Eating Disorders - Connecting the Dots : Part 1

Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders
by Aimee E. Liu

If you've ever suffered from an eating disorder-or cared for someone who is anorexic or bulimic-you may think you understand these illnesses. But do you really understand why they occur? Do you know what it takes to fully recover? Do you know how eating disorders affect life after recovery? Now, nearly three decades after she detailed her first battle with anorexia in Solitaire, Aimee Liu presents an emotionally powerful and poignant sequel that digs deep into the causes, cures, and consequences of anorexia and bulimia nervosa.

Aimee Liu believed she had conquered anorexia in her twenties. Then in her forties, when her life once again began spiraling out of control, she stopped eating. Liu realized the same forces that had caused her original eating disorder were still in play. She also noticed that other women she knew with histories of anorexia and bulimia seemed to share many of her personality traits and habits under stress-even decades after "recovery." Intrigued and concerned, Liu set out to learn who is susceptible to these disorders and why, and what it takes to overcome them once and for all.

With Gaining, Liu shatters commonly held beliefs about eating disorders while assembling a puzzle that is as complex and fascinating as human identity itself. Through cutting-edge research and the stories of more than forty interview subjects, readers will discover that the tendency to develop anorexia or bulimia has little to do with culture, class, gender-or weight. Genetics, however, play a key role. So does temperament. So do anxiety, depression, and shame. Clearly, curing eating disorders involves more than good nutrition.

Candidly recalling her own struggles, triumphs, and defeats, Aimee explores an array of promising and innovative new treatments, offers vital insights to anyone who has ever had an eating disorder, and shows parents how to help protect their children from ever developing one. Her book is sure to change the way we talk and think about eating disorders for years to come.

Chapter 1

When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one.

- M. F. K. Fisher

MY FRIEND CAROL CALLING FROM SANTA FE, sounded elated as she told me her news: after thirty years, she'd finally located our high school classmate Candy Lunt. The last time either of us had seen Candy was at graduation, when she weighed less than 80 pounds. Shortly thereafter, her family left Greenwich. The possible implications of her continuing absence from our alumni directory had haunted both Carol and me.

"You should be a bounty hunter!" I said. "Where is she?"

"I spotted her name on the masthead of Forbes.

"No!"

I called her. Aimee, she still talks in that half whisper from the back of her throat, low and deep - you remember?

Barely. What I remembered more, at least at the end, was her silence.

"She's an editor," Carol raced on. "She lives in Manhattan with her daughter. Somehow, she's okay"

I wondered. As I'd recently discovered, there was a big difference between survival and well-being. "Was she glad to hear from you?"

"She and Ruby are coming to the ranch for a visit next week."

Can you come, too?"

"You couldn't stop me," I said.

Such invitations were characteristic of Carol. She had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma fourteen years earlier, at thirty-four, and during her first remission she'd launched a personal campaign to track down as many as possible of her "disappeareds" - friends she'd lost through the passage of time. I'd been back in Carol's orbit for twelve years now, and between her life with cancer and my marital separation four months earlier, we were closer than we'd ever been in school. But I was surprised by Candy's quick response after all these years.

"By the way," Carol said before hanging up, "she calls herself Candace now."

So, I thought as I packed for the trip from Los Angeles, Candy's taken a grown-up name. I found this disorienting. I didn't know Candace Lunt, whereas I'd first met Candy in third grade, when we were nine years old. We joined the Beach Boys fan club together. At my house in those preanorexic days, we baked coffee cake. At hers we ate hot dogs. I remember even as a child finding her ranch-style tract house forbidding. My childhood home was like a museum, filled with Chinese heirlooms - my father's ancestry - and temple rubbings, carved icons, and brass work acquired during my family's two years in India. While these treasures reflected my parents? pride of possession, dust did tend to accumulate. The Lunts, too, had lived abroad - in Mexico - but in their house you could see the vacuum tracks in the white carpets, hear the click of the wall clock bounce off the spotless kitchen Formica. Candy's mother and mine both worked, which in suburban Connecticut in the sixties was unusual. Mine imported hand-loomed textiles from India. Hers, a trim, prematurely white-haired woman whom I never once saw smile, was a dental hygienist. My father commuted Manhattan to run the guided tour service at the United Nations, while Mr. Lunt was a senior vice president with Ford Motors. Candy had two older brothers to my one. And she was smaller, freckled, quiet. Even before she had braces, she always covered her mouth when she laughed.

By senior year Candy was one of the most withdrawn girls in our school. That was 1970. More than three hundred thousand American kids weren fighting in Vietnam, and that spring the National Guard opened fire on antiwar students at Kent While Kate Millett had just published Sexual Politics, most of the girls in our class still wore miniskirts and painted their lips with Yardley Slickers. Candy, however, shunned makeup. She used her long ginger-colored hair as a screen. She avoided both our school's peace protests and the senior prom.

I arrived a day ahead of Candace at the restored adobe farmhouse Carol shared with her husband, Wayne. Carol and I had known each other since sophomore year in high school when I was just starting my modeling career. Carol back then lived in peasant blouses, blue jeans, and clogs. She always seemed to be baking a carrot cake or making joyous, boldly hued silk screens styled after the artist Sister Corita. She also knew how to fly a Cessna and shoot her dad's Smith & Wesson. Naturally slender and small-boned, Carol had never so much as flirted with anorexia nervosa, but she held a unique attraction for those of us who did. This was partly because she never seemed to judge us, but mostly because we wished we could be like her. Now, at forty-seven she was an accomplished graphic designer, painter, and horsewoman. She lived in cowboy boots and kept paints and pastels in her kitchen next to the sugar and olive oil. She was still my favorite role model.

We brought each other up-to-date on the respective states of my marriage and Carol's illness, both in flux with uncertain outcomes. Then Carol said, "Candace's divorce was just finalized" The two of us, she intimated, should find plenty to talk about. And since Carol was weakened from her latest round of chemo, I would be making the hour drive to pick up Candace and her daughter at the Albuquerque airport.

Copyright © 2007 by Aimee E. Liu

About the Author

My past lives include early childhood in India; middle childhood, adolescence, and anorexia in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City; three years of teenage modeling through the Wihelmina agency; a major in painting at Yale University followed by turns as a waitress in New York and a flight attendant with United Airlines. Between flights I wrote my first book, Solitaire, a chronicle of my passage through anorexia, which was published in 1979, when I was twenty-five.