Anorexia Took My Life, Then I Took It Back

Everyone has a story, and I am ready to share mine. Laura, thank you for planting the seed of even writing this in the first place. Bill and Conscientious Capitalism, thank you for creating the space for me to write the original three-page version of this letter. To my family, thank you for sticking by me through the ups and downs, no matter how much I pushed you away.

This story is not for me. This is for those of you in any phase of recovery; I hope you feel encouraged to see the process through because it is so unbelievably worth it. This is for those of you who already achieved full recovery; I hope you feel inspired to be vulnerable and share your own story in order to expand the dialogue around eating disorders and body image. This is for those of you with a loved one who is currently battling or previously battled an eating disorder; I hope you get a glimpse of the other half to your own story, if you haven’t already.

Dear AM,

You are living proof that life’s greatest challenges can be overcome. The mantra you learned in your last quarter at Santa Clara University, “in order to lead others, you must first learn to lead yourself”, feels like a spin on your personal mantra from the past two years, “in order to love others, you must first learn to love yourself”. When you found someone to lead you through recovery, you learned how to love yourself again. You are now able to lead yourself through each day with a sense of compassion and confidence in who you are. You are a more loving friend, sister, and daughter; you see your priorities more clearly; and you have the energy and passion to pursue your goals as your authentic self. This letter looks back at how you climbed out from one of the darkest periods of your life.

Part 1: Losing Yourself

Somewhere along the path of growing up, you stopped loving yourself. The shift was subtle and disguised at first because it was never a concept you thought about. You lived a privileged life surrounded by people you trusted. In the summer, you lived at your waterfront cabin with grandparents, cousins, and friends on either side of you and several boats on buoys out front. For the rest of the year, you grew up in a beautiful cul de sac with kids your age; kids who became lifetime friends. You lived next to a state park where you rode your horses after school and sometimes you even rode them home from school. You never felt like you were alone, and you never felt as though you were not loved. Your mindset shifted in high school, and a life-threatening illness consumed your world. You were diagnosed with anorexia, a complex and damaging illness that tops the chart with the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. You are one of many with an eating disorder, but you are one of few who both survived and fully recovered.

Sophomore year of high school, you decided to step on the scale in Mom and Dad’s bathroom. You expected the number to be higher than you would like, but I can’t remember what you set as the maximum, dreaded, unacceptable number you secretly wished would not appear. Whatever it was, you looked down to see it glaring back at you. You panicked, but then decided you would get back below 120 “the healthy way”. You exercised more and ate healthier, whatever that meant. You gave this approach about a month before you grew too impatient. You went back to the scale to see maybe a one- or two-pound change. You knew how to speed up the process and decided to exercise even more and eat less. This is where anorexia began to hijack your mind. The part of you that is thorough, organized, and focused — the part of you that plans a trip complete with a full itinerary, places to stay, meal plans, packing lists, and activities for all weather conditions — became thoroughly focused on your weight and your body.

For about a year, your meals slowly dwindled down. A full sandwich for lunch turned into a half sandwich. Someone asked one day what you packed for lunch, simply out of curiosity. You told them a half sandwich and an apple, sometimes a granola bar. They were shocked; that was nothing to them. Hearing that you ate less than others somehow encouraged you to keep going. Evidently, you could make it through each day eating less than the average person, but how much less could you eat? You started to test yourself. You eliminated the half sandwich, and you woke up the next day okay. You eliminated the granola bar and again, you woke up the next day okay. Eventually, your daily intake reduced to one banana and one salad-sized plate of dinner. Sometimes you replaced the banana with an apple, which felt more filling but relatively equal in calorie count. Apple slices were also easier than a banana to ration until dinner. You always aimed to save your fruit for the end of second or third period, depending on the day, because that marked the halfway point of school. You were always hungry, but drinking water helped create the feeling of a full stomach. Some days you could get out of dinner completely by saying you ate with friends. Occasionally, though you had to be careful not to use it too often, you claimed you simply didn’t have an appetite. You would act completely baffled yourself and reassured your parents that you would probably be hungry later. You were hungry then, but you needed to convince them that you didn’t have an atypical relationship with food. You would lie in bed and tell them you felt sick, which was actually true because of how malnourished you were. The weight dropped, and it dropped quickly. For a few months, no one noticed you weren’t eating. Then, your sister caught on.

By August, five months after you first stepped on the scale, you were a regular at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Every Friday, you drove straight from school to the hospital for your 3:15 afternoon appointment. You walked through the front doors, told them your name, stuck out your arm for the hospital wristband, and sat down with the intake questionnaire. You begrudgingly wrote “restrictive eating” as the reason for your visit, which served as your euphemism for anorexia. When you heard your name called, you followed the nurse down the aisle on the left. They would ask how you were doing, and you would respond “good”. The nurse checked your vitals. Sometimes the alarm on the machine rang because your blood pressure and heart rate were dangerously low. The nurse left the room while you changed into a hospital gown. You kept on your bra even though you weren’t supposed to; you thought maybe it would add enough weight to end the appointments. You knocked on the sliding door when you were ready. The nurse carried in the scale, you stepped on backwards, and they wrote down your weight. You never knew the number. You would change back into your street clothes and eventually your doctor walked in. He recited the same information every time: your weight is still too low; you have to want to do this; it’s unsafe for you to play sports; see you next week. This continued for nearly two years until you left for college. When you visit home, you often drive by Seattle Children’s Hospital and years later, you still have flashbacks of “ANNE MARIE ELIZABETH HEYWOOD 07/21/1999” on the wristband, the Starbucks in the corner of the lobby, the patient room, the hospital gown, your doctor’s face, and your nutritionist’s face. Every time.

In the fall of 2015, your junior year in high school and a few months into your time at Seattle Children’s Hospital, doctors recommended you step away from soccer and lacrosse. You played high school soccer Monday through Friday and club lacrosse on Sunday. For a few weeks, Mom and Dad complied with the recommendation and you sat out of practices and games. Fortunately for you, you suffered a concussion a week prior and were not playing anyway. To your teammates and coaches, you were benched for the concussion. To you and your family, you were benched for the eating disorder (and the concussion). You knew you were not actively burning calories, so you ate even less. Within a few weeks, Mom and Dad decided to go against your medical team’s recommendation and allowed you to rejoin your teams as soon as the concussion healed. They hoped it would motivate you to eat.

In February 2016, high school lacrosse resumed, and you reached the one-year mark since anorexia hijacked your mind to fear calories and food. Teammates commented on how grown up and different you looked. You knew you looked different because you starved yourself for a year, but their comments made you feel more attractive and admired, which only validated the anorexia in you. Breakfast still consisted of a banana, but you added a Fiber One bar for lunch and used a dinner-sized plate for dinner. You were careful not to fill the plate, though, so it was really a salad-sized meal on a dinner-sized plate. By June, you still had not gained the weight your body needed to survive. Weekly appointments with doctors, nutritionists, and therapists could not break your commitment to eat as little as possible. You did not play on your travel lacrosse team that summer. Your body could not handle the strain. While nothing material improved in regard to your physical health, your relationship with food continued to show small signs of improvement. One evening, you sat down at the dinner table with one sister and your brother’s girlfriend. You couldn’t do it, though. You couldn’t eat. Your legs shook under the table. One hand shook as you picked up the fork, the other hand was clenched in a fist. The anxiety and the fear were overwhelming. So, you left the table, ran upstairs, and tucked yourself in bed. You cried. You did not understand why you felt so fearful of something you used to love. You wanted desperately to be normal. The anxiety felt unbearable. You wondered if this would be your life forever. You wondered if this was a life worth living. You were suicidal, for not the first time. You were scared.

Before long, your brother’s girlfriend crawled in bed next to you. She wrapped her arms around you and talked softly. You decided you would watch TV together. This was actually a technique you learned in therapy — when you felt too anxious to eat, go do something else for a little while, then try again. You said to her, “I need to eat dinner first”. Looking back, I think you felt comfortable eating with her because there was no pressure. She knew you were anorexic, but she was not part of your treatment team (doctor, nutritionist, therapist, parents). There was no thought of, “she’s just doing this to get me to eat”. She was someone who would hold you for as many times as it took to show she loved you and hated to see you in so much pain.

Just before senior year, you and Seattle Children’s Hospital celebrated your one-year anniversary, at which point you still showed hardly any progress in every aspect of recovery. You needed more extreme intervention. Your medical team pushed for an intensive eating disorder outpatient program. You would sleep at home, but eight hours and every meal of every day would be spent in the program, thus you would be pulled from your senior year of high school. Mom and Dad went to tour the facility and every medical professional on your team was ready to make this decision on your behalf. I remember you walked out of the house to go to a friend’s house and Mom followed. Standing by your car, you were in tears begging her not to send you there. You didn’t even know where “there” was as you were not included on the tour, but you knew you didn’t belong. You just struggled with food, that’s all. More importantly, everyone at school would know you were anorexic; you didn’t want to be the girl who missed a year of school because she was in a treatment center. You would also miss senior year. You had waited six years for senior takeover, senior sweatshirts, to sit on the far-right bleachers with the Class of 2017 banner over your head, and to walk at graduation. You promised her that you would do the work; you would get better without the outpatient program. She took your promise, and you went to meet your friends like everything was normal. You probably should have joined the outpatient program. Even though it would have failed, it would have been the safest place for you to be.

Senior year started and you were at your best, except for a few hours each week when you went to your Friday appointments at the hospital and Wednesday appointments with your therapist. All your siblings were at college, which meant they weren’t at school or home. Your parents granted you an abundance of freedom, and you escaped the outpatient program. Your friendships going into the year were steady enough to make it to graduation. New friendships emerged, too. You were accepted to your dream school, Santa Clara University. You did not feel conflicted mentally and because of this, your bold, bubbly, social personality shined whenever you were around your friends. Yes, you were distracted by food and calories, but you only had one line of thought: restrict as much as possible. You were really good at this, so you were happy, even proud. You didn’t have any guilt that you were harming yourself. This guilt emerged in college when you regained some of the lost weight and your healthy mind started to challenge your anorexic mind.

Underneath all the highs of senior year, of which there were many, your relationship with Mom and Dad was torn to shreds. The pain from those years was no one person’s fault. You were consumed by a deadly mental illness, enough said there. Mom and Dad took several missteps in addressing the issue, and they were also terrified of losing their youngest child. Every single thing they did, hurtful or helpful, was in an effort to keep you alive. Our house, which you identified as a safe space your entire life, turned into the place you avoided most.

No matter how much you pushed them away, Mom and Dad stood by your side. Sometimes they made decisions that, in hindsight, were dangerous for you. Those were the decisions you appreciated most. Dad defended you when doctors criticized your breakfast, which mirrored your sister’s breakfast before she left for college. He argued that no one went after her, so why should you be treated differently? Well, you had an eating disorder, and she didn’t. She also ate lunch, and you didn’t. Both parents eventually stood up for you when doctors didn’t want you to play soccer or lacrosse. You had been an athlete your whole life; it was and still is part of your identity. Should you have ran in P.E.? Probably not, but were you about to tell your school that you had anorexia and your doctor, who you quite frankly despised, told you not to run? Absolutely not. You loved running. Should you have played soccer and lacrosse year-round? Probably not, but you are an athlete in a family of athletes.

Dad defended you when someone shouted that your anorexia was an attention stint. He never raised his voice in regard to your eating. In fact, he hardly commented at all. One time, you ate the last turkey meatball and he praised you for finishing a leftover. Today, this is something you both celebrate because it means you get to eat something fresh the next night. But at the time, your mind started racing. “Why would you finish the meatballs? Someone else would have eaten the last one. You don’t need it. Get rid of it. Don’t eat it. You already ate more than you planned.” So, you left the kitchen, opened the front door, threw the meatball into the bushes, ran upstairs, and put yourself to bed to avoid any more calories for the day.

Mom drove you to every doctor and therapy appointment until you cut her off and asked to go alone. She respected your request, a leap of faith that you would actually show up. Dragging your kid somewhere they do not want to be, but they need to be, cannot be easy. You were unkind, bitter, and resentful every time. Friday’s that used to be the best day of the week became the worst and Wednesday’s that used to be the second-best (because they were a half-day) became the second worst. Mom persevered, though. She never gave up on you. On the rare evenings when you wanted something specific for dinner, like Mod pizza or teriyaki, she was the first out the door to pick it up. She always kept a list of eating disorder therapists on hand. She helped you find the one that launched you onto your final road to recovery.

It pains me to look back at how you treated your parents. Though it did not always come across as such, all they wanted was to support you, love you, and keep you safe. I don’t often think of those years, but I know they do. Mom and Dad are incredible spouses, parents, children, friends, professionals, community members, and humans. I wish you saw it then, but I am grateful you see it now.

After you graduated high school, you headed to SCU, an opportunity that was also nearly lost to anorexia. A few months before the first day of fall quarter, your medical team advised that you attend University of Washington. After two years, you were still not at a healthy weight and certainly were not in a healthy mindset. You needed supervision from family and medical professionals. But Mom and Dad took your side and you moved to California. At eighteen, you opted out of establishing a new medical team in the Bay Area. The impact of your anorexia worsened. Your behavior started to change as you lost security in yourself and feared judgement from others. At times, you seemed crazy. But you weren’t crazy, you were battling an untreated mental illness. Food and calories consumed your headspace from the moment you woke up to the moment you fell asleep. Your day would be ruined if a pair of jeans felt tighter than the last time you wore them. You wanted to order burgers but felt as though you needed to order salads instead. You wondered how others could eat without thought and still look so petite and toned. You were frustrated that no matter what you ate or how much you exercised, you stopped losing weight. Your body clung to every calorie you consumed; it had been starved before and would refuse to be starved again.

No one could stop you from restricting because you were unsupervised; you left your parents, doctor, nutritionist, and therapist behind in Washington. For the most part, you escaped all the people who knew skipping meals was a red flag. So, you stopped eating breakfast. Sometimes you would eat lunch, which would always be a small bowl of oatmeal with peanut butter. You overloaded yourself with school, a job, and yoga to keep yourself too busy to eat. Not infrequently, you felt lightheaded at work and in the library studying. At dinner, your healthy mind and anorexic mind went to war. Your healthy mind knew the dangers of restriction. Your healthy mind knew it was wrong. But your anorexic mind desperately wanted to be thinner. Most often, your healthy mind would win the dinner war and you would “overeat”. Really, you were compensating for the lack of calories from the rest of your day. Then, you would wake up and feel ashamed of how much you ate at dinner and you would restrict again. Your healthy mind and anorexic mind constantly competed. Sometimes your healthy mind would win, and you would eat a hearty breakfast, but almost instantly, the anorexic mind would kick in. You would feel guilty that you ate such a large meal, ashamed that you lost focus on your goal to lose weight, and embarrassed that someone may have seen you eat as much as you did. You ate a normal breakfast, and these were your thoughts. Sometimes you experimented with turning the minds on and off; your healthy mind would rule for the weekend and you would be free to eat anything, then the anorexic mind would take charge for the weekdays. This turned into an unsustainable mess, as anyone can probably imagine. The self-hating thoughts showed in your mood as you struggled to find happiness. This went on every day for your first two years at SCU.

You often ate behind closed doors or late at night for a reason. You thought you weighed too much, and you feared others thought the same thing. You feared new friends would see old photos on Instagram and notice that you gained weight from high school. You figured if people did not see you eat, then maybe they would not see you as an overweight person who overeats, both of which were incredibly false perceptions of yourself. You built up a shell around yourself. The first two years of college are when you not only didn’t love yourself, but genuinely began to hate yourself. Without love for yourself, you did not have the capacity to love others either. You became absent as a friend, daughter, and sister. What’s worse, you hated yourself because you weren’t the skinny, thigh-gapped, flat-stomached girl you had been in high school when you starved yourself and overexercised. You hated your body so much that you avoided seeing anyone from high school during the summer. You feared they would talk behind your back about the weight you gained, and they wouldn’t know it was the weight you were always meant to have. You could not avoid everyone, so when you did see a select few classmates, you isolated yourself. You made your personality small in the hope that you would be small, that no one would notice you. You lost yourself.

Part 2: Finding Yourself

Nearly four years after your initial diagnosis, you decided you were ready. At the end of your sophomore year at SCU, in April 2019, you gave therapy another chance. This would be your fourth therapist in as many years. You were unsure how it would go but promised yourself to keep an open mind. You were finally ready to confront the illness that took away the fun, spontaneous, relaxed, kind person you are today. Fortunately, you found someone who quickly became more than a counselor; she is a friend and a mentor, too. Your first hour-long session felt like fifteen minutes. You clicked instantly. You found a way to meet every week, even when you moved back home for the summer, studied in Barcelona for a semester, and when the pandemic hit. From the start, your therapist would throw a challenge at you and you would swing until you hit it out of the park. Then, she would throw you a new one. Together, as a team, you re-learned how to love yourself.

She was the first person you candidly opened up to about the thoughts in your head, how you felt about yourself, how you ate, and how you wanted to look. You told her you struggled with overeating. She told you that you struggled with undereating. (She was right). She helped you take baby steps to recognize where you restricted and where you could improve. Immediately, you worked on feeling more in control at dinner by incorporating an evening snack. Half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was the go-to. Once you felt comfortable with an evening snack, the two of you focused on breakfast. No matter what you ate the night before, your challenge was to eat breakfast the next morning. This hurdle may have been the hardest to overcome. No one else knew what you discussed in therapy, which meant no one else knew your one job every day was to eat breakfast. You were surrounded by people who either did not eat breakfast themselves or were unaware of your need to eat breakfast, or both. With no one holding you accountable but yourself, the question of to eat or not to eat made you incredibly irritable. You were confused; you had two equally loud voices in your head telling you opposite things. You were frustrated; you did not know how long recovery would take or if you would ever fully recover. You were embarrassed; at 19 and 20 years old, a bowl of oatmeal could cause enough anxiety to make every limb shake. You were sad; you started to realize how much you had lost your authentic self.

At the end of your spring quarter sophomore year, you moved back home for summer, the hardest season to have an eating disorder. Summer is the season when progress from the rest of the year gets put to the test. You entered the season feeling like you were comfortable and confident in your own skin, then you realized you were comfortable under a big sweater, but not in a swimsuit or shorts and a tank top. This realization depletes you of energy and joy completely; you thought you had made progress but alas, you still hated yourself. You loved when summer ended; it meant you would leave home where you still felt scars and trauma from high school, and you could catch a break from the anxiety, depression, and shame that consumed you.

When you moved home for the summer after your sophomore year, you kept working on the post-dinner snack and tried to follow a fairly strict schedule of three meals and two or three snacks every day. You really worked hard to challenge your anorexic mind. You had developed a belief that somehow your weight correlated to your value and your worth. Every afternoon spent on the lake or at the beach, you were in a mental battle with yourself. You were embarrassed you didn’t have an hourglass body. You were also annoyed that your mind fixated on how you compared to others rather than embracing the moment and people around you. You believed everyone from high school looked the same, or better, than the last time you saw them. They “glowed up”. You looked heavier, and thus you looked worse. Like I said, summer was hard and for the most part, you put on a brave face.

For the first half of junior year, you studied in Barcelona and your therapist came with you, at least virtually. Weekly FaceTime calls mostly consisted of conversation about the other countries you visited, your class with local Barcelona students, the new people you met, and the growing bond between you and your host mom and her daughter, who really became your third grandma and second mom. The anorexia in you didn’t just disappear because you spent a semester traveling in Europe, though. You still faced days where you felt you overcompensated, ate something you didn’t need, or compared yourself to other students. Not infrequently would you hear conversations about students not wanting to gain weight while abroad and needing to join a gym. Some students really did join a gym. You weren’t tempted to follow this trend because that seemed like a ludicrous thing to do while abroad in a city where gyms are not the norm. The “overeating” and comparisons to other students did not derail you either, but they did bother you. This is where Barcelona offered a beautiful opportunity to adjust your priorities given the present circumstances. Your priority was to experience life in Spain, so you focused on exactly that. You just lived abroad. You explored the city with friends and on your own, you walked everywhere, you cooked with your host family, you tried new foods, you visited your Norwegian family, you visited new countries, and you revisited others. You challenged yourself to embrace the opportunity to live in a foreign country and to leave behind the fixation on calories and exercise.

After Barcelona, you returned to SCU for winter quarter. You moved into a house with four girls you did not really know and one you knew well. All of them are in the mix of your closest friends today. You continued your Barcelona mindset, and you let yourself live. You said yes to everything and because of this, your relationships grew very strong, very quickly. A few weeks after returning to California, your therapist left on maternity leave. Your weekly appointments paused, but she was never really gone. She sent you updates on her new baby and you sent her updates on your social life. You managed okay without her. Quite frankly, I think you were so busy living a life you had not yet experienced at SCU that you forgot to focus on food and how your body compared to those around you. A few days before you were set to leave for a ski trip to Whistler, the borders closed, and lockdowns went into place. You flew home for what was meant to be one week, then ended up spending all of spring quarter in Bellevue. The house was nicer than your shack at SCU; the environment was better for at-home school; Mom and Dad spoiled you because they felt sorry for you; Jack and Oslo (the dogs) lived there; and let’s face it, you will always be a homebody. After two months at home, people started to realize the pandemic may not be as temporary as originally thought. You heard comments like, “we will either come out of this looking better than ever or worse than ever!” and started to believe you needed to come out the other side looking better than ever. You started writing down your weight every few days. You saw small drops and felt excited, then you saw how high (in your anorexic mind) the total number was and felt deflated. Just the same as sophomore year of high school, you grew impatient with slow progress. You turned to diet pills just a week before your therapist returned from maternity leave. Again, your healthy mind and anorexic mind battled over whether or not to swallow them. Your healthy mind knew they wouldn’t work and even if they did, the weight loss would be temporary. You also knew you would throw them away as soon as therapy resumed anyway. Simultaneously, your anorexic mind wondered, what if they did work? What if feeling confident in your own skin was as easy as taking two pills a day? One night, your healthy mind won, and you left them in the drawer. The next night, your anorexic mind won, and you took a double dose. You met with your main confidant that week and told her about the pills; you knew she would be surprised, but you also knew she wouldn’t judge you. By the end of the day, every bottle was in the trash bin in the garage. You never looked back.

The summer before your senior year at SCU, you focused on two challenges. First, you prioritized eating three meals a day. You worked long hours in a job you loved at a company you admire, and you were determined to show you could be an asset. You also worked to strengthen your healthy mind and weaken your anorexic mind. You focused on being consistent and mindful with your meals. Consistency meant three meals a day, starting with breakfast before 10am to avoid conflict with lunch and no exceptions to lunch, even if you sat in a chair and worked all day. This helped you feel more in control at dinner, too; you didn’t feel the need to restrict because you were in the habit of eating full meals and you didn’t feel the need to overcompensate for skipped meals. Second, you reduced cardio exercise. You would go for a morning run in Kirkland with a close friend or hop on the Peloton a few times a week, but the other days you embraced more valuable and enjoyable activities. You sat with neighbors in the backyard for a pandemic-appropriate happy hour; you spent time with your summer brother; you went riding (horses, not bikes) in the state park; you went hiking with your sisters, Dad, summer brother, and the dogs; you went boating and played tennis with friends; and you went for walks with Mom and Jack. You found the joy in spending time with the people who loved you and you grew more comfortable in your own skin. You stopped hiding yourself.

When you moved back to SCU for your final year, your recovery reached a new phase where the rules of eating started to disappear. You stopped living by the structure of three meals and two snacks a day. You were excited because this meant you were close to full recovery, but you were also confused. It took practice to get your mind and body to work in tandem with each other. The overall goal was to eat when you were hungry and to choose what you ate based on appetite, not calories. The eat what you want was a lot easier than the eat when you want challenge. Some days you weren’t hungry until lunchtime, but you had just spent a year and a half eating three meals and two snacks a day without exception. If your body told you not to eat breakfast because it wasn’t hungry, your mind sent up a red flag and told you not to miss a meal. Sometimes this conflict between mind and body meant that you ate when you weren’t hungry, but it was mealtime. Sometimes this meant you skipped a meal even though you were hungry because you were “allowed” to. As the weeks went on, you started to trust that you wouldn’t let yourself starve or overcompensate. Your healthy mind was finally stronger than your anorexic mind.

Today, you eat what you want, when you want, and in what quantity you want. You no longer scratch at your hand or tap your leg to cope with your anxiety before a meal. You no longer order a salad when you are at a restaurant known for pizza, pasta, or burgers. You get what the restaurant cooks well, not what your anorexic mind orders you to eat. At home, you don’t choose what to put on your dinner plate based on what others serve themselves. Sometimes you feel uncomfortably full, like everyone, but this feeling no longer causes guilt, sadness, or restriction. You no longer punish yourself for eating by hiding your personality or starving yourself, or both.

That being said, there are also areas you are still working on. You have a habit of body checking in the mirror, but you often do so with gratitude and compassion. Someday this habit will fade completely. You occasionally check the calories before you eat, but you almost never put it back no matter what the label says. You may compare your meal to someone else’s, but you remind yourself that you are your own individual and should live as one. Even with these remnants from your eating disorder, you are at a point in recovery where nothing could derail you enough to cause your anorexic mind to overtake your healthy mind.

Recovery is hard, no doubt, but with the right person, you gained your traction and took off. It was exciting. You welcomed every uncomfortable shift in your eating or exercise pattern because you trusted your therapist and you knew every challenge was a necessary step to a better life. You now unconditionally love every part of yourself. You are compassionate and kind to yourself. You are happy again.

Part 3: Embracing Yourself

Best of all, once you learned to love yourself, you began to focus your energy on others. You started to foster a stronger, more authentic relationship with your siblings and parents. Family sat at the center of your world from the 21st of July in 1999 when you were born at Overlake Hospital. You are blessed with three older siblings who each set a unique example of someone you admire and aspire to emulate. You admire your brother’s love for your grandparents, humor, and responsibility. You admire your sisters’ fearlessness, work ethic, humor, breadth of knowledge, and independence.

I grew up incredibly proud to be a Heywood. I am still incredibly proud to be a Heywood. Looking back, I realize all the times I heard “You’re a Heywood!” came from the legacy of generosity and intelligence set by Mom and Dad. Your brother and sisters added to the legacy with their maturity and responsibility. You added to the legacy with your uniqueness from every other Heywood kid before you. Yes, you were mature and responsible, but you were notably chattier and quirkier. Just as frequently, if not more frequently, you heard “you are so different from your siblings”, usually purely on the basis that you talked more. The four of you shared many of the same teachers from kindergarten through senior year, so teachers loved this line in particular. They needed to tell you to stop talking enough times for all four of you combined.

In the last year, you welcomed high school friendships that were reborn, this time without a fear that you would be judged for your weight. You trust they love you for you, and you are not your body; you are so much more than that. When you returned from Barcelona, you embraced new friendships at SCU. I cannot express my gratitude for the people I am fortunate enough to call my friends today. I am blessed by all definitions of the word to have them in my life. I value our laughs, cries, phone calls, celebrations, adventures, and day-to-day conversations more than they will ever know. I am my most authentic self around them and I am grateful every day. My friends gave me the space to find myself again.

Your greatest asset is your eating disorder. You did the work to find the strength to fight against a brutal mental illness until you were genuinely able to see your purpose, your attributes, and your virtues. Your eating disorder — and it is “yours”; it is a deeply personal, self-critical, hateful mindset — clouded the attributes and virtues you always embodied. From a young age, you closely resembled the gifts given to Mom and Dad, as well as the values they raised you on. Mom continues to be best known for her generosity, thoughtfulness, organization, and her ability to maintain meaningful relationships. Dad will forever be known for his intelligence, gentleness, athleticism, and overwhelming love for his kids. Now, take a look at your greatest strengths: generosity, thoughtfulness, organization, athleticism, and ambition. You are a beautiful blend of Mom and Dad.

One of your strongest virtues is your humility, as is the same for your siblings. I suppose it is not very humble to say you are humble, but you are. You and your siblings do not talk about professional or personal successes, even to each other. It takes poking and prodding to know your own sibling received a promotion or an award, or even ran a marathon (or two). This is no surprise. Dad is considered one of the best cardiac electrophysiologists in the region, but you only know this from talking to everyone except him. Seattle Magazine recognized him as one of their Top Doctors in 2019, 2020, and 2021 (one of only six and the only cardiac electrophysiologist to be recognized from his hospital). Castle Connolly has considered him a Top Doctor: First Edition since 2013. He did not know this until you told him and when you did, he asked, “what does that even mean?” and went back to eating dinner. To him, his patients are what matter and to his patients, he matters. One flew from Montana to have him perform their procedure. One moved to California and undoubtedly found care from great physicians. Yet, they continued to consult Dad on their new doctors’ recommendations. When you see his partners, they cannot help but gush about Dad’s unmatched bedside manners with patients. The point is you have an incredibly humble father and he taught you how to carry yourself with the same humility. It’s one reason your friends take it upon themselves to brag about you.

Mom and Dad also taught you the importance of maintaining perspective on how you live each day and how you confront challenges. Perspective on how one lives each day is rooted in what one believes to be the most important aspect of their life and how that will guide their actions. For you, family and friends will always take the top spot on your list of priorities. While Dad is an incredibly dedicated cardiologist who works long hours and will do just about anything for his patients, he always puts family first. Growing up, he showed up for dinner almost every night. Even when he was on-call and stuck in the ER, he did everything possible to drive home for even half an hour to see you and your siblings. He coached your soccer teams starting at the age of seven and he never missed a practice or a game for nearly ten years. To this day, I do not know how, but he showed up to every cross-country race, soccer game, lacrosse game, and baseball game. One fall, three of you played on a different high school team while the fourth played college baseball. Between you and your sisters, you covered two soccer teams and one cross-country team. Every time you looked in the stands or you crossed the finish line, Dad was there, often with his work clothes hidden under his giant, puffy bench coat. He attended every parent-teacher conference (where he heard about how much you talked), band concert, art show, talent show, and musical. He always helped you in the evening with math or science homework, even when you cried and told him he solved the problem wrong (the problem you didn’t know how to solve). Dad showed up. Always.

Mom showed up, too. She made sure to be home when you walked or biked back from Cherry Crest Elementary School. If she wasn’t there, you picked up the landline before putting down your backpack to ask when she would be home. She held you when you were bullied and read stories to you until the tears were gone. She made dinner every night for six people, including a teenage boy. She was also tough; one complaint about your lunch in first grade left you packing your own for the rest of time. She read your papers for school and college applications. She helped you find your first, second, and third job. She still cooks dinner and dessert of your choice on your birthday. She sends you a care package every Valentine’s Day. She organized fun activities with family friends and the neighborhood kids, like the pizza and ice cream sundae night every year before the first day of school. She always puts flowers in your room when you fly home from California. She made your life as easy and as fun as possible, just as life should be, but rarely is, for a kid.

Now, you show up for your family and your friends. This looks different for each person in your life. You care about their own love languages, so you adapt your behavior to be most meaningful for them. For some, you cook meals, deliver coffee, and help clean bedrooms or apartments. Contrary to popular opinion, these are considered fun activities for you. For others, you hike, ski, bike, or golf to spend quality time together in an environment you both love. You offer up hugs for those who appreciate physical touch, even though this ranks dead last on your own love language list. You plan events, gatherings, and parties to celebrate others’ achievements, birthday’s, or simply to get people together. Just about everything you do, you do to show up for the people you love.

The portion of your story on embracing yourself almost exclusively discusses the admiration you have for your family, and how that admiration shaped who you are as a friend. This is a powerful sign of your priorities and perspective on life. Loving and embracing yourself means you turn that energy outward and share it with the people around you. For so long, you did not have any spare energy to give. Family and friends are your utmost priority and your re-recognition of their value to you shows how transformational the past two years have been to bring back the person you are meant to be.

Part 4: Looking Ahead

Your attributes, virtues, purpose, and priorities all boil down to one thing: your relationships. Now that you are able to love and lead yourself, you are able to turn your focus to the people most important to you. Some of your priorities explicitly relate to these individuals, such as the goals to strengthen family relations and maintain high school and SCU friendships. These are the easiest goals to meet because they are naturally enabled by your thoughtfulness, social awareness, and energy.

Other goals are more challenging as they connect in some way to your greatest crucible, and they are certainly long-term goals. You set an intention to be consistently active and to one day, run a marathon. You are a natural athlete, so it is in your blood to move your body. But for you, there will always be an added challenge. You must maintain perspective on why you are active to avoid falling into the trap of exercising to lose weight or change your body shape. After all, a wise therapist once told you that everyone could eat and exercise the same, and everyone would still have different body shapes.

You are known for being kind to others, but you must also be kind to yourself. You must have the strength and courage to recognize when eating disorder thoughts enter your mind, because they will. This connects to another goal of maintaining your emotional health, which will not be hard at all. You are incredibly fortunate to have found a therapist who is more of a close friend and mentor than a professional psychologist. Your commitment to her and her commitment to you is unwavering and indestructible. This is one reason the two of you will write a recovery book together. I have no doubt that your ambition and your courage will take you far.

Eating disorders are largely misunderstood, undiagnosed, and untreated. You are one of the lucky ones who found the motivation within yourself to choose recovery and find someone who you trusted to guide you through the process. Because full recovery from an eating disorder is incredibly rare, you also have a responsibility and a duty to leverage your privilege to change the narrative around body image, food, and women. You may only reach close friends and family, but you never know who they will reach. It is a chain reaction that starts with you and your willingness to be vulnerable and live an open-book life. This is absolutely not something to do on your own. You will need guidance and support. You have that in your family. You have that in your friends. You have that in your trifecta of a counselor, friend, and mentor.

Your eating disorder took everything you love and value in life from your vision. You lost all perspective on who you are and who you want to be for those around you. Now it’s time to embrace your authentic self: the generous, thoughtful, athletic, fun, and intelligent person that you are. Your purpose is to believe in your own power and beauty.

Keep taking care of yourself and your people,

AM