Lies About Food, Body, Sex, Vodka and God
On being uncool, naive, starving, drunk, stupid and saved.
Women with disordered eating in adolescence or young adulthood are much more likely to deal with co-occurring substance abuse now or later in life. I am one of those statistics.
It started with the food.
The seeds of harm were planted early for me—through SnackWell’s cookies, fat-free diets, "heroin chic" models in glossy magazines, a mother’s offhand remark about a jiggly belly, and a culture that idolized thinness while mocking imperfection. I didn’t know these messages would poison me, that I was already swimming in disease.
Growing up brought a flood of emotions, physical changes, and pressure that left me unmoored—first in adolescence, then again in young adulthood.
At 14, puberty hit, bringing with it a blossoming sexuality that was utterly foreign. It was never explained or discussed in my home. In a single summer, I went from petty childhood worries, such as sibling rivalry and math homework, to the burdensome realities of womanhood: managing ever-evolving body parts and the unbridled emotions now saturating every move I made.
My mom gave birth to me at just 19, and something about the proximity of that age scared me. At the time, I was told (by the church and culture) that men couldn’t be trusted to control themselves sexually. I viewed sex as this mysterious, scary, sacred thing that you’d know nothing about until after marriage. I made it into something far bigger and more threatening than it was. It left a scar that’s still visible.
Maybe I stopped eating to push it off. Perhaps I started binge eating when I realized it was impossible not to grow up. Was the food a barrier? A method of protection?
When I read this passage in Caroline Knapp’s phenomenal book, Appetites, as an adult, it was hard to believe how she captured ME so clearly:
“And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex and power and value, which seemed so merged and hard to tease apart.
In the midst of all that, I didn't exactly loathe my body, or feel ashamed of it, but I was deeply ashamed of my fear, which felt disabling and immature and woefully, painfully uncool, a terrible secret, evidence of some profound failing and ignorance on my part.
Other girls, or so I imagined, knew what to do, how to use their power, how to derive pleasure from it, and in contrast, I felt not only freakish but isolated, as though I was standing outside a vital, defining loop.”
This is tricky territory for parents, and I don’t blame mine, but no one had talked to me about what was happening (just as I’m sure no one talked to them when they were young.)
I had an idyllic childhood—full of love, faith, and security—so adolescence represented an abrupt end to that magic. It was jarring and unwelcome. Now, not everything could be fixed with a summer morning ride on my Dad’s motorcycle to diner breakfasts with a fat stack of pancakes.
My parents, always before a cocoon of comfort, suddenly felt unsafe – like people I was hiding from.
My parents, always before a cocoon of comfort, suddenly felt unsafe – like people I was hiding from. I didn’t want them to see, smell or know this new me. The few times I tried talking to my mom, I was quickly sidelined as “too emotional.” She was marked unsafe for this territory.
Seventeen magazine, the quiet and clear shame women showed toward their bodies, and the cruel whispers of middle school girls taught me early – fat is something to fear. Hating your body is just part of being female. If you stay thin, then the boys might like you. And the girls would to.
*I distinctly remember this being the first magazine I ever purchased and the sight of Niki Taylor’s abs have been embedded in my mind ever since.
I clung to a disintegrating assumption about how the rest of my life would unfold, concluding that thinness was a pathway to love, respect, and success. Fat symbolized my deepest fear of rejection and failure. I even fetishized fat by writing with disdain about overweight characters in private notebook novels that no one would ever read.
Life soon became an invisible spreadsheet of food and body rules.
Flat bellies. yes.
Cellulite. no.
Thigh gaps. yes.
Love handles. no.
Rice cakes. yes.
French fries. no.
Running 6 miles. yes.
Skipping a day. no.
I fantasized about the life that came with being “thin enough”—just as I’d later chase the allure of effortless attractiveness completed with a cocktail.
Neither goal was attainable, but I didn’t realize that at the time. I thought I just had to try harder, have more discipline, and develop the holy fruit of self-control.
I was the problem.
My faith was the problem.
My body was the problem.
I thought it was my fault that I couldn’t keep my calories and exercise in check, that I was bullied into eating lunch alone in the office, and that I didn’t make the cheerleading team. I thought it was my fault that I wanted boys to like me, but I couldn’t bear it if they did.
Underneath the surface of my disordered eating, I was consumed with fear and shame—feelings I knew weren’t proper for a good, godly girl, especially not one raised in a loving family like mine.
I didn’t deserve to feel this bad because my life was so good. There was no clear reason for my struggles, so I felt unworthy of having them.
Just one more sign that there was something deeply, horribly wrong with me.
From One Disorder to Another
It makes sense that early eating disorders would pave the way for adulthood of dysfunctional drinking, but like so many, I didn’t see it coming. For me, the two vices quietly traded places, one fading out as the other crept in.
I didn’t touch alcohol until the last year of high school because of my pious upbringing. When I did start drinking, I quickly wanted to distance myself from the uptight teetotalers of my youth. That accelerated in college. I wanted to be cool, to prove I was laid back, and drinking seemed like the perfect way to do it. Plus, it made so much of what I hated about myself disappear — and blocked out the “food noise” that had plagued me for so long.
Appetite was dangerous. Too much need. Too much me. Too much pressure.
But when I drank, all of that faded into the background.
I quickly learned to…
…Suppress hunger with liquor.
…Restrict food as punishment for a drunken binge.
…Purposely pass out drunk to avert the insatiable hunger beast.
An empty stomach is the perfect setup for intoxicated self-destruction—so when the eating disorder collides with alcohol, things unravel.
The buzz came quicker.
The lies felt truer.
The numbness ran deeper.
Intoxication and hunger ebbed and flowed with my diet, my sleep, my performance, my spiritual life — and the aching desire to be loved by a man who almost always turned out to be just a boy.
A vision of weightlessness and effortless attractiveness (in both body and personality) fueled an imagined “better” me. I juggled a toxic mix of fear, shame, insecurity, and loneliness.
When my heart longed for the healing of community, unconditional love, and complete forgiveness that can only come from God, I filled my heart with the worldly salves of vanity, greed, intoxication, and self-sufficiency, walking further from the Lord with every choice.
Unknowingly, I worshiped “the created rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25) and wondered why my spirit felt dim and tortured.
I felt so seen the first time I read Appetites (mentioned above). Finally, someone had named the isolating, disorienting feeling I carried:
— inexplicable fear of intimacy,
— humiliation for my ignorance and confusion regarding sex, life and relationships— shame for my shame
Knapp captured it: Empty, silent, absent. I’d rather be those things than ravenous, loud and all-consuming. It was so much safer.
Reality Bites
As I moved from destructive eating to destructive drinking, it was like watching myself from outside, powerless to stop it. I was Ebenezer Scrooge, viewing Christmas past but frozen in the present. I could see the years stretching out ahead of me—drinking I couldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop.
But by my late 20s, the illusion of youthful invincibility had faded, and I knew I’d eventually have to face it all.
Stolen moments from blackout nights reeled through my mind on repeat:
Stumbling home alone at night in college multiple times.
Waking up in a room I didn’t recognize or remember going to.
Saying “no” repeatedly to someone who kept trying not to hear me.
Bruises I didn’t remember getting, numbers I didn’t remember typing.
Words that didn’t sound like me, that weren’t me, but came out of my mouth.
In her memoir The Recovering, Leslie Jamison’s prose is so good I’ll need to read it twice. She described something that hit on my quiet desire for love and acceptance — something I attempted to fill in all the wrong ways when it came to men in my younger days:
“..It seemed hypocritical to stop what we’d started – like I’d already promised him something as payment for the meager gift he’d given me, the affirmation of wanting [...] me in the first place.
My rum-blood believed every man’s desire was a gift he gave me, and a promise I made to him.
But there was also this, beyond and beneath each because: It happened because I was drunk and because he didn’t stop.”
It was never out of genuine desire or love. Never once.
Of all the things I’ve written online, that feels the most vulnerable. I still palpably feel the shame of it, and that bleeds into my life today. But it’s part of the mess.
During that time:
Mornings after those times shocked me into the reality of what alcohol did to me. At times, I wished my only problem was disordered eating because at least I was safer and less destructive in the moment. Binging Steak n’ Shake milkshakes made me feel awful, but binging liquor could cost me so much more.
The older I got, the stronger I felt the internal urge to take action. No matter how far I felt from God, I never doubted His supernatural ability to rescue me.
When I listened to Lauren Daigle sing “Rescue” –hungover and sprawled out in misery on my bedroom floor – I tried to believe it could be about me.
That I was lost, but God was on His way to find me.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
Girls (like me) with eating disorders see the body as a battlefield and food as the enemy’s weapon. We pine for insatiable thinness, unrealistic beauty, and unmatched charisma. Ultimately, that’s a desire for happiness, fulfillment, and acceptance, which can only be found in God.
Girls (like me) with alcohol problems see everything they are as the problem – quirks, personality traits, perceived weaknesses. Alcohol is a temporary filling to their lack: lack of love, friendship, confidence, ambition, or healing. Ultimately, that, too, is a desire for happiness, fulfillment, and acceptance, which can only be found in God.
Moving from eating disorder to drinking dysfunction was natural. Eating disorders kept me safe from my own unrealized ambition, confusing relationships and considering the existential questions of life. The only way I could step away from that was to move into a different kind – the safety found in the numbing abyss of alcohol.
But, I’d never find peace as long as I kept hiding in the false comfort of hunger, isolation, intoxication, and the empty promise of changing “tomorrow.” Each day was one step closer to redemption, but I couldn’t see it in the moment.
Meeting my husband began healing me in ways I couldn’t have known were coming. His unconditional love and acceptance of who I was in the deepest sense – insecurities and all – were an unexpected gift.
The day we got engaged:
For all of his brokenness, and mine too, God began piecing us together in the gaps of one another. God used my husband to heal parts of me I didn’t know could be fixed. He works all things together for the good, even the worst of circumstances like those from which my husband came.
Unraveling the Lies
When Jesus said, “In this life, you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world,” He meant we’d need to keep clinging to Him throughout.
…Overcoming an eating disorder didn’t get me out of the trouble we’re promised.
…Overcoming alcohol dependence didn’t do it either.
But I now know and expect the many troubles of this world and realize that things aren’t easy for anyone. Maybe that’s obvious, but grappling with that helped expand the view from me to you and the world beyond.
We’re all a little awkward, a lot sinful, and certainly broken – made whole only through Jesus’ atonement for us on the Cross. Accepting the reality of our imperfections and functioning within the bounds of human inevitability is grounding.
For so long, I believed that a particular kind of attractiveness or way of being would make me acceptable in the world. When I began to believe the scriptural promises of God’s greater plan and inability to make a mistake with me, I slowly unraveled from decades of harmful lies.
Self-acceptance inside the grace and goodness of God is the way forward. It’s not easy. It’s not quick. I can’t promise you won’t take two steps back at times. But it’s always available to us as sons and daughters of God, who calls us to “run with endurance the race set before us.” (Hebrews 12:1).
The Slow Healing
The eating disorder didn’t just switch off one day. It was more like a slow drip out of my psyche and behavior patterns. One day, the toxicity fully emptied and I no longer wanted to starve or binge or purge. I had to accept there was no quick fix and getting free would be a journey of slow growth, fueled by intentional learning, action, personal grace and support from those around me.
The drinking ended in starts and stops, until one day was finally the last. I didn’t know it would be. It was too dangerous to make a promise that big. So, like they say, it was one day at a time. It’s still one day at a time.
You’re not alone, so don’t operate like you are. You’re in good company with many women who’ve gone before you and are with you now. This struggle is no surprise to God. It’s what manifested out of your attempt to feel and love and manage the complicated layers life brings on.
Eating disorder, alcohol dysfunction, whatever you’ve used to cope is understandable, but don’t stay stuck in it anymore.
Walk forward in the confidence of that knowledge. There are answers. There is freedom. And it won’t always feel this way. Take it from me. I love you.
Need help? Join a support group like this one for alcohol. Contact an org like this one for eating disorder struggles.
RECENT POSTS:
My latest piece in the Wall Street Journal: Eating Disorders are on the Rise. Scientists Still Don’t Know How to Treat Them.
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This is a beautiful share ... I almost forgot you were telling your story, and not mine, half way through. Thank you for your bold and brave voice.
This is so powerful 🙏🏼thank you for your vulnerability!