This firsthand account of eating disorders explains Hornbacher's relationship to food, eating, psychological health, through her told stories and essayed thoughts.
She tells of her eating disorder, which started young for her, around nine years old. It began when she became bulimic. This was the start of a binge-purge cycle, she tells. She explains how that looked in her life, and she explains what was happening in her life at the time that made her feel so constrained and panicked. Because these problems began when she was especially young, she explains that she felt completely unable to disobey her growing urges to eat excessively and then vomit.
By fifteen, she admits she was fully anorexic, and the doctors were concerned for her. She tells about her home life, about the difficulties in her parents' marriage. Hornbacher tells about the way her parents often inadvertently made her feel about herself, and although she tried to please them, her eating disorder became increasingly severe.
At its worst, the doctors gave her weeks to live. He weight was only 52 lbs. She discusses her path to healing, the decisions she had to make to pursue mental wellness and wholeness, the path toward physical health (which he says still plagues her—the chronic nature of her eating disorder left her with permanent health concerns). She explains that her ailments came on accident. She thought she was being healthy and responsible to impress her parents, but secretly, she was slowly starving herself to death.
