Eating Disorders in Adulthood: The Conversation Women Aren’t Having

Eating disorders don’t just affect teenagers.
They follow women into adulthood. Into careers, relationships, motherhood, and everyday life.

In this episode, Wendy Lurrie sits down with Fallon Morey to talk openly about something rarely discussed. Living with an eating disorder as a grown woman.

This conversation explores:

• The lifelong “voice” of disordered eating
• Control, shame, and identity
• The impact on daily routines and relationships
• The role of culture, media, and validation
• Why so many women stay silent

This is not a conversation about perfection or recovery.
It’s about truth, awareness, and what happens when we finally say it out loud.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome back to Rupture, the world of Best Guessan. I'm Wendy Lurry. Eating disorders create rupture because slowly they take over your relationship with yourself. It looks like discipline. It looks like control. It looks like structure until one day you realize the system is running you. And by the time you realize that, it's affecting far more than how you eat. And despite what people think, this isn't only a problem among teenage girls. Eating disorders persist through the decades and can start and take hold later in life. And that's what today's conversation is about eating disorders in adult women. Fallon joined me for an earlier episode where we talked about the invisible disabilities that she carries. Today's episode is different. Today's episode is about something we have in common: eating disorders among grown-ass women, which despite the prevalence, isn't talked about nearly enough. So today, two grown-ass women are going to have a conversation about the rupture of eating disorders. Hey Fallon, welcome back to Rupture.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Hi, thanks. Thanks for having me back.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

It's great to see you. Let's start why don't you start at the beginning? We'll start with yours. When did your eating disorder start? And what triggered it?

SPEAKER_01 1:42

I think it's like it's hard to pinpoint because it's been just like a lifelong, lifelong companion, like a lifelong paradigm. Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. So the most prevalent I remember, like when I really realized that this like inner dialogue of you should watch, restrict, you know, do something about your weight started in high school. I remember distinctly one of my parents saying something to the effect of like, you know, you're gaining a little weight. And I was very skinny. Like I was maybe, maybe a hundred pounds and five, six and a half. Like I was not a big person. So that kind of started that early message, like, normal average size body is too big, you know? And it had weight had never entered my conscious, like daily thought before that. It it was what it was. Like I never thought about getting dressed and how everything looked and how the mirror like represented me. But then I hit college right when the it like heroin chic era of like skinniness came in, early 2000s, where you know, people were were making fun of like the Jessica Simpsons of the world for being a size 10 and you know, all of that. And so it really came to a head. I think it was my I I've gotten to the point where college is a long time ago. It was my junior year. Welcome to oldishness. I know oldishness, I like it. And I sort of started to experiment when I realized I wasn't good with like totally restricting my calories. I started to experiment with like I can't even remember the name of the the drugs, but like the over-the-counter, you take them and you're not supposed to have an appetite. Yeah. It starts with an X, now I can't remember what it's called. And then I sort of started to get into this concept of like binging and purging. So more of like a a bullying kind of thing. And it was the end of my first semester of that year, and I was under all this pressure. I'd been trying to get my grades up. I had a bad falling out with like my first college boyfriend the previous summer. I was feeling super out of control, which, you know, as a background about my me, autistic people do not like to feel out of control. So that makes a lot of sense now. And, you know, I felt this immense amount of control by going, like, well, I'm not as skinny as I'd like to be, but I'm doing something about it. Like, look at me being disciplined enough to like, to like get rid of the thing or try to get rid of the thing that like I I shouldn't have put in my body. And uh plus taking all these these weird over-the-counter medicines, plus restricting what I was eating, like on days where I was not binging. And I guess one of my my best friends at the time, he like messaged my mom without me knowing and was like, I'm super worried about Fallon. Like, she's not she's not eating that I see. And if she is eating, she's I think she might be eliminating it somehow. And she looks kind of kind of weird, like she's all skinny with a big head, like it was like thank God. And so before my mom knew, like I got to my last day of finals, and I woke up and I I don't know if it's like being in shock, but like I woke up and I I had like this intense brain fog and I couldn't shake out of it, and I knew I had to go take a final in like an hour and a half. I couldn't get warm. I was in like a scalding hot shower with like a heat lamp on in the room, and I like could not get like warm. And I called my mom and I was like telling her what's going on, and I was freaked out, and she's like, Go eat something, and I was like, I don't want to eat anything. She's like, Yes, I suspected you don't want to eat anything, but go take your final and when we when you get home, we'll talk. And so when I got home, she sort of like forcefully said, you know, I should say at this point, I don't have a diagnosis. I've never been officially diagnosed, but she said, you know, I will push for a diagnosis for you. And if you don't want to go back to college next semester, so I can carefully monitor your intake and your output, like keep going down this road. And I had a lot riding on the line. I was I had an ROTC scholarship that I was in, and I had, you know, the rest of college and how would I have paid for it and a future plan. So for me, that was enough to kind of scare me out of it. Although the endless dialogue in my head about what I should, should not be eating, how I should punish myself for being too heavy or like not the right type of heavy, or I don't know, my my body structure never ever went away after that point. So that's and I do have the tendency when I have episodes to like binge in secret. I no longer, because of that episode, I can no longer tolerate any kind of like eliminating things. It it freaks me out now. I've like a phobia about it. But I don't believe you. Yeah, so it sort of started then, and then just the the endless cycle on, cycle off of what an eating disorder is, you know, has just kind of stayed present.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Uh yeah. So that's all right. So you did a little bit of anorexia and it sounds like more bulimia.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Yeah. I did uh well, because you were saying peop autistic people like need control. Control freaks need control too. Yes. For me, the I by the way, I experimented with bulimia and I was like, nope, nope, nope, not my jam. But restricting made sense to me. And the way I did it in the beginning was I was I was just thinking about it before. It was like, it was so bizarre because we were my kids were little, I was working like a really, really high stress full-time job. So we ordered in a lot. And I didn't change what I ordered in, I just changed what parts of it I ate, which was like really weird. So like we would get pizza, and I would take the cheese off and refer to what remained as cheese memory, and said, All I need is the cheese memory, and I would eat the pizza. Or we would get, we would order Chinese food from a place that we called the good, bad Chinese place, and I would get like wontons, but I've the best of the bad Chinese. And I would just like take the meat out of the wontons. Like I would do these like weird things, but you know, when you and I were talking, like these things change over time. So like I know that the way I started wasn't the way that the eating disorder continued to evolve. So I do agree with you about the dark passenger. Like I thought of it more as a feral animal living in my house. Sometimes behaved, sometimes not. But I've I've stuck to the restriction idea. But what how I restrict has changed. So like we're like, how did it, how did yours change over time?

SPEAKER_01 8:57

I think that if anything, it just I would say that at current, I'm doing, I want to say I'm doing better, but am I? Because I'm right now in the middle of using an app on my phone and a and a GLP one shot and uh like microdosing, and also counting the food I put in and going, well, maybe I don't need a little bit more of whatever. And I start to quickly recognize that tracking things like my food intake to that much of a degree is not good for me because I quickly go down that that rocky road of, well, look how many calories I saved and look how the scale went down 0.9. If I just like, I like just like lay off like one more half cup of rice, or like, you know, what if I what if I take this food out? This food makes me heavier. So like what if I what if I take this away? So mine has gotten more about restricting or, you know, for me it's like food displacement. Like I make myself so busy that I don't think about eating. So like I'll just work through the day and I just won't eat anything, or I'll work or I'll get busy for several days if I'm like traveling for work and I'll just be like, oh yeah, I'll eat in a minute, and then I just won't, but then I'll be like, well, I don't need to eat. Like, so that kind of comes and goes. I'd say like I tend to displace food with some sort of other thing, food with Amazon shopping, or food with crafting during lunch, or food with l food with work, or you know, one addiction swap one addiction for another.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Basically, yep. Okay, so I have a couple but besides that, my light just went off. Hang on. I don't know if that's gonna work, but whatever. What so oh I've got to have a million questions. It's it's rare to be able to talk to someone who still has this as an adult, so it's like I'm just filled with questions. When it was at its worst, how many times a day did you weigh yourself?

SPEAKER_01 11:00

I mean, probably like every time I put food in my mouth, like for a little while. And that I think there was this time in the Navy where I was doing that because I was in the middle of I was getting a divorce and I moved out on my own, and I was so stressed that I had like forgotten to eat for a few days, but then I was like, oh, I like the results of forgetting to eat. So like let's just keep forgetting to eat, or all I ate for like for like a solid three months was noodle soup made with chicken broth and egg noodles, and like that's it. And people were like, wow, have you lost like 35 pounds? And I was like, Well, you know, I'm just I'm just you know, busy and working out a lot, or like I'm just you know, on a liquid diet of my own choosing. But I probably every time I could get to a scale, so if I like went upstairs and I had a soda downstairs and a snack, I went up and weighed in. And, you know, it was like every time you put something in your mouth, you expect it. Or on the flip side, as soon as you I start any kind of diet or improvement or exercise plan, or I switch up my exercise, like I'm on that scale like two times a day, trying to see like, oh, I worked out yesterday, surely I I lost 10 pounds last night, and then I get super disappointed, and I either go harder or tail off in like a self-shame spiral when it doesn't work my way.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Yeah. So did you have like I thought of the foods I ate as sort of like a formulary, like if it was on the formulary, I could eat it outside of that, no.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

I've yeah, similar at certain times. I'm not there right now, but it because you're right, it does like come and go. And I'd say, you know, I had my like when I was super restricting myself. And the worst thing was is in my head during any of my worst times, except with it's all like I you're not thinking of like there you're not like diabolically like cackling, like, ooh, I'm currently having an anorexia today. Like you just you're it's just like something you're doing now as like a a matter of habit after so long.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

So but before it was habit though, like how much of your time was spent thinking about this?

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Oh, I would say still my time is spent like at least some portion of every 20, 30 minutes I'm thinking about this to this day. Yeah. Whether or not I'm doing something bad about it. And that's what I think people don't understand is they're like, well, if you really had an eating disorder, you would have been skinnier, you would have been sicker, like you wouldn't, you wouldn't have muscles, you wouldn't like be, I don't know what I am now, like close to 200 pounds, but like you wouldn't be like normal size, you'd be thin. And I'm like, no, because it just no matter what you do, like that noise stays all forever, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:57

It's forever all the time. It's uh so so one of the things that I found really interesting. So like I did it suddenly. Mine was mine did mine started later. Mine started. If I can, when did you start your so mine started? I'm older than you. So mine started in 1999 when like everything in my life was spiraling out of control, and I did the classic, I can't control anything else, so I can control this. Yes. And it and I wanted to be careful because I have a daughter, right? And I was very concerned that that she would see it. So I hid it a lot. But I found like I became competitive, like not with anybody else, but with myself. And because you did the restricting, like you understand, like how much less can I eat? What else? I mean, I had the formulary, but what else could I cut out?

SPEAKER_02 14:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

And if I kind of leveled out, because it became like how much more weight could I lose? And if I plateaued, I found that any kind of disruption was great. Like a business trip or any kind of travel changed the pattern, and I would lose weight during that, and that would make my baseline lower.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

That's it was crazy. It but but the other thing that was really that I think is really troubling about it, and I want to know if you had this too, especially when like you were at your thinnest, is you know, unlike other things, people reward you for this.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

I was just thinking, like, I want to know how many people when you were going through that were like, wow, Wendy, you're looking so fit these days. You look so good now. Like when I all of them. Yeah, when I I, you know, with a lot of the people I used to associate with, there was always a comment, and you get a little charge out of that, and it's like the reinforcement you need to keep doing what you're doing, even if it's not healthy, like even if it's not sustainable. There's a difference between like sustainable eating and exercise that is healthy and can result overall in like you being at a healthy weight and like purposely trying to constantly drop that weight. Right. Right. And it like, man, when you drop weight, do people come out of the woodwork to tell you how great you look?

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Absolutely. I could see the difference in just the way people engaged with me. And it was and and that just feeds it, right? Like that just tells you keep doing what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Yeah, there's this awesome, awesome public figure, and she talks a lot about the culture of like weight shaming and weight loss, and how women are expected to like have plastic surgery and like do things to themselves to be more like like overall palatable to society. And she calls this this idea like this pretty and you've probably heard of a pretty privilege, but there is absolutely a thin privilege that is like you get something, you get treated better if you're pretty, and you get treated better when you're thin. Like that's that like overall, like, and it might not be better than the person next to you, and sometimes it might, but you get treated better personally when you are thinner than when you were a heavier version of yourself by many people.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Right. Right. And it's it's rewarded. And like one of the questions I was gonna ask you was like, how did people react to you? Like what like when you were like like when you were really thin and you were hearing this stuff, like what did the eating disorder do for you? Like, what did you get from it? I mean, I let me put it in the present tense since I know you're still living with it. What do you get from it?

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Well, you know, I guess deep down, like when I grew up, I was I was I didn't appreciate it. I was a skinny, scrawny, nerdy kid with buff teeth and braces, and we weren't that we didn't have that much money, so I had like crappy clothes and like hand-me-downs, and I just always wanted to be like the pretty kid, right? I always wanted to be pretty, and part of being pretty in my mind is like inextricably linked with being skinny. Like in my mind, uh that doesn't apply to everyone, oddly enough, but in my mind, for me, I cannot be attractive unless I am an acceptable level of like without weight on my body.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

And so whenever I'm complimented on how low my weight has gotten, people don't say like, oh wow, you're looking healthy or oh wow, you're looking thinner. They say, oh wow, you look great. Look great. And it's not your body looks great or your waistline looks great, it's you as a person look great. And before they may have been completely neutral, like you have, especially when you have people who never ever complimented you on any part of your physicality before, but they will come out to compliment you when it's smaller than it was in the past. Yes. Which just like reinforces like, okay, I I'm doing the right thing here. Like I'm doing this right. And what I find is hard for me is that like I have so much emotionality tied to eating and overeating and stress eating, and I have very bad body dysmorphia. So if I look at myself in a camera, a mirror, or anything, I always feel like I look like a goblin troll. Like, and I'm I'm never thin enough, I'm never pretty enough. And so then I look at pictures of myself when I was like, you know, in my 20s in the grips of an eating disorder, and thought I was too fat. And I was like, oh my gosh, that girl was tiny.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

And like what has how do those look to you now? Like when you look at those now, do you think she looks green or she looks scary?

SPEAKER_01 19:35

I mean, she looks good, but her eyes are a little sunken and her head is a little too big for her body. And God, I wish I could go back and be like, stop whatever you're doing where you are. Like, you're okay like this. You finally have some curves in your body, and like you're not. But like you're okay. But sadly, you can't, you know, go back in a time machine, as with so many other things. And so, and now I'll still do that. Like, I I see a picture and I don't like it, and then six months later I'm like, wow, what a great picture of me. I was I was and it's always the first thought. I was thinner than I thought. That's always the first thought in my head.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

You were thinner than you thought, yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Yeah, at the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:19

Right. Well, the thing is, once this takes hold, like it really takes hold. Like it sinks its claws into you. And uh did you go to therapy for this at any point?

SPEAKER_01 20:29

I have talked, I have a therapist now, and I've been with her for like over 10 years, and it's just part of our normal dialogue because when I'm I'm having a harder time with it, I I talk about it a lot. I've never been to eating disorder specific therapy. I've thought about it, but I tried, I'm always worried about having to like peel back that onion. And like, like I went to I don't know if it was a nutritionist or a dietitian, but I found that it wasn't good for me because it wasn't like let's find healthy foods for you, but it was like, okay, well, you ate, you know, you ate lower calories, which was good, but like you ate too many of a certain type of calories, so you need to like restrict that type of calorie. And I'm like, this is awful for me. Like I I 100% cannot it like the whole the whole two months made me feel awful about myself because of it.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

It also feeds into the eating disorder, right? Because it's I mean, that's the thing. We're already obsessed with food, and then your nutritionist is making you more obsessed about food.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yeah. And it's like then it was like literally all you think about. Like, set a goal every week around food, set a goal about whatever. The app I'm doing now actually has a lot of non food goals that I and that I like. So it like they urge you to set a goal like wake up every morning and drink a glass of water to feel more awake, or wake up every morning and this is what this book is wake up every morning and write. Down a brain dump of everything you're thinking as soon as you get out of bed to like clear your brain. And so I can handle things like that. Does it help? I mean, I just started that, but I find that a lot of the stuff that first pours out of my brain is like, you know, gotta go way myself, you know. Like it still comes out like that. Like there's it does, right? Such a deep well of vitriol within myself for myself.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

I think there's a lot of self, I mean, you're just like thinking about it and talking to you about it now. It's like there's a lot of self-loathing in this, right? It's like we have to do this because we're not attractive enough, right? Because we're not something enough, and we have to do this really drastic thing to our bodies to make ourselves worthy.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Well, it's fucked up. And I don't know if this is for you. Like, I look back at like things that I should have been happier about, and they were ruined at the time by what I was thinking about my body. Like the first picture I took of me with my newborn and my my little boy when I had my second kid, and all I thought about was like, I'm not posting these pictures for anyone. I look enormous in that. And like I should have been celebrating. I just, I just create like I just made a human like in the factory. Like I I did this, I should be proud of this. But all I could think was like, oh, you could see my double chin and my like my belly's sticking out, and like my my my face is fat, like I'm not, you know, and not focusing on what you should be focused.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

I know, I get it. I totally get it. I mean, I looked at a pic just looked at a picture of me with my the that I found the other day because we're in the middle of a move, so it's all these pictures are popping up, hard copy pictures. And I saw this picture of me holding my my daughter, who was probably around a year and a half, and all I can see is the weight.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

Yeah. Right?

SPEAKER_00 23:50

And I hadn't lost the I hadn't lost all the pregnancy weight.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

And you look great, and I'm sure you looked great in that picture, but I you're whip for not for you. And that's what I think people don't understand is they think that when you make up this value judgment on yourself, you're making it on them. Like if I say I think I'm too overweight, they think I'm making a comment on everyone who is my size or bigger, and that's not how I see the rest of the world. And it's very hard to explain like this is how I see myself, not everyone else.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

So that's interesting because I feel that way now. But in the early days of the eating disorder when I was I was really in the grip of it and dangerously thin. I looked at everyone else in the world, and everyone looked heavy to me. Like it was like I was yeah, it was really messed up, but like I looked at everyone, was like, you could lose some pounds, you could take off some weight. And it was like, I'm judging, it was bad enough that I was judging myself on like a moment-by-moment basis. I was judging everyone.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

Well, and I was sort of going the other way. Like everyone I looked at, I found something about them that was thinner than me. Like I could see a person who is objectively like bigger proportionally than I was, but I'd be like, yeah, but the way her stomach is shaped is like flatter than the way my stomach is shaped. Like she has a very pretty face, and you can see her bone structure. So like she's thinner in the face than me. Like she has more muscular legs, so that like I I could find a reason to be like everyone else has a a something better than I have. And I can still do that with nearly everyone I meet. Like, and you know, it's I know it's frustrating for the people around me because all they ever hear is like me talk about the new diet I'm on, or me talk about my weight, or me worrying about how many pounds I've lost. And then I I do have a family that I feel like focuses sometimes too much on how much they've gained, or like how much they should lose, or how they're you know, the heaviest they've ever been, and then their number is 50 pounds lighter than what I weigh, right? And I'm like, okay, so if you're judging yourself, then what are you doing to me? And they're like, No, it's not the same, we're built different, you know.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Do you guys all eat the same food? You and your family? Yeah, like when you sit down to dinner, is everyone eating the same thing?

SPEAKER_01 26:21

My husband and I eat differently, and you know, my kids eat differently than just because you know how kids are.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Kids are like yeah, no, they hate everything.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

My son, yeah, my son likes eight types of macaroni and cheese and zero types of protein. So, like, you know, they're uh well, I lied tonight. They're having, I think, like chicken nuggets, and that's the one type of protein, which I'm not sure even qualifies.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

Barely a protein. It's not a bubble.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

It's like parts of chicken. And I will say that the healthiest I typically uh that I've ever been in my life all the way around is since I've had my husband and my kids because I feel like it levels me out. I have a fast, like busy work schedule, I have a busy kids schedule, and I a lot of times I just eat whatever I'm given.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

What I have the biggest problem with now is the never-ending like anxiety guilt dialogue about what I am eating, like how much I'm eating, like, are people gonna judge me for being hungry? Like when I go out with people in a restaurant, I always make some sort of qualifying statement as like, oh no, you know, this is a one-time thing for me. Normally when I'm with I never eat like this. Like I need people to know that I'm trying because I feel like there's so much judgment.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

Wait, so when you go out all right, wait, I want to dig into this a little bit more. So like when you go out to dinner with people, you eat the way an eating disordered person would eat, but you make excuses for it like this is just a w you don't let them know that this is something you live with all the time.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

This is just Well, or I'll like I'll eat a lot more than I'll eat a lot more than like I normally eat. Like I'll binge a lot, like because I'm well, for me, it's because I'm in a social situation, which makes me very nervous and it makes me need to like do something. So on the other hand of this is what I think is probably important to this is like I've you know, as we talked about in your show, for anyone who hasn't listened, I'm autistic and I have a very big oral kind of oral fixation. Like I I tend to orally stim when I especially when I get nervous. Like I bite my fingernails and I chew on my hair sometimes. And when I'm around food, I just eat, eat, eat, regardless of the disorder, the guilt and all that comes later. But then I have to make sure to tell everyone, like, no, I'm I'm super healthy, I care about my body, I I eat protein, I love grain bowls, like quinoa is my favorite, but tonight I'm having all the chicken wings because I'm out. Like, but there's always this like level of explaining to the world because in my mind the whole world is like eyeballs on me judging my weight and my eating. I I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 29:08

No, I'm not real, but no, none of this is real, but we feel it which might totally make it real. Like, do you tell people you have an eating? Like, how open are you? What do you tell people you have an eating disorder?

SPEAKER_01 29:20

I share with my close friends that I tend toward extremely disordered eating and eating habits, and that like probably would have been it classified as an eating disorder, you know, at some point in my life. I've shared the now I've shared the bulimia story with everyone, but like I don't typically share that with everyone. My husband knows I have struggles with it. My mom knows I have struggles with it. So I've noticed that my mom will like, I told her the other day, I was like, I think I've lost like almost eight or nine pounds, and she's like, great, but she leaves it because I think she doesn't want to like push that, which I appreciate.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

And I found a lot of I do a lot of one of my biggest hobbies I do is dancing, like I danced with a dance group, and a lot of my friends in that group are very sort of like body positive or body neutral, which is like we're there to do a thing. We don't we don't talk about how that thing looks on a certain body or how your body does it, except for the fact that we want your body to do it safely. So like it's more about you know, like training your body to do a hard movement that like a lot of people can't do, but it's not about like you're gonna look better doing this because you're skinny, right? You know, and I I desperately appreciate that. But with those friends, I'll say, like, hey, you gotta walk me back. Like, so I have a friend, she orders me food because I joke that she's just like a little tiny thing, and she I joke that she's like Kirby, which is a video game character, like she eats all the time, right? And to just to sustain herself, and so I'm always like, make sure I'm eating, please, because I I need that. Like, I somebody remind me to eat something, and so occasionally she'll run and be in the room and be like, Have you eaten? You know, but it's very much like a fuel your body type of thing.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

So yeah, I never talked to anybody about it, honestly. I mean, my my husband, Nick, I mean, Nit figured it out early, like early in our dating lives. My closest friends knew because they saw it, but they never really said anything about it. Right. And I never talked about it. I mean, I I went to therapy once for it, and you know, I talked about this on another episode, but the it was a therapist I had seen, you know, episodically for different things. And she was great. But when I went for this, and I went under duress from other people, she said to me, This is the first time you're coming to me with a problem I don't think you want to solve. And I said, That's true. I don't want to solve this, I don't want to fix this. Like I because for me it wasn't just about the control, the control shifted and it became about power. And I felt like when I had my body under perfect control, I was more powerful and more capable. And the times that I lapsed, like COVID, when I decided it didn't matter what I weighed, right? Because the world was coming to an end, I put on like 20 pounds in no time. And I'm not that big to start with. 20 pounds shows a lot. It was like here and my face. It was like, it was awful. And I and it I hated myself during that time. I mean, as much self-loathing as I had before, it was just layered it on because it was like now you can't even control yourself. Like you've lost the thing that gives you the discipline to manage everything else.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

Well, and think about the messages though, that, and I know this isn't my experience, the messages that society gives you overall, I would say more as a woman, are about like find your inner power, like exert control, like you know, there's all the weight loss slogans will say something about live your best life, live your healthiest life. And a lot of them are not about you know, getting to a healthy weight, they're about getting to a weight that you think looks good. I've started to see advertisements for GLP1 medications, and the advertiser is a very, very thin woman, like I probably I would guess a size zero or two, talking about how it's okay if she just wants to lose like 10 pounds to fit into a smaller dress for a summer party. There's no judgment. And the judgment should be that we should not be like celebrating people getting as skinny as possible. Should not buy the dress in the next size up, it probably still looks amazing. I looked at that thinking the one ad came out and I was like, oh, maybe this is another ad for I get a lot of ads for mobile Pilates reformers. I don't know why. It's just my Instagram is flooded with them. I've never done Pilates in my life.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

Oh, by the way, Pilates is awesome. I do it every day.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

And I want to do it because I've had everyone tell me, like, I love Pilates and I want to try it, but uh flooded. Yeah. So I was like, oh, this is probably another Pilates, and it's like a very tiny woman with a muscular body going, you know, it's okay if you just want to lose an extra five or ten pounds by doing this like medicating, and I that's terrible.

SPEAKER_00 34:23

I mean, that is just terrible because most of the ads I've seen for the GLP ones show are showing heavier people. Well, okay, so I have to make a confession. I have to do a little bit of a confession, but it's it's sort of wrapped up in a little bit of a story. So because I'm a little heavier now than I would like to be, and it's because of a prednisone puff. You ready for this one?

SPEAKER_01 34:42

And I would not look at you and think that you are heavier than anything. But I know, right?

SPEAKER_00 34:48

But you know. So, like, this is a crazy story, and I haven't really told the story before. So uh I got the head injury, I had my accident had got the head injury in like October 2022. So it's we're about to celebrate the four-year anniversary.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 35:03

About a month after the accident, I developed this shocking autoimmune disease. And it's no one's ever heard of it. It is so rare. It's called polyarteritis nodosa. No one's heard of it. The average, I looked this up because I wanted to reject the average rheumatologist sees zero cases of this. Like it's incredibly rare. And it's one where the because like the immune like your body turns on itself, right? So what it's turning on in the c in the case of this particular disease is it's turning on the the blood vessels that feed the organs. Extremely rare. There, by the way, there's no way it's not connected to the head injury. There's no way it is, but no one can exactly prove it. But apparently, because I've talked to neurologists about this and rheumatologists, and they're like, the truth is when you're when when there's an assault on your body, it's the immune system that responds. So I was like, okay, that makes sense. And I had this thing, and they treated it, and it was fine. And then for like two years, I had nothing. Like for two years, it was totally fine. Didn't even know that I had it. And when I would sit see the rheumatologist, one of us would always say, like, are we sure I even have this thing? until last summer. And then last summer it came back with a vengeance. And it sent me into a flair. I when I hear flair with like autoimmune, I think a flair lasts a few days. I mean, it's sort of intrinsic to the linguistic nature of the word flair. It doesn't, yeah, I've been in this flair since last September. It's not even over yet. So it was really, really bad. And what they did was they put me on very, very heavy doses of steroids, like 60 milligrams of prednisone a day. Woo! Which is like I was doing full one hour full body strength classes every day. I was like, Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

I'm gonna say, are you also drinking a gallon of water a day? Because every time I'm taking prednisone, I'm just like, like my mouth is dry all day.

SPEAKER_00 36:47

All the time. And you get the sugar high in all the time. So what the one thing I didn't really know because I didn't ask was this weight gain that comes with prednisone. So first it shows up in what in they call it moon face, which I had. Like a few months ago, like my face, like my face is long. My face was like rounder. And the last time I saw the rheumatologist, she was like, Have you gained weight? And it's like, that is the only setting in which it's okay for one person to ask a woman if she's gained weight, is like when it's your rheumatologist and she's trying to figure out if this is a a side effect of the steroid. Um, and I I asked her, like, how long does it take to lose this weight? And she's like, Oh, once you're off the prednisone completely, in a few months after that. And it freaked me out for a minute. And the way I dealt with a freak out of that, of like, oh my God, I weigh too much. I started looking into the GLP ones. And I was like, I I didn't do it because apparently, according to the things, I didn't qualify. But you can jigger the numbers to make yourself qualify.

SPEAKER_01 37:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

Um, but I decided not to do that and just like let this take its very, very strange course. And right now I'm in a place where like the the form of my eating disorder currently is I still restrict not quite as much, but I have gone crazy with the workouts. Like it's showing up that way because also it the workouts help manage the mood and emotional things that you the instability that you get from a TBI, so it has multiple benefits. But the you you this excessive work excessive working out is I don't remember the name of it, but it's one of the forms of of an eating disorder, too.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

So like the restricting and the like that's just the current form, but like I will be happier once this prednisone puff is over. But I the good news is I don't hate myself now because like this one, it's kind of it's it's exogenous to me. Like yeah, this isn't because I ate too much or didn't exercise enough. This is because I've been on steroids since last September. That's why. So I I I don't blame myself for it. So I don't feel quite as good.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

But I bet there's a part of you that's like not one wishing your flair was over because of any other thing other than I wish I could lose the weight. Yes. Which is sad because crazy. I want your flair to be over so you're the healthiest version of yourself, not because of what is it called? Puff?

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Um, I just call it the prednisone puff. I have no idea if it has a real name. It's just like what I named it. I keep thinking that that sounds like the worst dessert ever. Like prednisone puff. Like it's a I don't need to stuff with prednisone prednisone puff for the table, please. Yes. Yeah, no, I definitely want to keep that. It's it's totally so crazy, but it's interesting that you're doing a GLP one now. Like, is it working? Like, what's the experience of it?

SPEAKER_01 39:32

I feel like I'm also stuck with kind of a set of circumstances. So I have PCOS, which is polycystic ovarian syndrome, and it's it's like, among other things, a lot of times it's mainly like a big group of symptoms resultant from you know, you grow tumors essentially, or cysts on your ovaries, they stay there for a long time, like they cause all sorts of home hormone imbalances and of other things, they make it very, very hard for you to control or lose weight. So, my normal is I like to work out and I like to lift weights. That that makes me feel good. I like to run. But you can, there have been times in my life where, separate from the eating disorder, I will work out like crazy just to stop from gaining a pound that week, depending on how my hormones are fluctuating. And so when you put that into this like constant counterbalance with the feeling of you should be thinner, thinner, thinner, you should you won't look good unless you're this size, like you you're targeting this number, it's like this constant war. Sometimes it equals equilibrium, and sometimes one or the other wins out, and then I I have to deal with the fallout of that later. So for me, I was a GLP one is supposed to help with insulin resistance, which is resultant from PCOS. So I'm I'm on like a microdose of it now.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_01 40:58

It's like a very small quantity a week, hoping that it like helps with that and helps with other symptoms that I experience. But you know, I haven't changed a lot about what I've been eating, except which means that I'm still free to go ahead and and scrutinize the things that are going into my mouth because I'm like, well, isn't a GLP one? Then I have the mental thing. Well, GP GLP1 is supposed to make the food noise quieter. It does not. It's supposed to make you not want to eat as much. It also does not, at least for me. Like it's all I'm thinking about is food, but my food noise isn't like I want a Big Mac, I want fries. My food noise is like, I want to eat my lunch, but I shouldn't eat too big of a lunch because I don't want to eat a big lunch because I want to keep my calories low and you know, like finding ways to mentally abuse myself over it. So I'm trying to find a good balance right now. I don't know if this is the right way to go about it.

SPEAKER_00 41:58

I'm I guess I'm of two minds on the whole GLP one thing because like on one hand, I think it's great that there's something that can help people lose weight. On the other hand, though, it's it continues to feed this narrative of everyone needs to be thinner and the and everything is the focus on how people look and the the body image, like it it's it's continuing and kind of accelerating that societal problem of judging all of us by how we look.

SPEAKER_01 42:24

Yes. And and it's this like I think that's the reason you can't get out of that constant narrative. And you can't ever, society-wise, like if you you know, I studied this a little in my psychology courses when I was in college, but especially because now the way that we consume internet and media is largely like short form, social media driven, like for a large portion of the population, there is a huge degree of selection of the image that you see. And so what even I forget is that person on the camera has taken a hundred photos to get that one at the right angle where they look perfect, and they say, Oh, this is this is me after a giant Thanksgiving dinner, and they're like shirtless with like, you know, like washboard abs and like, look at all that, look at all that dinner in my belt, you know, or whatever, some ridiculous photo. But, you know, it like contributes to I feel like the collective unconscious of this narrative of like we have to look a very specific certain way to be acceptable. And when you again, when you see the people that are succeeding on social media, there are some exceptions, mostly men, I think. But when you see the people on social media, they are younger, they are thinner always, and they are they are attractive, at least in my viewpoint. In a lot of cases. Not always, but like in

SPEAKER_00 44:00

That's true. That's a social media problem anyway, right? I mean, that's why people get depressed looking at Facebook because people are posting only like these perfect pictures of themselves on holiday and it looks like they have these perfect lives.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

Just depresses everyone who doesn't have a perfect life, which is everyone.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

And you know, I'm worried that my kids are gonna consume that. Like my kids started asking questions about, you know, is this food healthy? Is this food not healthy? Like, if you eat unhealthy food, will it make you fat? And so we've trained the word at home, we've trained the word like fat out of that vocab out of their vocabulary. Like we're not gonna talk about fatness and thinness as virtues. We're not gonna talk about them as if some there are people out there who identify as I am a fat individual, and they're that is the their self-label, and I'm happy to like like say with all respect, like that's great. Right. But we're trying to disabuse our kids of the notion that somehow those two things are virtuous, yeah. Like somehow your worth is tied to fat and skinny. And I'm saying some of this because I also don't want to come on your show and be like, let me talk about how great having an eating disorder is. No, no, it's it's the opposite of great. Yeah, because it's the opposite. And I think what you said earlier is so so like it's sticking in my head when you said you had a therapist that said that you don't want to, you don't want me to cure you from this. And I'm just thinking like how true that is, because I'm gonna talk about how problematic my behavior is with you today, but I'm still gonna go downstairs and weigh my food and log it and think about probably how much less I should eat later because of what I ate earlier. And I and I don't I've never quite tapped how to like stop that cycle.

SPEAKER_00 45:50

I think that's the problem. I don't know that there anyone has figured out how to stop the cycle. I mean, it I looked this up a while back, but it said that something I was reading said that eating disorders are among the most lethal mental illnesses because well, first of all, some people starve themselves to death, but also because people don't want women don't necessarily want to be cured of this. Because it gives them that societal reaction and all the all the affirmation and validation that that what we're doing is the right thing to do, and that if you're overweight, you don't have control. I mean, I will I'm not proud of this, but like when I when my first husband and I split up, I started dating, which was like that was interesting. And I I had one date with this guy, and we had we were having dinner. He was a large frame guy. And over dinner, he told me that he had lost like some insane amount of weight, like 100 pounds, 150 pounds. It turned me off like that. As soon as I heard that, what my brain processed it with was this guy has no discipline, this guy has no self-control. And I judged him for that.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

But he just lost weight. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 46:59

But the but the fact that he had gained he had weighed that much at some point was a complete turn-off to me.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 47:07

Yeah, and I judged him and I acted based on that judgment, and like I said, I'm not proud of it. But it's all of this fucked up food and body and eating. It's like it's this terrible, terrible brew of stuff. You what I'm listening to, you you think about this stuff all the time.

SPEAKER_01 47:22

All the time. And I think mine my tendency is to spend my brain space thinking about how everyone around me is judging me all the time. So I'm not looking at you and going, oh, Wendy has, what did you call it? Moonface?

SPEAKER_00 47:39

Moonface. Yeah, it's a prednozone, it's a steroid thing. Moonface.

SPEAKER_01 47:42

Yeah, prednisone thing. Uh like I don't think thoughts like that are that like she should lose weight. In my mind, I'm like, she's looking at me. She just looked at me. She's looking at me because I just ordered a large French fry. Or he's he's making a face at me. And like, probably the guy's like, oh, I got sun in my eyes. Let me let me put my hat on. But I'm like, he just looked at me because I look really overweight, and I'll I'll adjust and I'll shift and I'll pat down my stomach. I I like am fixing my clothes and like sealing my own stomach rolls in virtual meetings when no one can see me. And I'm like, no one can see me. What am I? I'm like, where am I gonna put it? Like I'm tucking it away. Like I know, I know. And I'm I'm constantly, and the reason I still choose to label it for myself a disorder is because a disorder ultimately is something that impacts like some other part of your life, or largely impacts your life. And I have been largely impacted by this, like financially, psychologically, time, brain energy. It causes fatigue, it causes anxiety. Like there are days where I'm like, I'm hungry, but I don't want to eat, so I'm going to bed early. And like I cut out time with my husband or my not my kids, they're in bed early, but like I lose out on part of my freedom, right? Right.

SPEAKER_00 49:01

Right. Oh, by the way, I've eaten nothing today. It's what time is it? It's 62. I've eaten nothing. I don't eat until dinner. Wow. And I've trained my body so that I can manage that. I mean, now I'm a little bit like I'm I'm actually on the verge of hungry right now. But I that's the way that's part of the way I manage it is unless I'm traveling. Weirdly, if I'm traveling, I will eat something earlier in the day because I'm traveling, it's for a purpose and I have to like totally be okay. But I go whole days and don't eat anything until dinner.

SPEAKER_01 49:30

I used to have this mantra that was like that was like when I was at my weirdest, my weirdest, like I was in like a cult of one, and our leader was like, our leader was like my little eating disorder raccoon sitting on my head, like piloting us around, us meaning me, telling me what I shouldn't eat. But I had this mantra that was like, remember, feeling full and feeling hungry kind of feel the same. So if you think you're hungry, just tell yourself that you're actually full, and then you don't have to eat.

SPEAKER_00 50:07

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 50:08

And I I would like to repeat this to myself. Feeling full is just like feeling hungry. Feeling full feels like feeling hungry. And I would just like repeat this and repeat this and repeat this in my brain. Or maybe it was the raccoon.

SPEAKER_00 50:20

But it could have been the raccoon. Or the raccoon.

SPEAKER_01 50:23

I choose raccoon because like a couple months ago there was a story about a raccoon that broke into a liquor store in Virginia and got drunk, like and drank, and like he's like smashing around the and he had to be taken to an animal centered, like detox and sober up. But like that's how my raccoon is, my eating disorder is like at least it's not the drunk.

SPEAKER_00 50:42

Have you heard the stories about the drunk moose in Alaska?

unknown 50:46

No.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

So, like it so you know, they're the moose moose like we have moose in Vermont, but they're not nearly as big as like the Alaskan moose. And I was reading the I was reading a story once, and then it turned out this has happened more than once. So the moose moose will eat like the windfall apples that have just like are just on the ground, and over time they kind of ferment just from sitting on the ground. So the moose eats the apples and the moose gets drunk, and this moose actually wandered into a bar. Which sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it's a fun sign of a joke is coming up. I know, I know. But I what you said before is really important, and and I think it bears repeating, which is that nothing about what we're talking about is in any way meant to glamorize this. No. This is the last thing anybody should want to emulate or live with because listening to us and the amount of time and energy that we have poured into this versus how else we could have been using that time.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

We're both very smart, like respected women, you know, that could have been, you know, I I sometimes wonder how many things I could have done. Could I have finally written my novel by now if I wasn't spending, you know, 70% of my background brain processing power thinking about like how fat I was that day, or like how much I should restrict the calories I'm gonna eat later. Yeah. Exactly. And and like, you know, developing like uh like the mantra, the mantras to myself, however you say it, mantras to myself over time, they have changed, but like some of the restrictive ones are convincing myself that I'm not hungry, or just like this like mantras of like self-loathing, like like, you know, like just skip breakfast or just skip lunch today or whatever until I get where I want to be. And like you train yourself to just live with that noise. Right. And I think if anything, it just shows like why you don't hear from a lot of grown-up, grown ass women with eating disorders, because they are so accustomed to it that in their mind it is just the thing you live with. And it's not they, it's we never get rid of.

SPEAKER_00 52:56

Right.

SPEAKER_01 52:57

And that's why you can talk about it. Like you're talking about like like, you know, like buying shoes, like it, it's it's just something that you do and you have.

SPEAKER_00 53:08

I was I actually wanted to like sort of raise that as like like our final question, which is you know, I said this in the beginning of the intro, and we know it's true. Women don't talk about this. With each other, they don't. And we need we need to like come out of the closet on this. I mean, you know, I will say that since the TBI, I am much more open about it because my brain can't handle all of the like, I'm I'm hiding this. I am just now out and proud about this. And so even like I will eat a different dinner when we're having dinner with friends, and I'll and I'll just say it's I have an eating disorder. This is how I eat. My brain can't keep track of too many stories, so the truth is a lot easier. But we don't talk about it, and I think it keeps everybody in the closet with the shame and the guilt. And if we could bring it out into the open and talk about it more as grown-ass women, that has value. People need to hear from us and people like us who are talking about it because there's just not enough of this.

SPEAKER_01 54:04

I absolutely agree. I think that, you know, part of my regular makeup is to mask, like we've talked about before. And I think the unfortunate side effect of me being able to mask everything else that I'm doing in my life in a social interaction at a wherever is to also be able to mask this. Like I know what I'm supposed to say about how I'm eating or what I'm supposed to say about like how I'm supposed to order my food compared to how the other people order, but I never ever talk about it with other people in this way. Right. Where I'm like, no, you know what? I'm I'm not doing okay. Like I I I'm not happy that I'm taking this medicine, but yet I feel like I can't stop myself from pursuing this as like yet another option to to do this to myself. And I think it's really important.

SPEAKER_00 54:58

It's important. We should take this show on the road. I mean, we should like I think the more people are talking about this, the better. I think the fact that people don't talk, and that's also contributes to the fact that you know that's I looked at a study just to see what the prevalence was of this, you know, as women age. And it was pretty prevalent even to women in their 70s. And I'll tell you something. I think it's women in their 80s too, they just stopped asking the question.

SPEAKER_01 55:22

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 55:23

But it doesn't go away. And maybe if we talked about it more, we could kind of normalize this and figure out a way out of it. Because I mean, the whole goal is to get none of us wants to live with this. I mean, we're used to it. We've built our lives around it, but it's not the choice we would have made if we'd had a better choice.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

Well, wouldn't I love to just go for an activity I love, like a run, a walk with my kids, a a workout, uh, all things that are inputs my body needs socially, emotionally, or physically to like thrive? Like I need, I also need that like physical input for my own psychological makeup to thrive with that. And wouldn't I love though to be able to do that without the thought of what other benefit is it giving me? How do I make it a little less enjoyable to make the benefit greater? Wouldn't I love to just enjoy the things in life without having that as the underpinning to everything?

SPEAKER_00 56:21

Yes, I remember I used to shovel the snow because it was a great calorie burn. Right? It's like, but it's crazy. And I I would love nothing more than for us to find a path out of this. And by the way, this absolutely qualifies as a rupture because from when your eating disorder started or when mine started, everything changed after. Everything. Right? And our lives became wrapped around this. So it qualifies as uh it's kind of a big rupture. I mean, it it was watershed for me. I mean, until I actually had this, I really I ate whatever I wanted. I like as my husband would say, like, can you eat like a normal person? And one thing he said to me, I'll just last thing I want to say on this, is he just said to me the other day, like, I'd love to get to a point where we're eating the same thing. And so we can like enjoy the same thing. And I want to get to that point. We actually got to that point last night. We ordered uh I wanted food from Afghanistan. I've been craving Afghan food. I've just wanted an Afghan kebab more than I could say. And I got kebabs, which are totally like within the formulary because they're chicken. But I also got these leek dub, these leek dumplings, and my husband got a different form of the dumplings, and we were eating the same thing and talking about what we liked and the texture, and it was like, wow, this is what he means, and this is awesome. Like, I want to get there.

SPEAKER_01 57:38

Yeah. Well, I want you to get there. I've I want you to get there too. I've I've gotten there with my eating, but what I would like to do is is get on the same page with just some things are out of sync about the way I want I live my life compared to even my part, my my husband, because I'm like, I gotta get to the gym, so you gotta take the kids, and I gotta carve in time for this. And it I feel like I'm carving my schedule because of this into what other people are doing. Right. And I would love to like be able to take that out of the equation so we could all have the same day.

SPEAKER_00 58:15

I don't know if that even makes sense, but like it makes total sense.

SPEAKER_01 58:18

Why does my day have to be so different and so educational?

SPEAKER_00 58:21

And your day is different, right?

SPEAKER_01 58:22

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 58:23

It's the same thing as let's eat the same food so we can actually talk about it and experience it together. Let's find a way out of this. I think that's the goal of this conversation. And let's just find a way out. Let's keep talking about it. I'm there. Thank you so much. I mean, this is a really important conversation. And by the way, I think we want to have you back for the what did you say, PCOS? Is that that? PCOS, yeah. Yeah, I think we want to have you back for that. And you're gonna be on the panel for gender differences in healthcare delivery.

SPEAKER_01 58:58

Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 58:59

It's gonna be a good one.

SPEAKER_01 59:00

So excited.

SPEAKER_00 59:01

Let's keep talking about this too.

SPEAKER_01 59:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:03

This is really important. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of Rupture, the world of best guessistan. This episode featured Fallon Mori, and we talked about eating disorders among adult women. The best way to hear our stories and to support our work is to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks and see you next time.