Content warning: This article discusses disordered eating.
I will be honest - writing about disordered eating as a thirty-year-old Black, female doctor is not something I am doing with ease.
In fact, when I first decided to write about my experiences with restrictive eating in my memoir, Unlike the Rest: A Doctor’s Story, I did so with incredible trepidation. Of course, there is the natural anxiety associated with unveiling intimate parts of yourself for public consumption and the fear around if – and how- it may impact future encounters with patients or career prospects. But one particular dynamic haunted my decision: my relationship with my mother.
My mom, Nmeka, first noticed the prominence of my collar bones and the unusual angularity of my facial features when she visited me at the McMaster University campus during my undergrad, gently questioning if I was okay. “Of course,” I offered her, secretly desperate for her to see through my façade, and recognize that her middle daughter was nearly forty pounds lighter than she had been only a couple of months prior.
I couldn’t admit to my mother, no less to myself, that I was struggling – really struggling – with disordered eating. My life was in a tailspin after a turbulent end to a toxic relationship in the middle of the hardest academic year of my undergraduate degree, and the only perceived control I had was over what I ate – or didn’t. Subsequently, I became numb to the needs of my body and focused 100% of my energy on my studies – spending exhaustive hours in the library studying until my eyes stung with fatigue and my stomach cried out in hunger. My goal was to ace the year, no matter what personal obstacles were in my way, and at any cost.
