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.

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Now, if you have the pleasure of meeting me, you would likely hear me refer to myself as Anorexic. The choice to do so, in the present, is intentional, though not for reasons you might expect.

After acknowledging my diagnosis and sitting through countless rounds of therapy, I remember my therapist saying that some patients felt cured, or better put, unburdened by their illness with time. They had moved past the confines of the disorder and lived happy, healthy, ordinary lives. I was still new to my brand, as well as combative and stubborn, so when she told me I could live beyond this thing, it felt impossible. “I’ll never not have a problem with the way I look and food,” I said. “I don’t see a world where I am anything above this.”

For years, I was right. Food and image troubled me in ways that controlled everything: how I ate, how I felt about eating, whether I could buy clothes or stand for a photo. In its most debilitating form, the disorder came to represent what I thought was the most interesting part of me. Nothing, I believed, was as compelling as my disease. You could say I fulfilled my own prophecy. The question, then, is whether it was true by nature or true by choice. The answer lies somewhere between the two.

Biologically, I was not being incorrect to assume that I might never live beyond my challenges. That the chemical make-up of my brain was inhibiting a care-free pleasure for food. Biologically, I’m just highly, highly sensitive. But also, psychologically, I was defining myself under its label more than I needed to be.

Whenever I met someone and we’d start to engage in a typical round of small talk, peppering each other with random questions, at some point very early on I’d find some place to disclose: “I am anorexic.” “I don’t starve myself anymore, but I look at it like alcoholism” Immediately, I would see their disposition change, they’d become a bit startled. Unable to respond, maybe a bit fidgety, looking for the right word. In their silent reaction, I could feel what they were thinking: here was this person, someone who presented perfectly fine self-diagnosing under such a stigmatized disorder. Their response: “But you’re fine, now?”

Yes. 

First of all, fine is a subjective position–am I fine eating, yes. Am I still hypersensitive to changes in my body, yes. Am I able to eat pasta and not reprimand myself and enjoy it, yes. But am I also susceptible to obsessional thoughts around food that seem to never end, yes. The fact that I am fine–for me–is a joint experience between being over it and aware of it at the same time. “I look at it like alcoholism,” I hear myself say all the time, because alcoholism represents one of the mental disorders that society does not question as incurable. It’s also become increasingly less stigmatized. And I think this approach has been beneficial to me. It offered me a space of forgiveness.

You hate the way you look today and can’t put on much beyond sweatpants. That’s okay, you’re allowed this day. 

You feel bad about eating those three pieces of pizza? Again, that’s okay. You are allowed to feel uncomfortable, better to feel it than to act on those discomforts, which I also see I have significantly reduced. 

Today, you need to eat things only in your comfort zone? That’s okay! It’s like someone who's gone through a break-up and needs to indulge.

Speaking to myself in the mirror of my thoughts has allowed me to accept difference without belittling it. It has been the strongest influence in rebuilding my self-image, and with it, everything else. But not without fault. The statement, “I’m an anorexic,” I understand now, was never the most interesting thing about me. It became a way to defend my difference, a measure of distance, proof of how far from danger I might have been. But it was also a beard.

“That person should read your book,” my friend said, nodding toward a thin runner we passed on a street in Gothenburg.

The runner moved by quickly. From what I did see, yes, they were thin—but whether that was the effect of an eating disorder was impossible to know. “I don’t know,” I said, careful not to criticize her judgment. “Maybe. But really, my book isn’t about eating disorders. It’s about perception. The question is more: How do you feel in your skin? Everyone can relate to that.”

She didn’t answer. Earlier that morning I had watched her eat barely more than a spoonful of yogurt with seeds and honey, while I plated a banana, yogurt, strawberries, and the same seed mixture. At lunch, she skipped eating altogether, while sitting with me at a café where I ate a large salad with a piece of sourdough. Sipping on her flat white, she explained casually, “Andrew and I tend to eat only two meals on Sundays.”

“Hmm. I can’t,” I said, biting into one of the bread halves, which I topped with avocado. “I don’t like to feel hungry.”

“And you can’t afford not to eat.”

I choke at her response. In many ways, being so vocal about my issues has made me open to this kind of feedback, even if it feels shallow. Was it not she who admits to cutting back food until she reaches a weight that feels more comfortable? Who makes a point of noting her homemade granola is sugar-free? Who so often divides food into healthy and unhealthy, as if preempting a concern she imagines I’ll raise? Over the course of my visit, I had been the most flexible, the least concerned with how anyone else ate. And yet, no matter how far I’ve come, it still makes me self-conscious to be the only one eating at a table. Still, I said nothing when she raised her hand at the register, declining to order.

My friend is not malnourished, not underweight, not obsessive. She ate the pizza ordered at eleven last night, when I abstained. Her comment about the runner was meant as a compliment, a recognition of how far I’ve come. She even asked me about my favorite probiotic from The Gut Cø: “If you love it and take it, it must be great. No one understands this stuff better than you.”

But still, she represents the kind of misunderstanding I thought, by being transparent, I had cleared up—when I hadn’t. Eating disorders are worn, but they are not obvious.

It is not thinness that defines a disorder. Nor is it sensitivity. It is control: how much what you eat, how you look, how you measure yourself through food and reflection shapes your worth or your actions. Some feel this only faintly. Some, like me, feel it with sharp intensity. Most, I’d argue, fall somewhere in between. Which is why it baffles me when someone insists they can’t relate. We all have bodies. We all live inside them with some measure of discomfort or ease. Control falls on a spectrum, but the fact of the body is universal.

This is why, more recently, I speak less about the details of how I heal. I’ll talk about my probiotic regimen, about how much I love The Gut Cø FEED and CLEANSE for the ease it’s given my stomach and my thoughts. But I hesitate to say more about how I eat or exercise. The best way to mitigate control is to find what works for you, individually, with the tools that make sense for your body. 

But, while I might not give you my What I Eat in a Day, I will continue to upload my label. Not because it defines me, or remains the most interesting part about me, but because it opens the door. It names the thing we all share but rarely admit out loud: that none of us feel entirely at ease in our skin. If you meet me, you might still hear me say, “I’m anorexic.” What I mean is this: it’s how I’ve learned to live in a body. And there is no way to do that without feeling its weight.

For more from Tess, check out her Substack.