I hadn't seen my friend in a long time, and when we met up for brunch I thought she looked great. The years had seemed to have had no effect on her; she was the same chic, athletic woman she'd been back when we'd lived a few blocks apart. But when I ordered my meal, she said she wasn't hungry and ordered a black tea. And then she told me she'd recently been diagnosed with anorexia.
For many of us, the default image of someone with an eating disorder is a waif thin adolescent white girl, or maybe a gaunt matron, the kind of woman Tom Wolfe once dubbed a "social X-ray." Yet I assumed I knew better. My own mother struggled with eating disorders her whole life, and I've watched friends of all shapes, sizes and genders go in and out of their own sometimes catastrophic relationships with food. Why then had I been so blindsided that Sunday at brunch? Why hadn't I recognized how invisible eating disorders can be, especially in people we don't expect to have them?
