I was 11 years old when I started struggling with my first eating disorder. I did not know what anorexia was, nor did I know that the pinching of skin folds between my fingers, under my arms, and on my stomach, was symptomatic. I did not know that it wasn’t healthy to obsess over my reflection in car windows or to hunch over to keep my waist “tucked in.” I thought it was normal. But I wasn’t always this way. A once-expansive childhood had, somehow, collapsed into a labyrinth of dietary rituals and superstitions.

There is a tendency for the media to portray eating disorders as superficial illnesses of female adolescence. The limited scope of these stories mitigates both the severe emotional and physical consequences inherent to eating disorders, as well as their prevalence across other genders and age groups. 

The family story about me that has enthralled me most has to do with my thighs. My mother says that the nurses who cared for me in the hospital nursery would pick up my newborn legs and laugh about the immense size of my thighs--far too big for an average-weight baby, they chided. Eventually, this disproportion led to body-shaming nicknames, like Thunder Thighs and Drumstick. On the one hand, I embraced their abundance. They were thick and powerful and helped me easily press double my weight in the gym.

Although not formally recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, awareness of orthorexia among the general public and within the eating disorder community is on the rise. The word “orthorexia” was coined in 1998 and means an obsession with proper or “healthful” eating. Although being aware of and concerned with the nutritional quality of the food you eat isn’t a problem in and of itself, people with orthorexia become so fixated on so-called “healthy eating” that they actually damage their own well-being.