SM: How would you avoid eating dinner with your family?
Lindsay: I would tell them I was going out to dinner, but I wouldn’t go. (I was a very social girl before this.) I would say I had homework and I’d take the meal upstairs and do away with it. I’d flush things down the toilet or even put things in a plastic bag and hide it. If I did have to go out to dinner I’d push food around my plate. That’s a HUGE sign of someone with an eating disorder: just playing with food, making it look like you ate it.

SM: What do you think it was that triggered this in you? Why couldn’t you diet in a healthy way or accept your body as it was? Was this really even about the way you looked?
Lindsay: I thought at first it was all clearly body image; looking back now it was my feeling of losing control focused in on my body image. I was always very muscular. In seventh grade I was called, um, “manly” by some of the boys because I was in a lot of sports. But I remember it stuck with me.