Disordered Eating

Fran Schumer

Word Count 1643

When I was young, my mother took great pride in my appearance. She was especially pleased that I was thin. In this respect, I took after my father’s side of the family. I had their lean build and long limbs.

“You see, there is justice in this world,” my mother often joked with friends. “I was a fat girl and I have a thin daughter.”

From then on my mother’s life and mine became a model of how not to raise your daughter if you want her to have a healthy attitude toward her body.

At first, I took my size for granted. Mostly, I was happy that my being slender brought my mother so much pleasure. She had been overweight as a girl, and although there were other reasons she was unhappy, she blamed most of her problems on her weight. “I was an awkward, clumsy child,” she said throughout my girlhood. She repeated it like a mantra: “I was fat, Franny. Fat.”

For some women, the loss of extra weight is a catalyst. It gives them confidence, and they blossom in other areas. For my mother, the confidence came first. Mostly, it came from my father.  At age 20, she married him for love rather than money or status, and the gods rewarded her. My father loved her unconditionally, chunky thighs and all, and his love allowed her to become the person she wanted to be, and the person she wanted to be was thin. Fifteen years and three children later, my “awkward, clumsy” mother turned into a swan.

It seemed to happen overnight. One August, after the bus from sleepaway camp dropped me off in the school yard, I ran to hug her. I felt she was different. There was less of her.

“You lost weight,” I said.

“Oh, don't be silly.”

On the walk home, she smiled. I saw it was true. She had lost weight.        

The previous year, my mother had heard about Weight Watchers, a new organization formed by Jean Nidetch, a housewife from Queens, N.Y. I doubt many members of that group, now incorporated as WW International, Inc., were as successful as my mother. Within a year, she lost thirty pounds. She kept that much and more off for the next sixty years. Even at age 90, she remained proud of her born-again, size-six self.

I didn’t think about my weight, and then in adolescence, as I developed gentle curves, I did. One day, a neighbor visiting my mother studied at me in my tight t-shirt and jeans. “What a lovely figure she’s developing,’’ she said, swatting me playfully on the rear. “She’s getting to be quite a young lady now, isn’t she?”  

Instead of looking pleased, my mother looked somber.

“Oh you never know, Joan,” she said. “It’s so easy for girls to gain weight. You know how easily those pounds can come on.”

Soon my mother’s anxieties became my own. What started out as a concern for my body, looking thin, enchanting my mother with how well I looked in clothes, metastasized into a full blown eating disorder. Today we know a lot about eating disorders. Researchers study their relation to genes, culture, gender, personality, family dynamics and other matters. All those factors helped produce mine, but at the time I showed symptoms, the term ‘eating disorder’ didn’t exist. It didn’t appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980, twelve years later.

My dieting began innocently. In high school, a classmate asked if I ever dieted.  “No,” I said. She confessed that she and her sister ate only three hard boiled eggs a day; sometimes, half a cup of ricotta. Had she won the Nobel Prize I couldn’t have been more impressed. Other factors about her impressed me. Her grades were high, and she didn’t seem to care about clothes. For a thousand reasons, some of which I still struggle to understand, I began to feel I wasn’t enough; being a girl wasn’t enough. I had to show I had significance, power, weight. Oddly, one way I did this was by trying to lose weight.

Soon my behavior with food grew more extreme. I ate so little during the week, a half cottage cheese sandwich for lunch, dry tuna on toast for dinner, that by the weekend, my body rebelled. For the first time in my life I overate. The overeating caused the first rift between me and my mother. Up until then, my mother had been my confidante, my ally, my best friend. She loved me, and appreciated my best qualities; we spent hours at the kitchen table sharing stories about people, novels we loved. What she couldn’t bear was to see me binge. Had she (and I) been more enlightened, we would’ve known that the extreme way in which I ate suggested something deeper was wrong but my eating frightened her for the wrong reason: she feared I might gain weight. After one particularly bad binge, she looked at my distended stomach and said, “You have so many things wrong with you, how could you do that too?”

At the end of my senior year, I graduated as “smartest girl” in my class. I had been accepted to my first-choice college, and I was thin. Except for the bizarre eating, which was episodic, my parents saw me as the happy, healthy girl I’d always been. During the summer, however, my pattern changed. I stopped overeating. Instead, I became anorexic, another term I hadn’t heard until eight years later, when I saw it screaming from the cover of a magazine in Harvard Square. The summer I became anorexic, however, in 1970, no one, least of all me, knew what I was doing. “Abe, Abe, do something,” my mother pleaded with my helpless father. We had just left a restaurant in which I hadn’t finished my dinner. “You promised you would eat a whole steak tonight, but you didn’t,” my mother said to me, lips trembling. You ate only a portion. Why are you doing this?”

In later years, my more enlightened self could have given her an answer. In 1978, Hilde Bruch, a German American psychiatrist, published “The Golden Cage: the Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa.” She hypothesized that anorexia often emerges during a period in which an adolescent is about to separate from a parent, especially one to whom they are unusually close. Salvador Minuchin, another psychiatrist, used the term enmeshment, which he defined as a relationship in which the child internalizes the parent’s ideas at the expense of having her own. The only girl in a family of boys, I fit the type. I was in sync with my mother about everything except weight.

In college, I promised I’d regain the weight but I didn’t. By then I realized that other things were wrong with me. I couldn’t study; even worse, I couldn’t get myself to care about grades, about anything. I saw women around me with equally bizarre patterns of eating but no one talked about them. Our eating disorders lived underground. Finally, in the spring, when I feared I might have to drop out, I decided to gain weight. I gained a little, and then, like many anorexics on the rebound, too much. For the next eight years, my weight zig-zagged wildly. A friend likened me to a blowfish. “I never know whether you’re going to look like this,” she said, puffing out her cheeks, “or like this,” she said, sucking them in.

Finally, four years after college, I picked up the phone and randomly dialed a psychiatrist.  He helped me enormously. He said, “There’s nothing I can do to help you.” Instead, he directed me to a group just starting, a twelve-step program like Alcoholics Anonymous, but for people who had problems with food. I remember my first meeting. In a dark church basement, I heard a woman talk about what she had done with food, what she no longer did, and how her life had changed. I felt I could listen to her forever. Here was someone who had my problem and had found a way out.

People with eating disorders find different ways of recovering. Some use therapy. Some use 12-step programs; some do both or neither and die (two women from my college) or get other kinds of help or just get lucky. Most agree, however, that although the problem starts with the body, the solution lies elsewhere. As the psychiatrist I’d seen after I returned to him at a normal weight, said, “Now that you’ve solved the problem with your eating, there’s only your heart, your mind and your genitals left.”

First, I had to learn how to eat. People today use nutritionists, but forty years ago, they, too, were clueless about these disorders. I received help from other women, who, like the woman I’d heard at the meeting, had re-educated themselves. One day, four hours after I’d eaten breakfast, I felt a rumbling in my stomach. What a thrill: to feel hunger at the appropriate time. In the next eight months, I mastered the art. Then there was all the rest of what I had to learn.

Many years have passed since those early days of my recovery. I married, had children and maintained a career. If I said I was entirely normal about eating, my friends would laugh. I still think more about food than most people, and cling to a weight on the thinner side of normal, even at an age where a little extra padding is good, especially for the bones. Still, I wake up every morning, and literally, on my hands and knees, thank the universe that I am no longer eating, dieting, even being as I was during those dark years that derailed so much of my young adult years. Earlier in our marriage, a therapist asked my husband if my eating disorder had disturbed him. “Tip of the iceberg,” he said, laughing. My focus on body started my problems, but like the rest of the human race, I now work on the parts you can’t see.

Fran’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in various sections of The New York Times; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She is the co-writer of the New York Times bestselling Powerplay (Simon and Schuster) and the author of Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). Her poetry chapbook, Weight, was published in 2022. She wrote the Underground Gourmet column for New York Magazine, and the restaurant reviews for the New Jersey Section of the New York Times.