Filling up space

Interesting and sad:

As an anorexic teenager, I never went anywhere without the slogan "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" written in a notebook or on my hand.
I had found the words in a women's magazine, along with yet another editorial designed to persuade women readers that shrinking our bodies would improve our lives, and I adopted them as a mantra to help diminish the terrible hunger I felt inside. I was ferociously hungry, not just for the food I was avoiding, but for love, learning and adventure – all the good things in life that felt out of my reach.
Like most anorexics, my eating disorder was not a girlish fad or a diet gone wrong but a private, violent strategy for exerting control on the body when life felt beyond my control. Eating disorders can strike people of all ages and both genders, but for young women like me, growing up in a society which demands impossible perfection and peddles airbrushed beauty, eating disorders pose a particular threat.
I soon discovered that skinny tastes of nothing at all. Living with an eating disorder is a bland, cold, joyless experience. But it took me five years to let go of the idea that in order to be loved, I had to take up as little space as possible.