Author Susan Burton says food has been the site of her anxieties for as long as she can remember. For decades the editor at This American Life struggled with eating disorders.
Through therapy, Burton connected her disordered eating to her parents’ divorce and not getting emotional needs met. She says that one of the reasons she was so preoccupied with food was that she was hungry all the time: “Hunger was something that I believed protected me and gave me power,” she says.
Burton writes about her experiences with anorexia and compulsive eating in the new memoir Empty. She says the title of the book was inspired by the feeling she chased for so many years.
“I loved the feeling of my body hollow, like a straw you could blow through,” she says. “Now I understand that emptiness didn’t protect me. It limited me. … It was something that I thought would expand my life, but instead it ended up restricting it.”
Burton says that she continues to work to overcome her eating disorders — including opening up for the first time about bingeing: “Anorexia was something that was visible to the people around me. So there was sort of no way of keeping it a secret. And bingeing, for me, it just happened to be where my shame was located.”
Burton says her current relationship with food is better than it has been in a long time. “It takes a long time to learn to eat intuitively, to learn to recognize the body’s cues,” she says. “I eat more than I used to. I like the feeling of being satisfied.”
Listen to the complete interview here
