Marya Hornbacher Quotes About Eating Disorders

Quotes about: Eating Disorders

• Recovery isn’t easy, at first. It takes time. It takes more work, sometimes, than you think you’re willing to do. But it is worth every hard day, every tear, every terrified moment. It’s worth it, because the trade-off is this: you let go of your eating disorder, and you get back your life.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Letting Go, Recovery, Thinking

• Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Food, People, Eating Disorder

• You will miss her sometimes. Bear in mind she's trying to kill you. Bear in mind you have a life to live.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Missing, Anorexia, Mind

• It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Sick, Support, Stronger

• Bear in mind, people with eating disorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school,athletics,artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school,drop out,quit jobs,leave lovers,move,lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather,we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule,most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Jobs, Moving, School

• We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Skeletons, Anorexia, Eating Disorder

• This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don’t really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Hate, Eating Disorder, Would Be

• • Eating disorders are addictions. You become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important: the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving—you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of a frenetic, unstable energy—and the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. At first, everything tastes and smells intense, tactile experience is intense, your own drive and energy themselves are intense and focused. Your sense of power is very, very intense. You are not aware, however, that you are quickly becoming addicted.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Two, Smell, Numbers

• People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers – everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it´s actually just how you think. It really seems to you that the sky will fall if you are not personally holding it up. On the one hand, this is sheer arrogance; on the other hand, this is a very real fear. And it isn't that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don't think there are any. Because you are not even there.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Real, Fall, Thinking

• I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You're dying.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Long, Silence, Waiting

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.6, Harper Collins

• I don't think people realize, when they're just getting started on an eating disorder or even when they're in the grip of one, that it is not something that you just "get over." For the vast majority of eating-disordered people, it is something that will haunt you for the rest of your life. You may change your behavior, change your beliefs about yourself and your body, give up that particular way of coping in the world. You may learn, as I have, that you would rather be a human than a human's thin shell. You may get well. But you never forget.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Giving Up, Get Well, Thinking

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.10, Harper Collins

• In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled eggs to eat. Life is essentially trivial. You either decide you will take the trite business of life and give yourself the option of doing something really cool, or you decide you will opt for the Grand Epic of eating disorders and dedicate your life to being seriously trivial.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Book, Writing, Epic

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