Posts Tagged “Anorexia”

**Content warning: This is one person’s story; everyone will have unique experiences in recovery and beyond. Some stories may mention eating disorder thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms. Please use your discretion when reading and speak with your support system as needed.

Alleigh Colleran is a Seattle-based writer and mother of one, currently pregnant with her second. This essay draws from her lived experience with eating disorder recovery, pregnancy, postpartum, and motherhood.

For most of my life, food has felt loaded. It has never been just food. Even when I tried to convince myself otherwise, there was always something more attached to it: control, shame, discipline, temptation, comfort, punishment. I spent nearly two decades moving in and out of the grips of bulimia and anorexia. Some years, the eating disorder whispered. Other years, it took over completely. But whether it was loud or quiet, it was always there, shaping the way I moved through the world.

When I was deeply consumed by it, my inner life narrowed into negotiation. What had I eaten? What had I earned? What would I allow myself next? What did I need to undo? Hunger felt suspicious. Fullness felt dangerous. And pleasure, simple, unguarded enjoyment, felt perhaps most scary of all.

For years, I thought that when I was ready to let it go, I simply would. I thought I was choosing it. I thought the control still belonged to me.

**Content warning: This is one person’s story; everyone will have unique experiences in recovery and beyond. Some stories may mention eating disorder thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms. Please use your discretion when reading and speak with your support system as needed.

Molly Morrison is a future physician, runner, and self-proclaimed journal enthusiast who is in ongoing recovery from anorexia and continues to choose healing each day. When she’s not writing or running, she’s probably curating a new recipe in the kitchen, laughing with her sisters, or planning her upcoming travels.

This is a story of a time in my life when I stopped feeling, thinking, and existing fully as a human being. It is also a story of how I found myself again.

For years, I underate and exercised my body into the ground. I thought that being “healthy” and “disciplined” would make me more lovable—not just to others, but to myself. Those thoughts came from everywhere: cultural standards, my social media feed, and comparison to others. I started to believe that the smaller I became, the more worth I had.

There was nothing logical about my eating disorder, but at the time, it felt like the only thing giving me order and direction. I knew something was wrong—when I snapped at people I loved, when my body was giving me clear warning signs—but anorexia’s voice still drowned out my own.

Academic excellence can vanish almost overnight when eating disorders take hold. High-achieving students find themselves unable to concentrate, missing classes, and watching their GPAs plummet. The academic consequences extend far beyond temporary setbacks—they can derail entire educational trajectories.

Learn more about eating disorder treatment and school support for teens and families

When a straight-A student suddenly struggles with basic math problems, or a creative writer can’t finish a simple paragraph, the culprit might not be lack of effort. For students with eating disorders, the brain-school connection becomes disrupted in ways that many families don’t expect.

The impact goes far beyond missed meals affecting energy levels. Eating disorders fundamentally alter how the brain processes, stores, and retrieves information—the very functions students need to succeed academically.

Remember: A semester of modified academics is far better than years of struggling through school with an untreated eating disorder.

Learn more about eating disorder treatment and school support for teens and families

Episode description:

In this episode of Peace Meal, we sit down with Mallary Tenore Tarpley, journalist, professor, and author of the forthcoming book Slip. Mallary opens up about her personal journey with anorexia, her path to treatment, and her concept of the “middle place” in recovery—a space between acute illness and full recovery that is rarely discussed but widely experienced.

Mallary shares how her early experiences with grief, media influences, and cultural messages about food and bodies contributed to the development of her eating disorder. She also talks about the power of persistence, small steps toward healing, and the importance of support and community along the recovery journey.

Episode description:

In this episode of Peace Meal, we hear from Darby Kellogg, a former collegiate runner who spent years in pseudo-recovery after receiving treatment for anorexia.

Darby reflects on how her eating disorder took root in the culture of competitive running, where an intense focus on performance, discipline, and “clean eating” often normalized or hid her disordered behaviors. When medical concerns forced her to stop training and enter inpatient care, she felt like she was losing the identity she had built around her sport. In the years that followed, Darby felt stuck in what she now recognizes as pseudo-recovery: doing what “looked right” externally while still following disordered rules internally. It’s an experience she says is more common than people realize, but rarely talked about. In this conversation, Darby shares how she came to recognize that surface-level recovery wasn’t enough, and what helped her begin the deeper, lasting work of true healing.

Episode description:

In this episode, Dr. Dev Seacrest returns to Peace Meal to reflect on how his evolving understanding of gender, body image, and disability has shaped his recovery from both anorexia and Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID). 

Since first joining us in 2020, Dev has gained deeper clarity on how gender dysphoria influenced his relationship with food and body image. He talks about embracing fatness as a trans man, finding support in a men’s body image group, and receiving a revised diagnosis that helped explain his chronic pain and changing mobility needs.

Through these experiences, Dev shares what it means to recover on his own terms—honoring gender identity, disability, and fat embodiment, and building a more peaceful relationship with his body along the way.

What Does Purging Mean?

Purging is a compensatory behavior experienced by many people with eating disorders. It refers to the act of compensating for or expelling food intake to influence body weight or “make up for” consuming calories. Purging is most commonly associated with self-induced vomiting but also includes the misuse of laxatives, diet pills, and diuretics, as well as excessive exercise. This is seen across eating disorder diagnoses, including bulimia, anorexia, and OSFED (Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder).

There are many side effects purging can have on the human body. In this blog, we will break down a handful of different physical consequences of purging to explore what eating disorder behavior can do to the body in the long term. We discuss the effects of bulimia purging across your entire body, in addition to the effects that purging disorders can have on your mental and emotional state. We’ll examine how eating disorder purging can exacerbate pre-existing mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, and how they can trigger new psychological challenges, including severe mood swings and stress-related disorders. Whether you’re struggling with this yourself or know someone who is, understanding the full scope of the impact of purging disorder is the first step toward recovery.