Excerpted with permission from Insatiable: A Young Mother’s Struggle with Anorexia by Erica Rivera (Berkley Books, 2009).

It always starts like this. One day you put on those skintight stone washed jeans—or at least, you try to put them on, but they don’t make it past the knees without a struggle—and your thighs look as disgusting as the sausages you haven’t eaten in years. And that day, as the pants cut off your circulation from the waist down, you flip the switch and turn off your appetite.

You’re on your third round of recovery now and you’ve learned how to relapse without being noticed. You’ve mastered the tightrope walk between scary skinny and just alittle- too-thin.

You start by cutting out the junk food—the real junk food—the cookies, the brownies, the Frapuccinos. The first three days are hell, when your mouth salivates at the sound of a blender in Starbucks, when your eyes have to avoid the bakery case or you might maul it like an angry gorilla at the zoo.

But once you make it over the hump, an amazing thing happens. The cravings abate, and it is suddenly all too easy to subsist on salads and boiled eggs.

It’s fun at first, these daylong dips into the eating disorder. You put off eating for as many hours as you can, until the floaty feeling overtakes you. That ferocious hunger returns, and you revel in the feeling of pining for something, for the occupation of obsession. You remember the caloric arithmetic the way you remember your Social Security number.

Not-eating opens up so much time in your schedule, time for all those mundane tasks you’ve been neglecting, the ones that require little brain or body power. You do your laundry. You shred bank statements. You catch up on your reading. You sleep. You wait for your body to turn bony.

“I haven’t had sugar in two weeks!” you trill to your therapist.
“I’ve stopped binging! I’m back in control!” She sips her lemon tea across from you.
“You realize what ‘in control’ means, don’t you?” she asks.
You shake your head no.
“That the eating disorder is back.”
You scowl. You scoff. You wave off her so-called expertise. You pick lint off your turtleneck.
“Your energy is low today,” she says.
You blame it on the weather, on your overscheduled afternoon, on your new medication. You blame the energy drain on everything except anorexia.
“Would you like to do something different when it comes to food?” your shrink asks.
“No,” you say.
“Even if it might make you feel better?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because eating never makes me feel better.” You’ve been there, eaten that. You added the whole grains and the omega 3s and all you got was fat.

You’ve tried other coping mechanisms—the journaling, the meditation, the movies—all the effects are short-lived. But the anorexia is on-call 24/7 and it makes you feel orgasmically good.

So this is why you come back: Feeling thin trumps every other feeling in existence.