Wow, Those Girls Must Really Like Cereal

The grocery store is preternaturally bright, a whirlwind of sounds and scents that has no business bustling this energetically at 10:15 in the morning.

“I don’t want to do this,” I announce aloud. It is an unnecessary proclamation—none of us want to do this—but we are all being encouraged to identify and process negative emotions, so I give a voice to this anxiety, the whirlwind in my brain currently causing me to decimate my cuticles.

“Neither do I,” Jennifer immediately voices, followed by noises of affirmation from Claire and Megan. Sarah shrugs her emaciated shoulders, then offers me a fist bump in solidarity. We all hover directly inside the entrance to the ACME; we could not be more out of place.

“Remember, these are just some suggestions,” the occupational therapist called Heather reminds us. “Recovery isn’t linear, and we’re after progress, not perfection.”

It is late February. It is a Thursday. We are at a suburban strip mall outside of Philadelphia, the ACME bookended by a PetSmart on one side and an organic nail salon on the other.

“I feel overwhelmed,” comments Megan, while a pair of blue-haired octogenarians glare at us for blocking the door and shuffle off towards the grapes.

I nod, because I, too, am feeling overwhelmed; because I, too, am irrevocably broken; because everyone here is trudging through the living hell of an eating disorder and none of us are capable at present of managing our own lives.

“Why don’t we work through some typical food prep scenarios,” Heather proposes, “and practice building a menu for a few days in a row.”

We trail after the counselor like ducklings, pausing by the prepared foods shelf, moving on to the bakery, stopping by the hummus as she talks about macronutrients and balanced meal plans. The entire grocery store feels like an uncanny valley; I seem to have forgotten how to act like an adult human.

“You ok, girls?” Heather questions, creepily attuned to the group‘s emotional state, the result of four years of undergrad, two of graduate school, and a clinical fellowship at a teaching hospital.

We are all patients at The Renfrew Center, a residential treatment facility for eating disorders, and we have all been living there for weeks. Just as there is not a great deal of understanding about eating disorders out there in the world, so, too, is there a lack of knowledge about what treatment entails. It is omnipresent—fully-immersive—a 24/7 attempt to rewire a human brain and re-educate its host about how to feed itself again. Amidst the talk therapy and the art therapy and the DBT and the tears, there are also real-world occupational exercises designed to reacclimate us to life outside the facility, outside the safe bubble of inpatient treatment.

Hence this field trip to the ACME, after which we will return, and eat a snack, and recount trauma, and eat lunch, and get weighed, and eat another snack, and build coping skills, and eat dinner, and get weighed, and paint our nails out of boredom, and eat another snack, and it all seems to have such existential weight that my legs threated to buckle under the pressure. Pressure is what put me in eating disorder treatment in the first place, and for a moment, it truly feels like there will never be hope.

Then I put one foot in front of the other—exactly as I am being coached to do, until it all makes sense—and follow the group into the breakfast meats.

We arrive at the cereal aisle, brightly-colored boxes filled with all manner of carbohydrates lining the shelves. Accoutrements like cocoa and maple syrup are advertised in screaming sans-serif fonts with accompanying anthropomorphic graphics, interspersed between what is—to be clear—a staggering array of different Cheerios varietals.

“So, here’s what I want you to do,” Heather advises us. “First, go get a box of cereal that represents your life before your eating disorder.”

The five of us stare at her blankly.

“Seriously. Go get a box of something you used to enjoy, when you weren’t restricting or purging.”

I am still wracked with suicidal ideation, I am grappling with the physical and psychological discomfort of weight restoration, and I have not slept next to my husband in eight weeks. Bless the therapist’s heart, but I cannot fathom how cereal will make me stop yearning to see my ribcage through my skin; how it will grant me a sense of self-worth that speaks louder than the insults silently spewed by my Anorexia.

Heather crosses her arms and waits, looking very much like she has all the time in the world. To be fair, her job is literally taking mentally ill women to grocery stores, so I suppose she actually does. But if nearly starving myself to death has taught me anything, it’s that none of us have all the time in the world, and most of us us get less than we’d really like.

So I put my trust in the Renfrew Center once again—as I put my trust in it when my life was unmanageable; as I put my trust in it when I took a leave from my job and my life in order to attend residential therapy; as I put my trust in it when I finally started to eat food again, even as my brain writhed in agony—and I start looking for a box of fucking cereal.

I scan the shelves, trying hard to remember a time when food wasn’t inextricably tied to my own value—to my own meaning—but I have suffered from eating disorders for decades; food has never been just food. Cartoon tigers and stout gnomes and giant strawberries circle before my eyes, this choice dizzying me in a way no cereal should justifiably be able to do. Finally, wracking my brain, I am struck by a sense memory, a moment of serenity; I recall eating breakfast at my sister’s apartment in college, reveling in the weekend, joyous to be reunited, my eating disorder somewhat anesthetized by dopamine from family and freedom and a future that suddenly felt rife with potential, after so much darkness and so much pain.

“What are you getting?”

Jennifer sidles up to me, clutching a box of Honey Bunches of Oats. She has been at the Renfrew Center even longer than I; her hair is still missing and she has developed a heart condition, so severe was her Anorexia.

Finally locating the cereal for which I am searching, I show her the Maple Brown Sugar Frosted Mini-Wheats.

“Far superior to the regular Mini-Wheats,” I inform her. “Are we cured yet?”

We return to Heather at the end of the aisle, all five of us holding different boxes, all five of us suffering in different ways, because eating disorders are insidious and strike indiscriminately.

“Ok,” Heather instructs. “Now, go find a box of cereal that sums up your eating disorder.”

I blink like an owl. My eating disorder is summed up in self-loathing and grief, all-consuming obsession, failure and worthlessness and every little thing I have ever done wrong—the desperate need for control in a world that feel uncontrollable—and why the fuck am I in a cereal aisle right now with a BMI of 15.9 and no coping skills, because what the fuck is even going on and how on Earth did I get here?

“Go,” Heather says to me specifically—I always have had difficulty not wearing my emotions on my face—and I go, because it’s not like I have anything else to do; it’s not like I have any clue how to fix my life at present.

This choice is easy: Grape-Nuts.

In the mid 2000s, Grape-Nuts unveiled a marketing campaign, informing the world that it was not only easy to replace two meals a day with two bowls of Grape-Nuts—it was actually a good choice. Weight loss with a jingle is Kryptonite for the anorectics, and I eagerly embraced the Grape-Nuts diet, a testament to the power of childhood trauma and a good marketing hook. Three meals a day became two bowls of Grape-Nuts, which eventually became one bowl of Grape-Nuts, which eventually became a small mug without any sugar. Grape-Nuts is how my eating disorder would cosplay, if barley ever becomes en vogue.

I am the first one to return to Heather at the end of the aisle, so in tune am I to my Anorexia’s cereal counterpart, and I watch the others return. These boxes have less color, fewer cartoons and hardly any whimsy; they are Corn Flakes and Rice Chex and unadorned hunks of wheat, the covers espousing health benefits and low cholesterol levels, nary a marshmallow in sight.

“Think about the difference in how they make you feel,” Heather intones. “What does it feel like in your body?”

My body feels bulbous and unfamiliar since I started weight restoration, and it is an incredibly uncomfortable thing upon which to focus, so I stare instead at my feet. I am holding a box of Frosted Mini-Wheats in my left hand and a box of Grape-Nuts in my right; I hope vaguely I will not be expected to eat any of this. Heather continues to speak, and I continue to avoid her gaze, caught up in an internal battle between sickness and recovery, between distress and acceptance, between where I’ve been and where I hope to get.

“Ok,” Heather concludes. “One last time. Now, I want you to go get whichever box symbolizes the other side of recovery. Find the cereal that you hope to one day eat without the voice of your eating disorder, without shame or judgment or negative self-talk.”

The other side of my eating disorder is amorphous and without form, something lost in time and space, a quantum path I cannot even comprehend, let alone physically walk upon. The whole time I’ve been in residential treatment, I have avoided thinking about what comes after, because—to be perfectly frank—I never really planned on being around for any afters. I fully expected that Anorexia would be my end…but at least I would die thin. Besides, any life that involved the number on the scale going up instead of down was not a life I was interested in living.

“Don’t think about it too much,” Heather encourages us. “Just think about what you would want, if you could choose anything and your eating disorder didn’t get a say.”

But now? Now I don’t know what I want. I mean, I know I don’t want to gain any more weight, but I also know I have to; I don’t want to return to my mind-numbing 9-5, but I also know I have to. I don’t want to stop hating my body, hating myself, for never achieving perfection, but I also know hatred is toxic and perfection is a ruse.

What I don’t know what to do next, or how to tolerate the discomfort of living in my new body, or how to avoid falling back into Anorexia, or how to want to stop. And, obviously, I do not know what fucking cereal will magically endow me with all of that knowledge, what impossible recipe will be magical enough to make me not care about its calorie count or serving sizes, what nectar will soothe my mind and re-catalyze my will to endure.

“Oh, this one is easy,” Jennifer comments, turning on her heel and walking the length of the aisle, stopping at the sugary cereal section, scanning overstocked shelves resplendent with everything that a massive advertising budget can accomplish, the boxes all designed to capture the preschool eye. The other girls follow suit, but I find I am temporarily rooted to the ground.

Life on the other side of your eating disorder, my inner monologue echoes, and I continue to ponder this, befuddled how and when such a thing will exist, so lost in thought that the rest of the group has returned with their boxes before I have even taken a step.

“Are you ok?” Heather inquires.

“Yup!” I assure her, all feigned cheerfulness and enthusiasm, automatically falling back on a lifetime of secrecy and people pleasing—admittedly most of the reason I am here at the Renfrew Center in the first place. I powerwalk through the aisle, grabbing the first box of chocolatey cereal I can find. If there IS something to look forward to—any sort of life where I am not wracked with shame because I have eaten, because my ribs aren’t prominent enough, because I am still intrinsically wrong and can’t possibly measure up—then it will certainly involve chocolate.

I am now…as are we all…balancing three different boxes in my arms. Heather begins to talk about emotional regulation and distress tolerance, about habits and neuroplasticity, but I am distracted by an approaching customer pushing a laden cart. He is an elderly gentleman in a sedate sweater, and he is goggling at us like we are whales that just evolved legs and walked out of the sea.

My first, knee-jerk reaction is that something must be wrong with me, so used to believing am I that I am at fault; my mascara is smeared or my outfit is mismatched or he has suddenly noticed I am precisely as fat as I now fear.

It is not until he has passed that I consider the sight we must have made: Six women of varying ages and ethnicities and religions, a motley crew ranging from emaciated to obese, all of us with grave faces and solemn countenance, all of us marked with the invisible scars of trauma, collectively cradling fifteen different boxes of cereal.

I burst out laughing.

Heather is in the midst of describing trauma responses—apparently best managed by cataloguing five things you see, four things you hear, three things you feel, two things you smell, one thing you taste…five things you see, four things you hear, three things you feel, two things you smell, one thing you taste—and she looks at me inquisitively.

“Sorry,” I manage, choking back another wave of laughter at the sheer absurdity of this multifarious conundrum into which I have gotten myself. “I’m totally listening.”

And I am, I am listening, because I want to get better; because my life is unmanageable; because I am hurting my loved ones with my incremental demise; because if I do not get better, I don’t get another chance at life.

We finish talking about food rituals and food diaries and food aversions and everything else the grocery store has brought up in our troubled subconsciousnesses. We put back all the cereal. We pile in the Renfrew van, driving back to the temporary home none of us have ever wanted. There is dirty snow piled on the ground; there are flakes flitting through the air.

Weeks morph into months. I gain even more weight. I discover Dialectical Behavior Therapy works for me in a way decades of talk therapy have never accomplished, and a glimmer of light starts to illuminate my future.

Eventually, I will leave the Renfrew Center, return home, resume my life, try to recover, struggle, and try to recover again. It is tumultuous and soul-crushing and so, so painful, but I will eventually realize I have also stopped self-harming; my hair is growing back shiny and thick; my body is actually able to heal flesh wounds. I will notice that my relationship with my husband is improving. I am better able to participate in the activities of daily living. Time will keep passing, and then I will have some days when the omnipresent voice of the eating disorder finally takes a break; I will have some days when I actually feel happy.

Research has shown it can take up to an entire decade to get over an eating disorder, to reprogram the body and the brain in the face of a disease that does its best to hang on. My path towards serenity will be long and rocky and lonely at times, and it is a path along which I might never find the proper end. But, for every step along the way, there is some solace to be found, a ray of sunlight to illuminate the ground, a shot of dopamine to keep me company. Occasionally, it is nothing more or less than the recollection of a gentleman shopping for groceries, a gentleman who ostensibly left the grocery store thinking, “Wow…those girls must really like cereal.”

And when I laugh, it almost feels like it was all worth it. It almost feels like I’m doing something right. It almost feels like this is a life on the other side of my eating disorder, and that it is a life worth living.

Sometimes…I even eat the chocolate cereal.