“I was never afraid of dying from an eating disorder. I was afraid of living without one.”
Today, she is draped in a black dress and embellished with a silver pendant. Today, every strand of her hair, curling in all directions, makes its own statement. Though she’s pacing the same footsteps that she once walked during her undergrad at Emerson, today, there is an entirely different person in her shoes.
Being in the presence of Karin Lewis, an eating disorder specialist and clinical director of her own treatment center, one would never guess that she once struggled so intensely with anorexia nervosa.
Karin graduated from Emerson College in 1992 but admits to being so immersed in her disorder that she barely remembers her time there. At 19 years old, college exposed her suppressed insecurities, propelling her into a trend of under eating and over exercising.
According to Karin, eating disorders are often onset by a lack of self esteem caused by suppressed traumas in ones life that accumulate over time.“In life, there are big traumas and little traumas. Big traumas are the ones that everyone can see, like a broken leg or a death in the family, so they get attended to. Little traumas, like an anxiety problem and low self esteem, usually go unnoticed, and are often associated with the most shame,” she explained.
Karin furthered that contrary to popular belief, eating disorders rarely begin with a negative body image but rather a subconscious want to find security in something one can control. “It seduces you. Suddenly you don’t have to think about anything else in the world but food,” she said, “but my whole life I just wanted to lose 10 pounds.”
At first, when Karin started to lose a noticeable amount of weight, she got a lot of positive attention. “All the girls wanted to know my secret and I started to find comfort in being ‘the best’ at losing weight,” she said. For the first time, she was a leader.
Yet as the disorder worsened, people began to notice that she looked unhealthy. She started developing bald spots on her head and hair began to grow on her back, her lack of nutrition throwing her body into “survival mode.”
As her disorder caused her brain to slow, her organs to fail and her menstruation to stop, Karin’s only response to people’s concerns were that “she was fine.” “Fine for me stood for f**ked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional,” Karin said with a chuckle.
Finally facing her eating disorder was extremely hard for Karin because she not only had to deal with her body image issues but also with the emotions she had avoided for years.
She explained that eating disorder treatment is a very frustrating process because you literally have to retrain your brain: “It’s like walking over grass again and again to ware down a path that doesn’t exist yet. Over time, the new path becomes more familiar and easier to walk on as the old path grows over.”
For Karin, this process took several years of therapy and self-improvement.“Once you start truly loving who you are, you become horrified by what you did to yourself,” she said.
Karin felt most grateful for her recovery when her father was dying from brain cancer. “Being able to be present with my father during that time allowed me to see the most beautiful things, like my father blowing my mother kisses when his aphasia kept him from saying ‘I love you.’ Can you imagine if I missed that because I was obsessing about a f**king sandwich?” Karin said.
Throughout the 1990’s, Karin said that treatment for eating disorders was limited to enrollment into a psychiatric hospital. There was little to no public knowledge or treatment centers dedicated to these conditions, making treatment a much scarier process for victims of this disease.
Karin explained that awareness and treatment have developed significantly since then. Ironically, these disorders are far more prominent in today’s society. Much of this, Karin assured, is due to the increasing pressure to always be better put on today’s youth. Students at Emerson, many of which seek careers in the spotlight and therefore are hypercritical of their appearance, are especially at risk of falling into this trend.
However, in a world where the concept of perfection is constantly propelled at us, Karin insists that we can still learn to love ourselves. “It’s not about loving your body,” Karin said, “For the love of god, you’re not just a body.”
