*****

I spent my childhood in an ice rink: a competitive figure skater from age five-to-eighteen, no one is surprised that I wound up with an eating disorder.

By age eight, my body was the problem. I was a third grader who, in fact, had never been overweight in the waking world. But in the figure skating universe, I was deemed a behemoth. 

From the mid-nineties to the 2010s, the sport’s culture was grounded in shame, criticism, and competition. Coaches told me daily where I gained weight. The ballet teachers yelled: “Don’t drink soda!” “Don’t eat chips!” as they told me how my body was wrong at the ballet bar. My competitors’ mothers asked how much I weighed, only to tell me their child weighed less. My friendships with other skaters were built on swapping restrictive diet tricks.

By age twelve, I was sent to a “professional” “nutritionist,” who weighed me weekly and told me exactly what I was “allowed” to eat. I became obsessed with “treat meals” and “treat items.” I spent my teens watching her weight go up and down, as I shrank. At school, I held warm protein shakes by my locker, saying, “There are 24 grams of protein! So it’s a really good snack!” while my middle school peers looked on in abject horror, munching Doritos. 

But how could I tell them that being thin was the only thing I could control?

I was also consumed with the fear that I could single-handedly ruin my father’s public reputation by having sex. My father — whom the world knows as “Dr. Drew” — gave out medically based sex advice on the “Loveline” five nights a week, and after catching me getting a kiss on the cheek from my third-grade crush, my mother had warned me: “When you lose your virginity, your father is going to broadcast it on the radio.” Of course, there was no universe in which he would do this, but fear told me otherwise. 

*****

At school, I didn’t feel smart. After being shunned by the sixth-grade class, my eating disorder commenced (social troubles and trauma, an oft-neglected spark that lights the gunpowder that is an eating disorder). I couldn’t control who was mad at me, but I could control what I ate. At the rink, the more I shrank, the higher I could jump. The more I was praised. I became the living testament to the “nutritionist’s” false credentials, validated by my tiny frame. I was miserable and weak, but I could only feel hunger.

But when I couldn’t be perfect anymore — when I lost control and made “mistakes,” eating more “treat items” than I intended — slowly, the weight crept back.

When I left for college, I didn’t know how to feed myself. I would go to the dining hall, watch my peers dole out portions, then eat until they were full. I didn’t even know what full felt like: starving or stuffed, always. Most importantly: I couldn’t make a choice. I had grown up outsourcing every choice to a woman in an office, whose last words to me were “Let’s get you cute for boys at college!” Then she proceeded to tell me to drink a bottle of water between vodka shots. 

I discovered her methods wouldn’t get me drunk. And I was just learning how to drink to black out, which earned me the nickname “Barflina” because I would either black out or vomit every time I drank. I no longer trusted her advice.

The purging started in earnest when I left home. I spent Saturday nights eating multiple pints of Ben & Jerry’s on my dorm room twin-sized bed. After a day spent eating too little, never trusting or feeding my hunger, I ate with reckless abandon. Then, the guilt: erase the mistake. Dopamine firing, the false trigger in my throat. 

But when I made myself purge eight times in one day, spring of my freshman year, I couldn’t delude myself anymore. I couldn’t pretend it was normal. My first rock bottom happened on my hands and knees in front of my childhood toilet, the first toilet where I taught myself how to purge. 

*****

My eating disorder recovery was a byproduct of individual and group therapy during the Body Positive era, which looked like dismantling ingrained beauty ideals and deciphering what I thought for myself, learning how to eat intuitively, and body neutrality: no diet and exercise regimen. I learned that I vomited my unexpressed feelings — rage, fear, anxiety, sadness. When I looked in the mirror, I learned to let the critical thoughts pass. And when I stopped vomiting, I began to write about it more freely.

Now, 13 years later, I am genuinely so stupid neutral about my body and my weight. But that was, of course, the byproduct of deliberate work and effort. That doesn’t mean I have mastered my relationship with my body and food. My weight goes up and down, but I remain neutral. When I am hungry, I eat. When I am full, I stop. I try to eat more vegetables. I try to not eat the entire pint. But more times than not, I am so moved by what I am eating that I can’t help but moan and dance in place (is food sexual? THAT is for another piece).

But if it happens? Oh well, I’ll do better next time. I don’t have to flog myself or barf to make it better. Instead, I understand that I am human. And that my health is much more holistic than my weight. Left to my own devices, my weight became an obsession, a fixation, an instrument of self-destruction. And the true irony is that I’ve never felt healthier or happier in the body I live in today, even if it is far from what sixteen-year-old me thought was “perfect.”

*****

Paulina Pinsky is a writer, figure skater, and clown based in Los Angeles. She writes the newsletter Newly Sober, leads people through The Artist's Way, and offers writing coaching. Future cohorts and coaching info at paulinapinsky.com.

If you want more long-form, you’ll probably dig Sundays because we have more like the one you just read (usually written by me or Ben Gaffaney) and also a complete recovery rundown full of books, and poems, and workout routines, and self-reflection, and self-flagellation, plus the occasional dreamy song added to the revolving TSB playlist.

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