I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can’t be that bad. It’s only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics? They’re just gross.
– Marya Hornbacher
We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
– Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
I breathe in slowly. Food is life. I exhale, take another breath. Food is life. And that’s the problem. When you’re alive, people can hurt you. It’s easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It’s easier to lock everybody out.
But it’s a lie.
– Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn’t sick; I was strong.
– Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself. (p. 84)
– Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
The stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking didn’t make her skinny, it made her cry
– Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame. I have an eating disorder.
– Jena Morrow, Hollow: An Unpolished Ta
Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
– Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
In all the years I’ve been a therapist, I’ve yet to meet one girl who likes her body.
– Mary Pipher
Eating is not a crime. It’s not a moral issue. It’s normal. It’s enjoyable. It just is.
– Carrie Arnold
My bulimia was my addiction. Hurting myself was my addiction… The music is what saved me. That’s the only thing I can trust.
– Nicole Scherzinger
I have something called exercise bulimia, which is where you rid of your calories by over-exercising.
– Jamie-Lynn Sigler
I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.
– Laurie Halse Anderson
We clean our plates, yet we’re still famished—starving for something other than food.
– Kate Wicker
Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn’t obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin.
– Mary Pipher
In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.
– Gloria Steinem
Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
– Naomi Wolf
You have a history of starving yourself,” he says gently. I lift my head. I meet his gaze. “I have a history that I don’t like to talk about.
– Stephanie Kuehn, Charm & Strange
Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.
– Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
