There is a muscle that runs from your lower spine through the bowl of your pelvis. Most people don’t know it exists until it wakes up. I had often heard about the psoas in yoga classes, the advanced ones where the teacher’s voice gently glided into authority of anatomy. One teacher often commented that we keep our exes in our hips and don’t be surprised if you randomly start crying.
I was always moving. Feel bad, run, strength train, feel a little better, punish myself for feeling better. Then I started noticing my shape. I was never the thinnest in the room but I could hold my own in yoga classes, scantily clad in whatever overpriced Lululemon I had bought in spaces my income said I didn’t belong. I also started writing ever so carefully about eating disorders in my blog. I talked mostly about binging and purging and watched private messages flow in.
In grad school, there was lots of encouragement of disclosure in a way that moved the class along, paralleling our ultimate use of disclosure in session to move therapy along. One girl talked about her eating disorder. She mentioned how the purging got so bad one day she could see and taste blood in her mouth. She was kicked out of our program that semester and had she never told us this info, I would have known.
I keenly observed this woman like the other 21 folks in the program. How had they gotten here, were they better than me, did I have any business being here? And this girl, I saw her most. Her eating disorder wasn’t a secret to me. I knew exactly why she was always drinking water from her Nalgene, why the pack of gum was always sitting right next to her notebook, why she spent hours in the gym barely lifting weights while I ran mile after mile after mile on the treadmill.
To this day, I know the calorie count in most foods. I know exactly what exercise will burn the most calories and how. I learned that to lose REAL weight, to lose the kind of weight to enter the disordered zone, you can’t workout as much as you would like. You simply get too hungry. I worked out at least twice a day and would become dysregulated if I couldn’t attend both my morning and evening classes.
On break from school one spring, I found myself in a hugely crowded yoga class in Fort Collins, the last of four classes I had taken as I traveled back from southern Colorado. Class in Colorado Springs. Class in Denver. Another class in Denver. And now here I sat exhausted and forced into a place in the front of class where I felt the excitement of it all. Losing weight was a lifestyle now. Thoughts of thinness preceded every action and the goal was always to weigh less. And I had found the perfect community in which to mask it all: yoga.
I had felt I escaped some fate when the classmate was removed from our program and the only difference between us was that I knew better than to talk about eating, disordered or otherwise. I knew better than to tell people the regimens I had lined out in my head that had to be completed for me to relax. I knew better than to go to lunch with anyone who might see me tuck away three quarters of my meal and vomit up the rest. If I didn’t do two a day workouts, one yoga, one running and strength training, I would feel anxiety so crippling that I could barely sleep. The only comfort was knowing that I could work out in a few hours when the studio opened.
I never excelled too much at restriction or a slow measured approach to diminishing myself. The purging was the main gist of it all. I had trained my belly and my brain to feel certain amounts of food and automatically and without sound I could easily discard fresh meals. My secret wasn’t always kept that way and one time at work I was caught. In conflict with a coworker, he sharply said that maybe I ought go puke about what had gotten me upset. He knew. I had been sloppy. What bothered me most was how much money I would waste. $250 of sushi in the toilet at Mizos. Pad thai down the drain at Anongs. Pastries barely chewed down the toilet at Coal Creek.
This went on for years. The binging and purging never seemed pervasive enough for me to do anything about it. Vomiting at this point wasn’t so much about staying thin as it was the feeling of relief that followed fullness. Feelings and thoughts expelled into nothingness. I started to get better at restricting, adjacent to a man who had the disorder as well. We entered an unspoken competition.
Embarrassment and shame became ugly smelling incense lingering in the air and he floated right in with it. I watched posts about the flat earth and alleged spiritual enlightenment fill up his Facebook wall and X feed. In reality, he was an abusive prick who took way too many drugs and didn’t know how to cook or eat at regular intervals. He always had a woman to do this for him. The thinness I had managed right before things went south was in direct response to this man. Can’t win for losing with a personality disordered person.
I eventually broke up with him and around 2019 I no longer had the privilege of worrying about weight. I was fired for doing community organizing and getting a free breakfast and lunch program into an elementary school. Who knew food was so political. Every Saturday after that I sat at the Farmers Market handing out double up food bucks, suggesting squash over potatoes to women thinner than me, nodding along to conversations about clean eating. I was the expert. I knew exactly how many calories were in everything on every table.
A year later I was dating a man who excelled at ski mountaineering and said something sweet about the roundness of my belly. I think he intended to be sweet, talking about the bulge like a pineapple, but instead it landed like a verdict. I had stopped running the numbers long enough to gain the weight back and didn’t know what to do with a body I no longer recognized.
The binging and purging shifted after that from food flying out of me to drugs and alcohol. Fired, single, and now a drunk. I would drink until I passed out so I didn’t have to feel the inertia of falling. At some point the fentanyl made purging involuntary. Projectile, sudden, out of my control the way nothing had been in years. My body lying still on the couch, feet crossed at the ankle without me noticing, the psoas locked and silent. I had stopped moving entirely. I didn’t know yet what that was costing me.
The eating disorder slowly went away not because I worked at it but because everything I knew was no longer true. My mom killed herself that fall. My uncle six months later. I stopped weighing myself sometime in there and didn’t notice until summer. The grief was so total it crowded out the counting. There wasn’t enough room in my life to both stay alive and quantify doing so. I held off on my licensure. I stopped working. I waited to see what would be left.
After the great losses of my mom and my uncle, I went to a doctor. She gave me a simple formula. Keep added sugar under 26 grams. I started eating chocolate almonds and cereal to manage the cravings the opiates had left behind. I tried Club Pilates but it was too fast and left my hips feeling sore and unmoored. Another studio with Turkish wooden reformers was out of reach financially. I eventually landed on the Lagree method, which was slow and deliberate. Moving that carefully after years of running myself into the ground started to work. My body finally started to feel what it was like to move without punishment.
Despite all this, I ended up losing weight again. From 224 to 170 as of yesterday. I used to use this formula where folks who are 5’0″ weigh 100 pounds and then you add five pounds for every inch. That math tells me I should be around 170. Looks like old formulas and habits die hard. This weight loss was the way the doctor wanted, though. Simply cut out added sugar and watched two pounds per week until it stayed.
Great loss cured me and I kept circling that like a drain. Most of my family is dead or estranged and I worry I’ll go unclaimed when I die, that my landlord will clean out my house the way I cleaned out my uncle’s. My aunt texts me about food because it’s neutral ground. Last week she told me they split one steak three times a month and mostly eat toast and eggs, that they all just need to walk more, with you as the exception. I held my phone for a second. Everyone compliments the disorder and calls it discipline. No one compliments the balance because the balance doesn’t look like anything from the outside. I don’t ask if she knows. That’s exactly how it always worked. Don’t say a thing. Keep it quiet.
I run until I think Angel has waited long enough in the car. All four windows down so she can watch. One front leg, separation anxiety, overweight in ways the vet keeps mentioning. I don’t count the miles or check the time. Somewhere around thirty-five minutes something opens up in my hips. Not a thought, not a number. The psoas, maybe, finally loose for a reason that has nothing to do with burning anything off. Just the body, moving because it wants to. Angel watches from the window and I wave at her like an idiot. She doesn’t care. I don’t care. I never start crying on the run. But I understand now why someone might.
the misfit west 