The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders Online Conference Transcript

Written by HealthyPlace.com Staff Writer

Our guest is Aimee Liu, author of the bestseller: "Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders." Ms. Liu suffered from severe anorexia as a teen, thought she had recovered, then faced a severe relapse in her 40s. Now she says "I'm fully recovered."

During this exclusive HealthyPlace.com chat conference, Ms. Liu discusses her personal experiences with anorexia, the underlying causes of eating disorders and what getting "real" treatment for an eating disorder means. Maybe, more importantly, Ms. Liu shares what she found out through interviewing the top eating disorders researchers and treatment professionals in the world. What she has to say could very well help you or your loved one.

Natalie: HealthyPlace.com moderator.

The people in blue are audience members.

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Natalie: Good Evening. I'm Natalie, the moderator for tonight's conference. I want to welcome everyone to HealthyPlace.com. Tonight, we're addressing the underlying causes of eating disorders and what getting "real" treatment for an eating disorder means.

Our guest is Aimee Liu, author of: "GAINING: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders".

Aimee was suffering from anorexia during her high school and college years and thought she had recovered when she was in her twenties. That's when she wrote her first book on the subject entitled "Solitaire." 20-years later, during a tumultuous period in her life, she quit eating altogether. She now considers herself "fully recovered."

Good evening Aimee and thank you for joining us tonight.

Aimee Liu: Hi Natalie!

Natalie: So our audience members understand, Aimee - when you were 19, how did you get to the point in your mind where you said "I really need help."

Aimee Liu: In 1973, I reached what psychologist Sheila Reindl calls the "limit of distress." That summer, following my sophomore year at Yale, I had designed my life to accommodate the demands of anorexia. I'd broken up with my boyfriend, pushed my friends and family away. As a painting major, I argued that I needed the summer to be alone and paint.

I earned money working in a room by myself, matting prints for the Yale Art gallery. I house sat for vacationing faculty. And I painted in the otherwise empty undergraduate art studio. I ate less than minimally and walked miles back and forth to the studio every day.

One very hot evening in August, I reached the center of campus and noticed that I was all alone. Everyone else in the university, it seemed, was away on vacation. The whole city seemed to have emptied to escape the heat. I felt a crippling wave of loneliness, and it dawned on me that I had done this to myself, that the compulsion to avoid food and keep losing weight was making me unbearably miserable.

Although I didn't consciously connect the dots, emotionally I sensed that what I was avoiding was not really food but human contact; what I was so desperately afraid of was not weight but the risk of exposing myself to others - and yet what I most craved was human contact and intimacy. So I was denying myself what I most desperately wanted and needed.

It was a very, very distinct sensation and a very particular moment in my memory, and I've since learned that most people who recover can recall a specific turning point like this when they DECIDE they have to change. What's critical to understand, though, is that this turning point is only the beginning of a very long and variable process of recovery. (treatment for anorexia)

Natalie: What kind of help did you initially get for the eating disorder?

Aimee Liu: In 1973, I had never heard of anorexia or eating disorders, even though I'd been watching many of my classmates starving, bingeing, and purging since junior high school.

One of my high school classmates had been hospitalized -- but she'd returned with her face bloated from drugs, and no one ever mentioned what was wrong with her or what had been done to her in treatment. Another girl in a class behind me died from anorexia while I was in college. Still, no one named the problem, and when I did approach the doctors at the university, they ran me through a battery of tests and informed me that I "should gain a little weight." And although I'd daydreamed in high school about talking to a therapist, my family would not hear of this. So when I reached my turning point, it did not occur to me to seek professional help. Instead, I tried to think of the happiest, healthiest people I knew who would not judge or reject me for seeking their company.

Over the next two years, I watched these "normal" friends eat and party and talk, and I tried to imitate them, spending less time by myself, seeking out people who made me feel good and accepted. Two months after that summer turning point, I fell in love with a grad student who was so exuberant, so joyful, that I learned what it means to revel in life. He eventually broke my heart and I crashed hard, but in the meantime I'd learned enough from him to avoid sinking all the way back into anorexia. Instead, I became bulimic for several years. I wrote Solitaire as I was phasing out of bulimia - still on my own, with no therapy.