A Hunger Artist

Winning the battle against anorexia.

by Emily Troscianko

A Partner's Perspective on Anorexia

Here I talk to my partner about how it was living with someone recovering from anorexia, and about his thoughts on anorexia more generally, including in relation to his own experiences of disordered eating. Read More

Is Anorexia a Disease, a Series of Bad Decisions, or Both?

Genetic and environmental factors in the development of anorexia, along with the feedback loops between the physiological and the psychological in its progression, make anorexia a difficult condition to recover from. However, everyday decisions also play a role, not only in becoming ill but also in bringing about recovery. Read More

Hospitalisation and Recovery from Anorexia

For some people, starting to eat more again isn’t enough, the weekly or twice-weekly support of a therapist isn’t enough, even an all-day outpatient programme isn’t enough, and a period of hospitalisation is the only way to recover from anorexia. Read More

Not Leaving Recovery 'Til It's Too Late

My father died unexpectedly two weeks ago. The fact that I recovered from anorexia in time to be his daughter again for nearly three years before he died is a great comfort in my grief. I write in order that others may be encouraged to act today rather than tomorrow, and to spare themselves the agony of losing a loved-before before recovering. Read More

The Physical Effects of Weight Gain after Starvation

I describe the physical changes that often occur when someone severely malnourished begins to regain weight. The more one knows when setting out on the journey of recovery, the less likely one is to be deterred from carrying on by physical difficulties that are to some extent unavoidable but also explicable and temporary. Read More

Is 100% Recovery from an Eating Disorder Possible?

As anorexia recedes further into my past, I often find myself reflecting on the wonderful fact of being free of it, and rarely feel still defined by it. Nonetheless, the question often arises – for me and for people who write to me: is it possible to be 100% recovered from an eating disorder such as anorexia? Read More

Wasting Time: Symptom and Enemy of Anorexia

I explore the time-wasting of eating disorders and their mental mantras, and how taking things to extremes offers an illusory solution. Read More

Make an Exercise Obsession Healthier by Eating More

I link to an article in which a woman describes the insights gained, about herself and her sport, during a period of intensive training combined with plenty of good food and rest. Read More

Where next after anorexia: death, recovery, or another eating disorder?

What determines whether or not anorexia nervosa turns into binge-eating disorder or bulimia nervosa? Here I explain and explore the stark fact that unless recovery occurs, there are only two options in anorexia: making the transition to another eating disorder, or dying. I give examples from my own experience of the factors that may make recovery possible instead. Read More

Fully Recovered, but Not Quite: The Long Post-Anorexic Road

I think of myself as completely recovered from anorexia, and yet that doesn’t mean that the illness, and the decade of my life which it defined, have not left traces that still affect me. I assess here the changes that have occurred since I last took stock, a year ago, and ask when it’s legitimate to say that one has recovered ‘enough’. Read More

Seeing through anorexia’s academic charade

Beginning to challenge the belief that anorexia can be a positive contributor to academic success. Read More

Escaping from anorexia, Part II

People often write to me asking (as I used to ask myself) how it is possible to make the transition from knowing that anorexia is ruining one’s life to actually saying no to it, and starting to eat more. Here I address in detail the numerous barriers to taking the plunge, and how those barriers might be overcome. Read More

How to reunite work and life after anorexia

Years of anorexia made me believe that nothing much mattered in life except the achievements of intellect, and complete control over food. Academia can make it difficult to abandon this valuing of intellect above all else, but the exclusion of life by work has to be challenged just as the destruction of life by starvation must be. Read More

What weight-lifting can do for a former anorexic

What are the dangers, and the rewards, of taking up weight-lifting for someone who used to suffer from anorexia? I reflect on the changes this sport has wrought on my body and my attitudes to exercise, food, and body image, and how it can represent an escape from the concept of exercise as a means merely to move along the spectrum between thin and fat. Read More

Christmas and New Year make the perfect time to challenge anorexic behaviours

Christmas and New Year are a brilliant time to break out of the tedious and destructive lifestyle and self-image that anorexia and malnutrition create. Read More

Starvation study shows that recovery from anorexia is possible only by regaining weight

There is one finding about anorexia which seems to me more crucial to treating it successfully than anything else. For the anorexic, gaining weight is the prerequisite for mental recovery, rather than vice versa, because most of the symptoms of anorexia are the symptoms of starvation Read More

What's the Difference between Being Fussy and Having an Eating Disorder?

These days it's hard to avoid people who have ‘issues' with food. But is there a clear boundary which some people overstep and others don't, and which marks the progression of mere fussiness into a fuller eating disorder? And if so, where precisely does it lie? Read More

Learning how to relax after anorexia

Last time I was on the Greek island of Corfu I was in the midst of the process of finally deciding that life with anorexia was so untenable that I had to try to escape it. What I find now so hard to comprehend, though I remember it so clearly, is how that anorexic semi-existence felt like the only possible way of living, and how certain I was that to change anything would make life unbearable. Read More

Constructing a character after anorexia

What does it mean to create a character for oneself, a character that isn't just defined by an eating disorder? Does anyone really construct a character, or is this something one rather falls into, or lets emerge? Read More

Anorexia and today's world

It's impossible to dampen the human ambition for progress, for ease, for choice. And the closer we come to achieving total ease, infinite choice, and complete 'modernity', the more glaring will its down-sides become: the obesity, the anorexia, the mental illness. Read More

My mother and I: a radio interview on anorexia

Read the transcription of an interview about my anorexia for the BBC Radio Scotland series 'A Life in Limbo'. Read More

Not only stopping starving, but starting living again

What is it that allowed me to get better from anorexia when so many sufferers never do? With this question in mind, I thought I'd try to compose a list of the factors that I, through my own experience and my understanding of the condition in general, believe are necessary to a full recovery from this most dangerous of mental illnesses.

The process of recovery is a process, and still needs monitoring and directing if it's to remain in motion. Here is my mission statement for leaving anorexia ever further behind. Read More

Anorexia and the invisible changes to its immovable rules

I'm spending some time on my own at the moment, for the first time since my boyfriend and I have been together, so I have a degree of control over what I eat and when that has been a little odd: uncomfortably reminiscent of when these things had such immense importance, and of how routines became immovably destructive and took such great efforts of will to dislodge. Read More

A history of anorexia while skiing: Part Three

I read diary entries from that ski holiday and wonder how my parents could bear to keep inviting me to come with them, paying for me even, when I made things as awful as this. The only answer is, I suppose, that it would have been too painful an acknowledgement of the state I was in: almost a relinquishment of hope: if Emily stopped coming skiing, we'd have to give up on her.

Yesterday I talked about what the family ski holidays meant in the early years of my illness. 2003, when I was 21, was something of a turning point. Read More

An article on my anorexia in today’s Daily Mail

My mother and I have just done an interview for the Daily Mail on my anorexia and her role during my illness and my recovery. The journalist was especially interested in what my mother said to me on the phone one day just before she and her partner moved house: ‘You are welcome at our new house, but your anorexia isn't.' Read More

A history of anorexia while skiing: Part One

Ski holidays are important in the history of my anorexia: they're a heightened state of ordinary life, with the whole family gathered together as it never normally is; and they're dedicated to the pursuit of an activity which is just physical, not intellectual. In this sense, they're quite unique for me. Read More

The end of feeling my hunger becoming nausea?

Everything in me rebelled against eating: I didn't want to be here with my boyfriend at all, could hardly speak to him or even look at him for my anger, and the sight of him eating repelled me as it never had before and never has since.

My boyfriend and I have just come back from a night in London with friends, a couple like us. I've got on so splendidly well with them in the past, but this time everything felt subtly different, and food was mostly to blame, I think. Read More

Emily Troscianko is completing a doctorate in German at Oxford University, England.

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About A Hunger Artist

A Hunger Artist explores what it's like to have anorexia nervosa, and what treatment and recovery from anorexia involve. It also analyses some of the paradoxes and vicious circles that sufferers of this mental and physical illness become trapped in, and examines the status of eating disorders in modern Western society.