I Thought I'd Overcome My Eating Disorder. 30 Years Later, I Found Myself In Its Thrall Again.

“For 25 years, making fun of my weight was a national sport,” Oprah Winfrey recently said, when she revealed that she’s been taking the weight loss drug Ozempic. That’s in addition to using the Weight Watchers point system, having her last meal at 4 p.m., and drinking a gallon of water each day. I wished I couldn’t comprehend the desire of a woman who had it all to want one thing more: a thinner body. But I did understand, intimately.

“Your eating disorder will always be your Achilles’ heel,” a red-haired nurse told me when I was 21.

I was shocked and offended. I’d left college to enter Waltham-Weston Hospital in Massachusetts in 1994. Unintended weight loss at the start of freshman year had given me a dieter’s high. If I had lost 5 pounds by accident, how much could I lose if I really tried? After two years of bulimia and anorexia, I found out the answer: 30 pounds. No number on the scale was ever low enough, though. Part of me wanted to get better. The other part of me wanted to get thinner.

By the fall of junior year, my better self won out. I was ready, as my best friend suggested, to “give myself over to the program.” This was a hospital, right? I was there for the cure.

That’s what I informed the nurse when she came into my room to tell me to double down, try harder, my dad’s insurance wouldn’t pay for this care forever. I was one week into treatment, and we were supposed to work up to finishing whatever was on our plates at meals and snacks. But I was still eating only foods low in fat and calories.

“You need to push yourself!” the nurse said, like a coach rallying a player dragging their feet through a game. “I want to see you do better at dinner.”

“Oh, yeah, totally,” I said. “I’m going to be a normal person