Varsity’s recent articles on eating disorders must be commended for addressing an issue that in spite of its prevalence remains very much taboo. But this commendation comes qualified with a suggestion, or a critique if you will, for these pieces seem somewhat one-sided, or oversimplified, in citing tired theory and generalized beliefs. Perhaps this is a tendency symptomatic of the difficulty of talking about, and especially writing more or less objectively, about things as personal and personalized as eating disorders.

More serious are the moments in which the articles appear almost to glamorize a disease that is anything but glamorous or desirable. Linguistic embellishment cannot disguise what is a less than salubrious truth. Nor should the omission of certain words – bulimia nervosa, compulsive overeating, EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified) – narrow the reader’s conception of eating disorders down to a preoccupation with anorexia nervosa. Eating disorders, like those who suffer from them, come in many shapes and sizes. There are guidelines, and therapeutic codes of practice, and medical indicators, and the definitive number on the scale; but there is no single, uniform diagnosis applicable equally everyone.

The pursuit of beauty, thinness, perfection is just one small part of an eating disorder. One might very well triumphantly clutch jutting bones; obsessively count calories; revel in hunger; scream and shout at the distorted image in the mirror. ‘A classic case of anorexia’, the doctors will say, satisfied that the patient has ticked all the boxes as they begin to mentally box them in. Neat, tidy, clinical: no need for messy personal considerations. But eating disorders, like people, are not that simple, and the recognition and treatment of the former is greatly dependant on an understanding of the latter. An eating disorder may very well be about striving for that mythic state of physical perfection – but it can also be about control, about a desire to disappear, about loathing food and the very act of eating. Weight and calories and appearance need not come into the equation; not when food stops being nutrition and becomes instead a drug, a drug that is all too readily available.

An eating disorder is self-evidently about disordered eating. Yet in this disorder a kind of order is maintained, as the habits and rituals of the disease come to define and delineate the pattern of each and every day. And breaking this artificially constructed order is terrifying. Recovery, or attempting recovery, is not about becoming a phoenix rising from the flames (though such symbolic descriptions do, on occasion, give one a certain amount of hope). Instead, it is about letting go: letting go of everything that is familiar, of habits ingrained mentally as well as physically, of entrusting yourself to yourself. The most frightening and most necessary aspect of the process is the realization that you are alone, that you must entrust yourself to yourself. No amount of money or love or professional encouragement or enforced hospital visits and clinical stays can make you better; because at the end of the day it is you against the plate, you against the beckoning bathroom door, you simply against yourself – or rather, against the part of yourself that is dominated by this malignant force, this voice, this thing.

An eating disorder is not something that a few extra kilograms will magic away, though quite often this seems the general consensus. When one decides, or more often than not, is forced to, 'get better' (and what exactly do we mean by ‘better?) there is nothing more terrifying than surrendering what has become one’s disordered lifestyle, one’s own diseased microcosm of the world, to a nebulous dream of recovery and health. There are those who do make full recoveries; and some who don’t and lose the fight. And then there are those who remain locked inside the disease, half in and half out, healthy on the outside, sick on the inside. Sometimes the leap of faith does not pay off. ‘You look so normal, well done!’ And so the vicious cycle starts again.

An eating disorder stays with the sufferer and comes back with a vengeance when their back is turned. A fad diet taken too far might be gotten over, or snapped out of, but an eating disorder cannot because it is just that: a disorder, a disordered way of thinking, of behaving, and eventually, of living. It's awful and painful and isolating and expensive and time-consuming, but also - and this is the worst part - comforting and familiar: a loathed prized possession. It becomes something you will not or cannot give up - not even after countless identical and identically nauseating hospitals; after the specialists and therapists and hypnotists and absurd nutritionists; after organ failure and surgery and too many wasted hours spent counting the drops of fluid in your potassium-laden IV. The pain you cause your family and your friends, the degree you almost threw away – nothing, absolutely nothing can stop it, except for willpower and sheer bloody-minded determination every hour of every day. And even then, there is no guarantee.