‘Food was a big way that I didn’t fit in’
Eating disorder survivors share their journeys to health
A first-time mother tries to conceal her new curves.
A teenage boy endlessly compares himself with the bulked-up bodies he sees online.
An elderly woman, in an attempt to avoid the ailments that took her mother, grows fragile instead.
They all struggle with disordered eating.
The Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, spoke with several people about their struggles, triumphs and paths toward understanding their condition – and, finally, healing.
While each story is unique, many share common experiences. Some developed unhealthy habits, such as restriction – limiting what kind of food they eat, how much, or going for long periods without eating. Many acted on societal cues that correlate thinness with health. Others felt pressure to look like the idealized images they flip through in magazines or scroll past on TikTok.
Those who sought help said the health care system routinely overlooked their struggles and used an industry standard of health, the Body Mass Index (a measure of body fat based on a person’s height and weight), that failed to signal their eating disorders. It’s a number that does a disservice to patients, said Judith Banker, founder and president of the Center for Eating Disorders in Ann Arbor.
“People abuse themselves with that number. The medical system abuses people with that number,” Banker said. “We
“You start to truly think food is the most important thing in the world. It can spiral very, very quickly.”
Samantha Barash
should be looking at blood pressure and heart rate and how the internal systems are working because weight is just a very, very poor proxy for body health.”
Across the country, 10% of Americans will develop an eating disorder, More than 10,000 people die from one, according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
At a time when millions of Americans clamor for appetite-suppressing drugs, when the negative effects of social media on body image cycle through headlines and congressional hearings, and when studies show that pandemic-induced isolation has worsened eating disorders, the people who spoke to the Free Press say they want to share their stories to help others who may struggle to find hope. They also shared, in handwriting on some of their photos, what they wish they knew at the start of their recovery journeys.
Samantha Barash: What healthy really looks like
Crisp, tender falafel, aromatic mejadra, delicate dolmas and warm pockets of wood-fired pita. This is the food that brings Samantha Barash home.
But that’s not how Barash has always felt.
“Food was a big way that I didn’t fit in with others growing up,” said Barash, 31, who grew up in a Middle Eastern household. The food at Barash’s home didn’t look like what her classmates ate. It also clashed with the messages she heard about eating healthy.
“I remember being at my grandmother’s house after I read in one of those silly ‘health’ magazines about damned rice and I didn’t want to eat white rice,” Barash recalled. “I remember not eating the grape leaves that my grandmother made.”
Barash developed a fixation on food, starting her first diet in the eighth grade, and deciding to become a dietician.
But it was in college while studying to be a dietician that her eating disorder worsened.
“You come into this with a fascination with food and then you start to truly think food is the most important thing in the world. It can spiral very, very quickly,” Barash said.
Barash’s journey to recovery began when she started working as a dietician after college.
“I had the realization that no matter how much weight I lost, it would never be enough,” she said.
Barash now helps others mend their relationships with food and body image at her own practice, Tap Into Nutrition.
Barash tells her clients that “true health is way more than a body size.”
“Some foods have more nutrition than others, but all foods are healthy,” Barash said. “If you go to your grandma’s house, and it’s her birthday and she’s 90 years old, and you guys are eating a birthday cake, eating that cake with your family at that moment is healthy.”
Fran Betz: Realization, then recovery later in life
When Frances Betz was 25, her 52year-old mother, who was diabetic, died from a heart attack. Betz vowed to avoid the same fate.
“I did not want to die when I was 50,” Betz said. “I wasn’t going to go through life like that.”
Betz dieted throughout adulthood. The fear of suffering the fate as her mother followed Betz into her 70s, when she decided to cut processed sugar out of her diet.
She began to rapidly lose weight. Betz’s daughter became increasingly worried about how frail her mother was and pushed her to see a specialist.
In doing so, Betz discovered a different danger: eating disorders.
“I never thought there was any danger in being too thin. We don’t hear that anywhere. All we hear about are the diets. I had no idea that people my age had eating disorders,” Betz said.
Research support’s Betz’s assessment. Treatment guidelines tend to be based on case studies of adolescents and middle-age adults.
By the time Betz sought help, she was tired frequently and moving slower – signs of malnutrition.
“I felt my brain slowing down,” Betz said. “It just took me longer to do things. That’s when I realized the absolute danger.”
Starving the body of nutrition can cause parts of the brain to thin, suggesting that people who are heavily restricting are destroying their brain cells and breaking connections between brain cells, according to a 2022 study by the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
The study also found that malnutrition can also cause heart damage: the very thing Betz was trying to avoid.
Betz blames her doctors for not realizing how her weight loss could affect her health.
“They didn’t do a damn thing,” Betz said. “That’s a remiss on their part, I thought I was doing OK.”
Betz is working to rebuild the way she thinks about eating, but trying to unwind a lifetime of bad habits can feel overwhelming, she said.
Betz, however, said she is working hard toward recovery and that her goal has always been to be with family for as long as possible.
Jacy Kirby: A healthy relationship with exercise
Jacy Kirby was 14 years old when he first sought help for binge eating. His primary care physician simply told him to “just stop eating.”
At the time, Kirby was bullied about his weight and appearance, and he spiraled into a deep depression.
“I’ve always used food to cope,” said Kirby, now 25, of Clinton Township, Michigan. “The binge-eating aspect, the full-blown disorder, was when I was struggling with depression and I pushed into it further.”
For Kirby, cycles of severe restriction and bingeing started in 2017. The slightest frustration, like hitting a couple of red lights in a row, might trigger a bingeing episode, Kirby recalled.
During a binge, Kirby went to multiple fast-food restaurants and gas stations and ordered food from each location. He returned home to sit in his room for days at a time, “gorging on all that food,” he said.
Afterward, Kirby called off work, exercised excessively and starved himself for days, trying to rapidly purge the calories he had consumed.
“You enter a sort of euphoric bubble where the world could literally be ending outside and it wouldn’t matter,” Kirby said. “But as soon as you take that last bite, it’s immediate self-loathing”
Though Kirby tried to change his behavior, he didn’t know how.
“Behind the closed doors of my room, I would try to sort things out and deal with it on my own. But I literally had no sense of coping mechanisms whatsoever,” Kirby said.
Kirby forged a new path after he began kickboxing, started therapy and met his fiancee, Chloe.
Before, Kirby saw exercise exclusively as a way of purging from binges.
“Exercise was about doing something to my body, instead of for it,” he said.
Now, Kirby is a fitness trainer at Planet Fitness in Clinton Township, where he teaches his clients how to build healthy relationships with food and exercise.
Kirby has also found an outlet through writing. In January, he published a collection of poems titled “To My Eating Disorder,” in which he details his struggles and seeks the strength to heal.
“I have a lifetime to go dealing with this eating disorder,” he said. “One of the biggest points I’ve learned is, you slip up, it doesn’t mean you relapse. I’m just taking it moment by moment.”
Dana Demeter: Finding beauty in a new body
Dana Demeter was 5 when a doctor told her mother Demeter was overweight.
After that, sweets were off-limits. She hadn’t thought much about her appearance before, but it wasn’t long until she started to compare her body to those around her.
By the time she turned 12, Demeter had developed bulimia.
“I learned about purging in health class and I thought, ‘That could be a good way to lose weight,’ ” said Demeter, remembering that it became a pattern for her when a friend did it, too.
Demeter started to cycle through restriction and binge-eating, which got worse in college. Hoping to start a new chapter after graduating, Demeter managed to quit purging on her own and thought she was cured. About a decade later, Demeter became a mother, which brought another set of pressures.
“It’s normal to talk about weight gain during pregnancy,” said Demeter, now 39 and a mother of three. “Then after you have the baby there’s very little talk about healthy weight loss, or just being OK with (your) new body.”
When her mother died in 2020, Demeter’s disorder worsened and she turned to food to cope with her grief.
Demeter sought therapy in 2022, after realizing that the way she talked and thought about food could hurt her firstborn daughter, Frankie, then 6 years old.
“I would catch myself saying things that were said to me and having to stop myself,” she said. “It wasn’t just about me anymore.”
With therapy, Demeter has relearned how to think and talk about food.
“I’ve realized weight loss isn’t always healthy,” Demeter said. “I have always been told that I would be beautiful if I was thin. I’m not. But I am beautiful.”
Alisha Washington: Reconnecting with beloved foods
Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, Alisha Washington remembers being one of the few Black kids in her community.
“Nobody is saying anything to me, but I just felt like I’m not supposed to be here,” Washington said. “You just feel like you’re very different from the people around you and you’re just trying to do everything possible to assimilate.”
For Washington, 30, assimilating meant changing her body.
“Fitting in meant literally shrinking myself down to fit down to what everyone else around me is,” said Washington, who now lives in Detroit.
That included rejecting the food her family loved: fried chicken, bread, collard greens, ham.
“It felt like my food didn’t have value to the health-conscious people and I was ashamed,” Washington said. “The food that I loved, the food that my mom made for me, the food that was at my family celebrations wasn’t good.”
Washington struggled the most when she was at college. She frequently skipped meals and once fainted in the cafeteria.
“Perversely, the worse I was taking care of my body, the more positive feedback I got, which feeds into the cycle of ‘I should keep doing it, because everyone’s giving me compliments,’ ” Washington said. “I don’t blame anyone for doing it – it’s just our social conditioning.”
Washington sought help in her mid-20s. The COVID-19 pandemic had set in, and she had recently gotten married and bought a house with her husband. She thought about their future together and the family they want to build.
Washington’s therapist suggested she start working with a nutritionist. Washington agreed, but previous experiences with health care professionals made her cautious.
“Doctors tend to start conversations about weight loss before they know anything else about me.”
In 2022, Washington began working with a dietitian who steered her away from focusing on weight loss and toward mending her relationships with food and eating.
Now, Washington is reconnecting with the foods that her family loves, even as she fights an inner voice telling her she’s not good enough, that she needs to change.
“It’s one of those things where you want to buck the system and be like ‘screw this,’ but at the same time you know that you’re a person and exist in a world in which certain bodies are praised and other bodies are punished.”
Makenna Silverman: Always reaching for recovery
Green light. Yellow light. Red light. Makenna Silverman, 22, of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, imagines a stoplight when she thinks of where she’s at in terms of her eating disorder. At a green light, Silverman glides, free from the weight of her illness. When she hits yellow, she struggles with negative thoughts but can move forward. At red, Silverman’s eating disorder brings her life to a halt.
Silverman was in the red in the fall of 2022 when she lost the ability to walk and fainted in front of her young cousins. “I was bedridden,” she said. “I had to sit down to brush my teeth.”
During Silverman’s childhood and teenage years, she often saw her mom receive compliments about her body. Silverman wanted the same, she said.
“If I had that much self-control, then people would be saying that to me, too,” Silverman recalled thinking at the time.
Silverman carried her search for validation to Michigan State University.
“I noticed the type of girls that made it farther socially,” Silverman said. To fit that mold, Silverman dyed her hair blonde and started to pair restriction with intense exercise to lose weight.
After a year, Silverman had isolated herself from friends and family to avoid their concern, was dizzy and was aching from undereating.
In October of 2022, Silverman’s friends held an intervention – gentle but insistent that she get help. They persuaded her to seek treatment.
“I realized I was sacrificing my friends and my family,” Silverman said. “I didn’t want that for myself anymore.”
But the intensive inpatient program Silverman sought was hard to find.
C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital had a seven-month waiting list. Silverman researched several other inpatient treatment facilities, trying to find one her family’s insurance would cover.
In December of 22, Silverman found Focus Integrative Centers in Tennessee, and spent two months receiving inpatient treatment there.
Silverman credits Focus with saving her life.
Silverman continues therapy with a care team and says she lately finds herself somewhere between yellow and green lights.
Last year, she reached one of her biggest goals, attending one of the Taylor Swift concerts in Detroit with friends, the same ones who intervened to stop Silverman’s spiral seven months before.
“I stood and screamed for three hours straight. I thought, ‘This is what recovery feels like.’ ”
Green light.