Chocolate Shock, Belly Bloat, and Deep-Red Unknowns: How a Trip to Paris Triggered My Eating Disorder Recovery

Yes, this title is entirely too long, and no, I won’t shrink it. Not even for you, SEO.

Smell that? Hmm. I fear the title of my post reeks of some sort of pretentiousness. Suddenly, I am on an episode of Gossip Girl, wearing a red beret and dining with men named Jacques or Francoise. You’re here to learn how to recover from your eating disorder? Don’t worry—just save up $2,500 and gallivant to Europe, where all of your problems will dissolve the moment you step inside a butter-scented pâtisserie.

Delicious chocolatey chocolate and shiny macarons that I refused to pay money for. However, they looked very, very pretty.

I’m self-conscious about this story (can you tell?) so I’ll stop trying to prevent you from judging me and take a deep breath and share it.

The summer of 2019, a month after I graduated from college, I travelled to Paris with my mother. This was a trip I’d waited years to go on, probably ever since I became obsessed with this French film called Amélie. It was a life-altering trip: my first visit to Europe and the experience that forced me to face my anorexia.

THE famous café from one of my favorite films: Amelie. (I may have shed a tear here, okay.)

Recovery started where the disorder began: with me, having a face-off with food. Since I was 14, I had always won this game, restricting the amount of food that entered my body. At 22, while I sat on the bed in the dim lighting of our cozy Airbnb, gazing at a bar of raspberry milk chocolate, recovery won its first round.

My mother and I had just finished eating lunch—a grocery store salad, baguette, and protein bar—and I had decided I was going to eat some chocolate, too. And I kept going. Going, going, until there was only an empty silver wrapper in my hands. (I could have eaten more, but our chocolate supply had been depleted.)

It’s not shocking, or odd, to eat that much food. It’s actually very normal. But I had spent a decade restricting; so why didn’t my sudden ability to eat shock me? Now, I understand why: Paris wasn’t reality. I was in another world, where I felt beautiful, inspired, and free. Everything was new: sights, smells, tastes, languages. Even garbage cans sparked wonder.

The old voice in my head, the one that told me not to eat, could be ignored, because Paris was a world that didn’t count; it was a world without time, where the now was all that mattered. Through travel, I entered the magical present, not the depressing past or terrifying future. I relaxed. And my body sighed with relief, and said, “Now, we feast.”

Tabitha Farrar, the most incredible resource for eating disorder recovery and an expert in recovery herself, believes anorexia to be a biological response based on periods of food scarcity:

“In short, It is food scarcity (energy deficit) that sparks the migration response in many different species, including humans. For those of us with the predisposition for this migration response when we go into energy deficit, we develop an aversion to resting and eating — because both stopping to eat too much and resting are threats to a mammal’s ability to migrate successfully.”

Maybe Paris had helped me finally escape fight-or-flight mode; I had freed my body from any sensation of impending doom, and so it was eagerly awaiting my return to stability, and my rightful body weight.

I ate so much that my bloated belly pressed against my tight jeans—a new sensation for me. Cheese wine chocolate butter bread. Squishy cookies and weird pink protein bars and ham-and-egg crepes. Chocolate croissants that made me question my belief in God. All glorious and delicious and safe for the eating.

Underneath all that pesto was beautiful mozzarella. Oh, how I had missed cheese.

I’ll be honest: this crème brûlée was underwhelming. But it was dessert, so I ate it.

Me, sitting at our favorite breakfast café, where I had my crepes and coffee almost every morning.

I (almost) rejoiced at the new, slight softness of my body, or the muscles I had formed from walking so many miles. Certain habits had yet to be overcome, though—like the constant body checking, which was made easy with the full-length mirror at the end of my bed. But something was letting go.

When I came home, I could no longer live in my old life—the one where I was depressed because my mind only had room for thoughts of food and self-hating dialogue. I didn’t want to be depressed anymore. I had spent my final months of college hiding out in the basement apartment of the house I had shared with roommates who I had also hid from, toiling away at a half-baked thesis and existing on paltry amounts of food.

I don’t know, this image seemed too symbolic not to include. I mean, I’m staring at black bars isolating me from the rest of the world—you know, like my anorexia isolated me. Or maybe I just miss those pants.

So, I started to relinquish restrictive behaviors. I started to want to be the kind of person who went on adventures and met new people and spoke foreign languages. Someone who knew interesting facts and was well-read and witty. Someone who was free.

It wasn’t an immediate fix. Anorexia had been my best friend, my safety, my comfort, for almost a decade. This makes little sense when you consider how miserable anorexia made me. But Tabitha Farrar has an explanation that does make sense:

“…consistent avoidance of weight gain alongside bodyweight suppression leads to the brain establishing a fear-response to any behaviours that might lead to weight gain. These behaviours, thought patterns, and reactions become neurally hard-wired in the brain due to the frequency in which they are engaged in.”

My translation: I had no idea who I was supposed to be if I wasn’t the smallest girl in the room. I was terrified.

As my recovery progressed, I became scared that I was gaining too much weight. I was scared that I hadn’t had a period in almost a year. I was scared of losing control.

Thank god for people like Tabitha Farrar, whose resources on healing from anorexia were the validation I needed to trust my own inner voice. I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted, even if it meant my “fear foods:” the ones I had always avoided, had deemed unsafe to consume. If I hesitated, ready to shut the refrigerator door and go for a very long walk, I practiced Tabitha’s mantra: Eat the fuckin’ food.

Three real meals and two snacks every day: the required bare-minimum regimen for recovery. I didn’t always meet this goal—sometimes the day was better spent eating cereal out of the bag with my hand until I was nauseous, applying to jobs on my laptop with my other, non-sticky hand.

But mostly, I followed the regimen. Slowly, I regained my energy. My passions. I wrote and read and sang and danced and laughed. I felt this thing called “zest” that used to mean little to me except as the fruit-skin topping for the baked goods I would rarely allow myself to eat.

Look at her go! Little ol’ me, hiking in the park with a friend. She’s still unsure of herself, but much happier.

Loneliness crept in, too: I had ended a relationship that had never really started, and was living at home while my friends and peers were seemingly succeeding.

Soon, I became obsessed with “getting past” this new-yet-similar obsession with my eating habits. I thought I was becoming a binge eater. Turns out, your body will slow down its appetite when it finally feels like it won’t be at risk of starvation anymore. So once my body weight reached its natural set point, the weight it naturally wanted to exist at, my appetite decreased. (Many people will actually gain beyond their set body weight before their appetite decreases, which can be attributed to this idea called “energy debt.”) But how the hell did people eat food without guilt, anxiety, or fear?

For weeks, I followed this routine: wake with the too bright sun, watch YouTube for hours, eat, hate myself, apply to jobs, eat, hate myself, watch Netflix, eat, hate myself, until the sun fell and my mother came home.

One day, I saw red. In the toilet, I mean. And when I saw it? I cried. Blood tears, bloody tears of joy. I smiled and winced through the cramps.

I knew my period meant that this crazy, erratic, terrifying, “fuck-it” attitude towards food was working. But I didn’t know when my insane appetite would resolve itself. What if it never did? Still, I ate.

Other symptoms—ones I’d always assumed were natural to my state of being—subsided. Gastroparesis and heartburn and panic attacks. Constipation. Fatigue. Brain fog. There was also the thinned-out hair, the yellowing, tender teeth—the symptoms that had bothered me as a young girl wanting to be attractive and desired.

I’d attributed most of these symptoms to either my POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) or to medical mystery. Countless doctors visits and tests and medications couldn’t solve what simply eating enough could.

Over the course of two years, I reached my set point weight. I became used to my new, larger body. I got a job, a new routine, new friends. I didn’t recognize the girl I had been.

Me, in Paris, 2019, before recovery really began. This picture makes me laugh because I’m clearly lost. Or confused. Or hungry. Or irritated. I look at her now and want to give her a hug.

Four years after my trip to Paris, I’m currently writing this while on my period, longing for a nap and a scream, happy to hold my bloated belly with tenderness while I isolate from all humanity.

As I sit in the quiet, I’m also realizing that certain thought patterns have lingered.

Sometimes, when I’m eating, I feel a clenching anxiety: Should I eat the next bite? Do I really deserve this food?

I’m forced to admit that my mental recovery from anorexia is ongoing. I do still struggle with disordered thoughts and behaviors, like body checking. I sometimes hesitate before choosing what to eat. I sometimes worry I’m doing the wrong thing or eating too much or not enough. I wonder, if I listen to the hunger cues that tell me I’m not quite hungry yet, am I really feeding into my disordered habits?

At the same time, I’m way better at loving every part of my body. I marvel at my energy and my strength. I used to struggle with opening doors; now I can actually feel my biceps and am tempted to ask strangers for an arm wrestling match.

My hair has grown back a bit thicker, and my skin is often glowy. I have a brain that can make jokes and a body that can dance at bars with friends for hours. I miss the cute checkered pants I used to wear when I was a smaller size, but I definitely don’t miss how weak I was, how cold I always felt, and my posture that declared my inner feelings.

Look, I get scared about the future sometimes. But I’m living more in the present moment (like I had when I was in Paris) then I ever have before. I’m experiencing real freedom. And food is just…food. It’s not more powerful than me.

*I’ve included a list of the resources (namely, the people) that were essential to my anorexia recovery on my Resources page.