I Thought Eating Disorders Were My Sister’s Story. Then I Realized They Were Mine, Too

Helpless in the Face of Eating Disorders

My first interactions with eating disorders escalated over time. I learned about them through an after school club in sixth grade. I noticed them in my eighth grade friends when they skipped lunch, worried about gaining weight. At sixteen, I watched my sister manipulate her food in abnormal ways, citing reasons foreign to me but recognizable as disordered eating behavior (see eating disorder red flags here). The next week I saw more behaviors in her - sneaky little things - that no one else noticed.

I spoke to my mom quickly after. I wasn’t an expert; I didn’t know as much about eating disorders as I do now. But I knew something was wrong. I don’t remember the days when my parents spoke to her, brought her to the nutritionist, turned away from the scale so that no one in the family knew the number that had become her obsession. Those were her experiences - not mine.

I do remember feeling helpless. Not knowing how to help. Wanting to hold her, crying, but instead being pushed away. Eating disorders like to operate in isolation. My mind is a bit blank between then and years later when we eventually sat down to discuss her experiences after-the-fact. She told me the nitty gritty - the journal with calories counted, the weighing scale confiscated (then secretly bought again through Grandma’s Amazon account), the loneliness.

Over the years, I have been identified as “a sister to someone who had an eating disorder.” It took a long time to realize that I, myself, had been struggling at that exact time with my own eating disorder, too.

A Decade of Denial: Discovering My Eating Disorder

It’s been 10 years since my sister’s eating disorder was spotted, but it’s only been four months since I received my own eating disorder diagnosis. The year after we discovered my sister’s eating disorder, I quietly started skipping lunch (on top of the breakfast I already didn’t eat). Missing lunch began as an excuse to get homework done that I had neglected the previous evening. It snowballed into a way to avoid the cafeteria - a place I had never felt I belonged, a place I felt alone, a place I felt I could not hide.

Depression swept through every aspect of my being between sophomore and junior year. My home life fell apart (a story for another day), and my mental health deteriorated further than it ever had before. But unlike sophomore year, I had cracked the code on hiding my struggles by my junior year. I forced myself to leave bed, showing up with a red bull to every first period pre-calculus class I could drag myself to. I spent moments between fractions and parabolas day-dreaming about my crush in the row over - a (now recognized) desperate attempt to feel less alone, even in my own mind. I failed every exam in that class, retook all but one, showed up to the required study group, held my own eyes open, and tried to absorb as much as I could.

As my depression worsened, I turned to more and more maladaptive coping mechanisms, one of which was my eating disorder. Food - or the absence of it - became one of the few things I felt I could control.

When you’re doing well in school on paper, in a family where parents are stretched thin by bigger crises, with only a handful of friends and teachers overwhelmed by hundreds of struggling teens, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks.

No one noticed how little I was eating because I was the gifted, independent child who took care of everyone else. I didn’t fit the stereotype of someone with an eating disorder, so to everyone - even myself - I didn’t have one.

Getting Help, Finally

I never told anyone about my eating habits during those last two years of high school, and I very rarely shared publicly about those experiences. I didn’t think they were valid enough to “count” as an eating disorder.

For years, I dismissed my behaviors as not serious enough. But after a decade of questioning and piecing together what I knew about eating disorders, I finally admitted something was wrong. When I was diagnosed with OSFED this May, it didn’t come as a surprise.

The eating disorder behaviors that I had previously distanced myself from had come back in full force after my mom’s death in 2024. The isolation I had worked consistently to counteract, year after year, was an expected part of my grief. Food thoughts and bad habits came back slowly, like a leaky pipe that went unnoticed until the basement was flooded. I was suddenly face to face with the eating disorder I had denied for years.

Choosing Me

I was always the one whose sister had an eating disorder - not the one with an eating disorder. Until I wasn’t. Until I realized I’d been living a lie for a majority of my adulthood. Until I realized that I needed help, too, but that systems put in place to help people like me had also failed me.

My first appointment with an outpatient dietitian was recently. I shared my eating disorder diagnosis with my primary care physician and my therapist. I’m getting help, but it’s harder than I thought it would be, even after spending more than a decade helping other people find support.

Recovery is not a straight line, and it’s certainly not easy. But I’m learning that asking for help (and actually accepting it) is part of healing. For so long, I believed eating disorders were my sister’s story. Now I know they’re mine, too. Naming that truth doesn’t erase the years I spent hiding, or the systems that overlooked me. But it does give me the chance to choose something different for myself today: to fight for the care I deserve, to share my story so others feel less alone, and to believe - however imperfectly - that recovery is possible for me, too.

Written By; Serena Nangia.