A 4-Part Series from Tess on Recovery, Repair, and the Truth About Healing

Tess has been part of The Gut Cø community for years — you might recognise her from our Instagram. She’s a long-time customer, a thoughtful voice in the wellness space, and someone we’ve come to know and admire.
 
Recently, she came to us with something deeply personal: a desire to share her recovery journey in full — not just the before and after, but the hard, honest middle.

If you’ve ever struggled with your body, food, or your gut — this is for you. This is part three.

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On the first day I was admitted to the hospital for my ED, I sat before half a dozen strangers—therapists, nurses, physicians, other patients. What struck me was that of all the people I met, none was the dietician. I only spoke to her twice during the entire treatment, both times while passing through the hall. Meanwhile, I met with a psychiatrist every week. Each time, he offered me pills, but I never accepted. From where I sat, the whole course of my treatment seemed designed to fix my head before anyone had asked how I felt when I ate.

The psychiatrist and I sat alone in the dining room that first day. He opened a bare manila folder to an equally bare document I assumed was my case. Sitting there, waiting for him to begin, I thought about everything I’d been told—which was mostly everything I wasn’t allowed to do. I could not leave the hospital. I could not refuse the head therapist, or the lunch set before me. I could not avoid the scale. I couldn’t even shave my legs.

“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Fine,” I mumbled, not looking up through the curtain of hair covering my face.
“We know this is overwhelming,” he said, the seat creaking as he leaned back—a performative kind of kindness meant to suggest maybe we could be friends. “We want to make it as comfortable as possible.”
So let me leave, I thought.

“I see you’ve never taken anything,” he went on. “Though your mother’s been on Prozac with good results. We’d like to offer you a mild antidepressant and a sleeping aid. Most patients find these helpful as they adjust.”
“Do I have to?”
“No, no one can force you.” This time the chair creaked forward, his elbows on the table. “But I highly encourage it. They can really help. We’d start you on the lowest dosage.”
“I don’t want to take anything,” I said.
“I really want to encourage you to be open to trying something,” he insisted. “The first couple of days can be difficult. Having some support is often helpful.”
“No.” I looked at him directly. He didn’t seem that old—maybe in his 30s. A plaid blue button-up, grey slacks with a black leather belt. No watch, no beard. He appeared clean, simple, and the least intimidating person I’d met all day. Which maybe made me more comfortable rejecting his attempt to help. “I don’t want it. I have a problem,” I said, “but I’m not depressed.”

For the rest of my stay, I was required to meet with him regardless. We sat at the same table in the same room for never more than ten minutes before he’d ask, “Are you going to refuse again?” I’d nod, and he’d walk me back to wherever I’d been moments before.

“Everyone agrees to a sleeping pill,” one patient said during free time. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you were the first person in the history of the program to outright refuse anything.”
Well, I thought, I can’t give in now.

For three months I sat at the breakfast table and watched as everyone’s name was called. Each girl approached the nurse with the big white folder of prescriptions, was handed a small cup of pills, and asked to swallow. Then during Medication Group, I kept quiet as the others were educated on the chemicals entering their systems and traded stories about prescriptions gone wrong. Hallucinations in the hallway, hives, grogginess, and they’d laugh. All I could think was: how’s that funny? It wasn’t. It was our reality.

Are you sure you don’t want anything? they’d ask.
“We want to make things comfortable.”
“You don’t have to suffer.”
“What are you so scared of?”

Among many things, I was scared of how they’d affect my body.

Yes. Between defiance, control, and fear of the unknown, I was scared of feeling more disconnected and out of control. My fears might have been exaggerated, and my decision might have made progress harder, but the more I heard stories of hallucinations and hives—or saw doctors hand out antidepressants like Tic Tacs while shrugging at my cries over the stabbing cramps from the PB&J I ate at snack time—the more I questioned the intentions of the experts around me.

Did they really want to help me with food? Or did they just want to make me easier to deal with?

Again, that’s a big statement against the people who saved my life. But I was a 15-year-old anorexic, forced into treatment, where I had to face my greatest fear: food made me gain weight. Bread made me heavy. Meat tasted unclean. Before treatment, I saw food as the main source of my pain—both physical and mental—and throughout the program, my fears were dismissed with a simple declaration that it was all in my head. When I left, my fear of food was as strong as when I entered. So, I could understand why relapse rates in ED wards were high: rehabs are designed to pull you out of physical danger, not to challenge the baseline belief that food only hurts.

I had sat there with my fellow patients—many on their second or third stay—as we were educated about pills. Side effects, benefits, and Latin names presented in detailed handouts. Every question raised, answered. While the narrative around food felt reduced to “we don’t want you to think about food,” or to rules: exchanges, time restrictions, calorie quotas, finished plates regardless of fullness. The hospital worked hard to soothe fears around SSRIs, and they succeeded. The hesitancy to toss back a pill existed only in the mind of the person not taking them—me. While the apprehension toward eating persisted.

Hospitals and treatment centers have an impossible task, and I don’t want to dismiss their work. But I do think they need to give as much attention to how we relate to food as they do to how we balance the chemicals in our heads. I can only imagine how different it might have been if I’d been in more group settings where we addressed the relationship between what was happening in my gut and how it related back to my brain. What would relapse rates look like if we were given time to eat without rules or limits, where the main course of the meal was relational, not caloric? Maybe meals wouldn’t have felt like a battleground. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt like my body was destined to reject everything I put in it. Maybe by discharge, I’d have been better prepared to care for my body in a way that also protected my head.

Today, I don’t see medication as weakness or failure. Sometimes, no matter how much you’d like to pull yourself out of the hole on your own, it’s impossible. Used correctly, medications are an incredible tool. My mother credits Prozac with saving her marriage—with giving her patience for her kids. It takes as much strength to say I need help as it does to say I want to try another way.

But no matter how much I acknowledge the benefits, I’ll always have a problem with how those medications were offered to me. As a norm. As a diagnosis. As the thing that’s just done. I may have been depressed, but I also felt certain my depression wasn’t a state of being—it was a symptom of something larger. And to make that distinction would’ve required more than a ten-minute impression.

Now, with decades more experience and years spent working alongside my nutritionist, later trading questions and tracing patterns with Pernille, who explores these nuanced conversations on the gut-brain axis through her newsletter and The Gut Cø—I feel certain my depression is inextricably linked to my gut. I can see now that my stubborn, younger self carried an insight without the language for it: my stomach has always informed my head.

Looking back, I wish the psychiatrist had been less focused on treating my mind in isolation, and more curious about how reshaping my relationship with food might have eased the tension in my gut—and, in turn, quieted some of the noise in my head.