I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  In my experience, eating disorders are all about control, so treating them is incredibly difficult because the more people try to help you, the further you recoil into your disease. Trying to help someone get better can actually make them worse. If you’ve ever had to deal with someone in active addiction or with a personality disorder, you know that it’s very hard to make someone who is sick understand that they’re sick given how many layers of denial shroud their perception. I was no different and since this woman was a little too aggressive with things like “logic” and “concern,” I stopped going to her.

  I pretended to go a couple of times, but of course the narc called my mom and told her I didn’t show up. Since for me anorexia was a progressive disease, things kept getting more and more extreme. I became increasingly isolated and dysmorphic. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I was terrified of some foods. Some people fear heights, others fear sharks; I feared olive oil. When an event was approaching, like a homecoming dance, prom, or a holiday gathering, for weeks prior I would have a knot in the pit of my stomach—not that I would ever eat a knot because it would have been way too many calories. I panicked thinking about what I was going to order at restaurants, how I could pretend to eat at dinner, or what I was going to say to get out of eating altogether. I’ve said every iteration of every prevarication to avoid eating in public: I’m vegan, I have acid reflux, I have celiac disease, wheat gives me migraines . . . The aforementioned is actually sort of true, but I didn’t know that until pretty recently, so for all intents and purposes it was a lie at the time of the telling.

  As I’ve mentioned, eating disorders aren’t just about food obsession and restriction. In order to successfully starve yourself, you have to engage in a massive amount of lying to others and to yourself. My friends Jenny and Dori and I laugh about how much I used to lie to them in my early twenties. Now that I’m out of the woods, we make fun of how I used to order at restaurants to avoid eating calories: I would pretend to consider the most fattening meals on the menu, and then fake getting flustered at the buzzer and go for a salad with dressing on the side. When you have an eating disorder, your brain tricks you into thinking other people are absolute morons who are convinced by terrible acting. Knowing full well that I would have a panic attack if a carb came within a foot of my face, I would pretend to be indecisive even though I knew exactly what I was going to order: “So should I get the cheeseburger or the spaghetti with a milk shake? Hmm . . . ugh, I can’t decide. I guess I’ll just get the side salad and a Diet Coke.”

  I continued to be the puppet of my eating disorder through college. Being in college was kind of the glory days of my eating disorder because I was alone and could finally engage in all my weird food rituals without having to hide them from my mom. I didn’t have to pray that she would buy the food I could eat, I could just go buy it myself. Once I lived on my own, what I ate started morphing from weird to just straight-up horrific. I know many people with eating disorders have “safe” foods, but mine were so few that I ended up eating only one or two foods for months at a time. That was the kind of rigid control my brain needed to feel calm. I went on a couple of very disturbing culinary tears that give me chills when I look back: I went about a month eating only dried mangoes, for example. I delved into the carcinogenic vortex as well, thoroughly enjoying the wave of new foods that were coming out before the FDA or the organic moms movement took super-toxic products off the shelves. Sugar-free Twizzlers, anything with aspartame, Olestra potato chips. If you don’t remember these chips, they literally had a warning on them saying they deplete your body of vitamin D and give you “runny stools.” But that was not a deterrent for me; I could not give less of a shit about having the shits. Today when people compliment me on having nice skin, I seriously think it may be because I embalmed myself with so many chemicals in my twenties.

  Granted, this wasn’t my first foray into artificial foods. I ate so much candy as a kid that the first time I actually ate a grape at around eight years old, I gagged. “There is something very wrong with this grape!” I said, spitting out what I thought was rotten fruit. It tasted nothing like the grape Bubblicious or the Runts I ate on a daily basis. I eventually learned that real grapes didn’t taste anything like my beloved synthetic candy. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that my favorite philosopher is Jean Baudrillard, who wrote about the idea of simulacra, about how in modern civilization people tend to prefer the simulation of something to the original. After eating fruit-flavored candy for so long, actual fruit was a real letdown.

  By the time I was twenty-two, my safe “food” choices were incredibly unhealthy, if not downright inedible. I got pretty obsessed with fat-free Swiss Miss hot chocolate, for example. There was a fifty-calorie pack, but certain grocery stores had twenty-calorie packs, and when I found them, I would buy every box they had. I had to rotate grocery stores a lot because the only thing stronger than my desire to stay thin was my desire to be thought of as normal by the cashiers. I would always pretend the groceries I was buying were for someone else or that I thought there was a deal. I would bring ten boxes to the counter at once and do a mediocre performance of a person who’s too lazy to save money. “There’s not a sale on these? Oh, well, I’m already here so I might as well just get them anyway.” This was before Amazon, which lets you buy weird things in the privacy of your own home. This was back when you had to face another human being when you bought embarrassing things, back when we had to do bad improv with the cashier and cover up condoms with other products, hoping they’d scan it upside down before seeing “ribbed for her pleasure” on the box.

  After a fifteen-year struggle with anorexia, I’m still not sure I even know how to describe it. Well, maybe I’ll start by saying it wasn’t a real struggle until I got into my twenties. My eating disorder was my best friend until I decided that I wanted to stop and simply couldn’t. By the time I moved to Los Angeles, as I tried to control my need to control, the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme. My brain convinced my hands and mouth to start bingeing instead of restricting, but I never purged or threw up my food. I’m truly not sure why, since I had the neurological makeup and perfect childhood to make me a red-hot candidate for bulimia. Maybe I wasn’t ambitious enough, or maybe I was too much of a masochist, because the aftermath of bingeing meant extreme stomach pain and countless hours at the gym. This was a perfect justification for my need to isolate. If I threw up my food, that would mean I’d actually have time to see people and function in society, which was my nightmare.

  If the idea of binge-eating didn’t make you jealous enough of my life, the weirder part is that I started doing it in my sleep. My body and brain were so bifurcated, so at war, that when I fell asleep, my body would take over and seek the nutrients it needed. Clearly my subconscious didn’t trust me to provide myself with food anymore, so like a puppet master, it started getting the job done without me. I know sleep eating sounds funny in theory, but it’s actually pretty terrifying to wake up every morning with the taste of barbecue sauce in your mouth and have it smeared all over your face. Many mornings I’d look in the mirror and think I was covered in dried blood, wondering for a second if I had been stabbed in the night before realizing I had gone nuts on strawberry jelly in my sleep.

  Every morning I felt like the dude from Memento, trying to piece together what happened. From what I could make of the forensics, apparently I would get up three A.M. and ravage anything in the kitchen with calories. The next morning I’d wake up surrounded by wrappers in my bed; sometimes I was even sticky from whatever weird sauce I blindly poured down my throat. Sometimes I had painful cuts on my gums and the inside of my cheeks from whatever I had been jamming into my face at four A.M. After I got out of bed, I’d slowly walk into the kitchen, dreading the carnage I’d find. It all felt very cinematic, like I was in a horror movie and had just walked in on a grisly crime scene. But what I found was often way weirder than a dead body. I’d walk into a scene that loo
ked like a bomb had gone off in a grocery store and created an apocalyptic graveyard of chicken carcasses and broken jelly jars. I was used to walking on eggshells, but walking on broken glass was a new one.

  To further complicate my disorder, I faced another interesting development around this time. My parents stopped giving me money. I was given money only if I was in total crisis, e.g. my perpetually worn-down brakes and dried-fruit-induced cavities. Other than that, I was on my own.

  I was able to scrape together some money by selling my clothes at vintage resale stores and being a subject for focus groups. For every product ever sold, companies do market research using focus groups. They basically ask desperate broke strangers to sit in a circle and talk about what they like and dislike about the product. The company paid fifty dollars cash on the day the group met and it was always around two in the afternoon, so you can imagine the types of people these groups attracted. And if you can’t, it was mostly drug addicts desperately needing cash, like, five days ago.

  I was desperate for money, but the problem with me is that I’m also a type A codependent perfectionist, so I also truly wanted to help improve the products we were testing. I specifically remember a Neutrogena facial scrub brush. I was sitting in a circle of meth addicts who needed fifty dollars and needed it fast. They were saying whatever they had to say to get the discussion over with, but I kept raising my hand and pitching ideas for how to make the brush more compact, sanitary, and utilitarian. It’s actually secretly my dream to be an inventor, so I rattled off a bunch of what I thought were very good ideas: “What if it was also an eyebrow brush on the other side? What if it can shave your mustache but then shape your brows, too? And it could also be a pen!” I’m not sure if you’ve ever been nonverbally threatened by a desperate drug addict, but I don’t recommend it. Knowing how emotionally dyslexic I was back then, I probably mistook these homicidal glares as flirting.

  The point is, for about two years I didn’t have more than eighty dollars in my bank account, which meant no more fancy Swiss Miss, poison potato chips, or dried mangoes. Once I was broke, I realized that having an eating disorder was actually kind of a luxury. Now I was starving because I had to be, not because I wanted to be. This ended up exacerbating my disease because it helped justify my food restriction and gave me a real reason to eat nothing. My brain now reasoned that starving myself was saving money. “I ate only five hundred calories today, I’m so frugal! Take that, Suze Orman!” I found the most cost-effective food to eat on a tight budget was, not shockingly, jerky. You name the jerky, I’ve binged on it. Turkey, beef, jalapeño beef, salmon, jalapeño salmon. As long as it was filled with the maximum amount of preservatives and antibiotics, it was in my body.

  I started choosing “safe” foods that were hard to chew and would never go bad. I basically started grocery shopping the way most people shop for tires. The more durable and long-lasting, the better. I used to buy protein bars in bulk, hoping to ration them out for the week, but of course given the midnight bouts with bingeing, I’d wake up in my bed under a blanket of the half-eaten protein bars I had eaten in an evening stupor. As the food I was eating got less edible, my stomach got less tolerant. After eating four or five of these basically indigestible protein bars in one sitting, I’d wake up in a state of rigor mortis, paralyzed by stomach pain. I’d have to lie in a fetal position for most of the day, full of regret, Red #5, and methylgubane. I just made that last word up, but knowing our food industry these days, it’s probably a real ingredient.

  This feels like the right time to mention that, at this point, I was so off the grid from what was actually logical, that I wasn’t really eating food conducive to being thin, especially when you consider the quantities that I was consuming. By the time I got to bingeing on protein bars, I was easily eating four thousand calories a day. At this point, my disorder had evolved into something less about restricting food and more about self-sabotaging in a way that got me stuck in a shame cycle that justified my extreme isolation. After I had eaten so many calories, my entire day consisted of making my stomach hurt and then needing to go to the gym for hours to burn it all off. My addiction being such a full-time job meant that I didn’t have to deal with reality, people, or, God forbid, intimacy with anyone.

  Since I spent so much of my adolescence preoccupied with this eating madness, I of course hadn’t developed the social skills to have good friendships, but when I met Dori and Jenny the first year I was in L.A., they were so awesome that I was determined not to let my insane food restrictions and dark secrets mess it up. This was a struggle, given that I sometimes spent days in bed or at the gym. I would frequently cancel plans in a cryptic way, and when I did show up, I’d kill the vibe by not ordering food or by asking the waiter what was in every dish and if they could make me steamed vegetables with no oil. These days the most annoying people take photos of their food to post on social media, but ten years ago it was me, the person firing off a litany of questions to the waiter about salad dressing and begging them to make a delicious dish taste awful.

  Dori and Jenny were the only people who really saw me eat anything. They never attacked or accused because perhaps somehow they knew that eating disorders just grow stronger when someone tries to fix them. That said, they would occasionally ask leading questions or gently drop nutrition information à la “Did you know that eating fat actually makes you feel full longer?” I know them well enough now to know that they’re way too smart and interesting to waste time talking about what makes someone feel full, so clearly they were doing it just to try and help me the only way they knew how.

  One time Jenny was at my apartment off Sunset Boulevard. It was full of cockroaches and I saw rats on two different occasions, but it was within walking distance of The Comedy Store and that’s all I cared about. I saw at least two or three cockroaches a day; the only good news is that I didn’t have to worry about them going near my food due to how inedible it was. They never dared come near my cabinets. If your food is so full of chemicals that not even cockroaches will eat it, you need to regroup.

  One day Jenny was over and for some reason ended up in my kitchen. I don’t remember why or how, but I remember her opening a cabinet. When she saw the food on display, she gasped. Her face went pale. Mind you, even when she’s not horrified, Jenny is already very pale. She has gorgeous alabaster skin and looks like an angelic doll a girl would have had on her dresser in the 1950s or that a creepy man would have on his dresser now. But after she took a good hard look at what I was putting in my body, her relentless smile finally fell to deep concern.

  “Oh my god,” she uttered.

  She didn’t make a joke or laugh it off. She just looked very sad for me. I don’t know what it was about that moment, but for some reason it woke me up. Maybe I realized that I was hurting people I loved with my behavior, or worse, disappointing them, which was a threat to my perfectionism. Maybe I was ready to change, maybe Jenny is my guardian angel and shone a divine light on me. Or maybe I was just tired.

  What’s interesting to me is that Jenny isn’t a doctor or a therapist or a documentary. When you live in an alternative delusional reality, facts sound like fiction, so if people tell you the truth, it doesn’t really help much; it just kind of makes you want to get away from the person telling it to you. I must have subconsciously known on some level that I was killing myself; the point is, I didn’t acknowledge that reality. Today denial is without a doubt my greatest fear in life because I know how powerful and insidious it is. It’s made me do terrible things to my body and has even been the fuel on the fire of wars, genocides, racism, and trends like drawn-on eyebrows and shiny clear bra straps that almost draw more attention than normal opaque ones. Denial is dangerous. Make sure you don’t have it.

  Jenny’s face that day was the first step in shattering my denial. Something shifted in me that day. This moment also collided with the point in my stand-up career when I was starting to go on tour, opening fo
r comics like Steve Byrne and Bobby Lee, and my lack of energy was starting to sabotage my dreams. I had to be on a plane at six A.M. and had to perform at eight and ten at night. My immune system was so weak that I was always run-down and constantly sick. I was finally getting what I wanted in life, but I was too dizzy and lethargic to enjoy it. Since I was tired of being tired, I finally experimented with trying a carb here or there, and it was incredible how much energy they gave me. Eating a piece of bread would literally feel like I had just snorted a line of cocaine. When I was about twenty-three, I finally ate a whole bagel, and I was like Bradley Cooper in that movie Limitless, bouncing off the walls, super focused, able to get through the day without a headache or a low-blood-sugar nap. One day I ate a bowl of cereal with 2 percent milk and I wrote an entire TV pilot script in eight hours. Once I saw how productive I could be on calories, I was sold. Food was my new secret weapon. And even crazier, after a couple of weeks during which I ate real food in sane quantities, my hairbrush no longer looked like Chewbacca.

  Maybe it was unhealthy for Jenny’s reaction and work goals to be what helped me slay this thing; maybe I was trading one unhealthy obsession with another, but whatever it was, it was better than being a walking zombie full of sodium benzoate. It doesn’t really matter what the catalyst was; the important thing was that Jenny’s reaction to the “food” in my cabinets made me want to get help.

  When I first decided to talk to Vera about my eating disorder, I was stunned when she told me my issue had very little to do with actual food. I thought that statement was odd, given food was pretty much all I thought about. Moreover, the disorder was, as I’ve already said, more about feeling like I had a modicum of control in a hectic environment than being thin. As long as I was eating something fat- and sugar-free, everything was okay. Well, everything except my liver.