This story was published in Volume 1, Issue 1
Editor’s note: This story contains accounts of eating disorders.
When Daisy Calthorpe moved to Boulder, hailing from the lofty skylines and thick accents of New Jersey, she marveled at the idea of finally being independent from her parents. Little did she know that a once-closeted secret of hers would be difficult to resolve and keep under wraps in a place like Boulder.
“Everyone is just so health-focused, and everybody’s so thin,” she said. “So I feel like I almost moved to the worst place I could have so early in recovery from my eating disorder.”
Her concern isn’t unfounded. According to the BBC’s reporting in 2014, Boulder was ranked as the thinnest city in the nation. The city’s body-conscious culture was so pronounced that the BBC started to investigate how it correlated with anorexia and bulimia rates in Boulder. It was so intense that physiques in the area were coined by locals as the “Boulder Body.”
“Being around skinny people like that all the time, in a crazy way, feels kind of competitive,” Daisy said. “It’s like people are humblebragging when they’re definitely not.”
Daisy has been in recovery from bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa — disorders characterized by binging and purging food and restricting food intake — for around a year. But she’s still seeking resources in Boulder that feel like the right fit.
“A lot of the support that’s out there is for people who are younger than 23, which is my age,” she said. “And it’s very heavily involved with your family, which I don’t want to do because I’m an adult.”
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the median age for binge eating is 21 years old, and 18 years old for bulimia and anorexia.
Claire Berens, a registered dietitian at Jane Reagan Nutrition in Boulder, said the city’s culture contributes to this influx of younger clients.
“Kids growing up in Boulder, not just at the university, they’ve maybe been exposed to fast food being bad,” she said. “Boulder even has the sugar tax on sodas. So, I would say we see a lot more of that granola or that almond mom-type mentality.”
Dietitian Jane Reagan, initially worked with college students at the Wardenburg Health Center, before starting her own private practice. She hosts online programs, such as a college workshop and “Preventing Eating Issues”, which are under $50 each, to thwart eating disorders in Boulder.
However, in the case that anyone outside the university, like Daisy, wants to receive more intensive care without breaking the bank, it can pose a real challenge.
“You have to be experiencing disordered eating enough, but you can’t be too disordered,” said Eric Meckel, a licensed therapist based in Boulder.“Or else you have to then be inpatient, and that’s a huge hurdle and can be expensive.”
He had a client that attempted to get into a recovery program, but they were not “healthy enough” to qualify. Meckel knew they were not going to be consistently healthy enough to be admitted.
“There’s this other trend of concierge-style eating disorder support,” Meckel continued. “Which is you pay, like, $6,000 or more a month to have someone who’s always monitoring what’s going on. I don’t know who can afford that, but that’s something I’ve seen more of in Boulder and the surrounding areas as well.”
Another variable is how this health-obsessed culture could breach into what clients think of practices in the city.
“I’m just scared of getting a health nut doctor and being criticized a little bit,” Daisy said.
Eating disorders often thrive in secret, compromising trust and rapport between clients and clinicians. Some patients also aren’t fully recovering out of their own volition. The external pressures of Boulder and its culture mount this problem.
“I think sometimes it can feel really unfair to our clients we are working with,” Berens said. “When they feel like, ‘Why am I having to make these changes to my eating habits when everyone else around me is still engaging in disordered eating behaviors, too?’”
Even though Daisy is physically recovered — in part involuntarily, due to physical ailments from the disorder — her mind still wages a more persistent battle.
“[There are] parts of us that experience anxiety when they go to the grocery store, or experience anxiety when we go to eat dinner,” Meckel said. “When there’s a part within us that fears something more than whatever’s being eaten in that moment, that’s the thing that it can exert control over to get its point made.”
Meckel points to eating disorders as a minute part in a broader phenomenon called the power and control wheel. The wheel is an illustration of how behaviors or subtleties within a relationship between anything can exert dynamics of control, such as eating habits.
“[In] the Venn diagram of somebody who experiences disordered eating and someone who has trauma somewhere in their background, there’s a lot of overlap,” Meckel said.
For Daisy, that overlap began when she was in middle school. She divulged that she never had close friends and resorted to finding comfort in food. She soon found out about eating disorders, however, and started to replace that habit with purging. At 20 years old, she then began to restrict her diet instead.
“I feel like for me personally, it has a lot to do with control,” Daisy said. “But also it just gives you a feeling of purpose and something to do all the time. … It’s so all-consuming that you’re never just sitting there thinking about nothing.”
Her thoughts can be unrestrained from real logic or practicality, which she said is something that people don’t understand fully about the disorder.
“My boyfriend was making me pasta, and I wanted parmesan cheese,” she said. “And I was told we didn’t have it. I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ But in my head I’m like, ‘He doesn’t want me to have the parmesan cheese.’”
Beyond just control, comparison is at the heart of the issue for Daisy, too. She fixates on bikini pictures of women that emerge on her timeline and scours Reddit for propaganda that can trigger her. Celebrities like Ariana Grande, who have noticeably lost weight or have ribs that protrude, also vie for her attention.
The typical discourse on what you ate today, while for some could seem irrelevant, is triggering for others. This is a common thread universally, not just in Boulder. However, the city seems to exacerbate it with its competitive health culture that borders on disordered.
“I feel like when I was sick, I just wanted someone to tell me it was OK to eat cake every day,” Daisy said. “I couldn’t think rationally about it yet, and I feel like people just don’t have that kind of attitude in Boulder.”
In a city where wellness is worn like a badge, recovery can sometimes feel like a path of revolt. But at the end of that crossroads lies “legging legs” — or life.
“It’s really hard to be that sick and also still manage your actual life,” Daisy said. “You don’t deserve a joyless existence, and you should get better. Life is so much better when you’re better.”
