Mallary Tenore Tarpley joins us to discuss her new book Slip and the realities of life in the middle of eating disorder recovery. She shares how losing her mother as a young girl led to disordered eating, why residential treatment was beneficial (and not), and how the pressures of maintaining “full recovery” led to years of struggle.
Behind the paywall, Mallary and Christy discuss the many definitions of “full recovery,” the challenges of writing a book about disordered eating that’s honest without being activating, and how Mallary talks to her kids about food.
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Mallary Tenore Tarpley is the author of the new memoir SLIP, which blends personal narrative, reportage, and research to offer up a new way of thinking about recovery as a “middle place” where slips happen but progress is always possible.
Mallary is a journalism and writing professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and McCombs School of Business. She frequently leads trainings on memoir and personal essay writing, and she gives talks and writes articles about topics such as eating disorders, recovery, and embracing imperfections.
A journalist by trade, Mallary’s recent work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, TIME Magazine, and Teen Vogue, among other publications. She lives outside of Austin with her husband and two young children.
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Mallary’s book, Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating-Disorder Recovery
Mallary’s Substack
Mallary’s Instagram
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: I used to always ask this as the first question on my first podcast, Food Psych, and it seems fitting here, given your story. So tell me about your relationship with food growing up.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Growing up, I really enjoyed eating food. My memories of food often center around my mother, because my mother and I used to make a lot of food together. We would do a lot of baking together. We would always go to the grocery store together. We loved Burger King and would often eat Whoppers side by side and I just have so many fond memories of eating snacks with her each night.
She was really a person in my life who made food feel fun. And so I often think about just those childhood memories as being really special because they bring me back to a time in my life when I didn’t have this fraught relationship with food, but when I really instead saw it as something that could be centered around fun and love and playfulness.
Just as an example, my mom and I used to always eat lobsters together. We would just have these lobster races where we would put the lobsters on the floor of the kitchen and have them race. And that may be why I’m a vegetarian now. I don’t know. But we would sort of have them race down the kitchen floor and then, which everyone lost, was put in the pot first, which may sound a bit cruel, but in Massachusetts, that was more of a thing that it is in other places. But I just have all those memories in the kitchen with my mom, and they bring me a lot of joy to reflect on.
Christy Harrison: Your relationship with your mom sounds so special from the book, and reading about her and then your loss of her was really moving to me. Can you tell me sort of how your relationship with food changed when you lost your mom?
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Sure. So my mom was sick with metastatic breast cancer for three years, and toward the end of her life, she really stopped eating. And looking back at her medical record, I actually saw that she had been diagnosed as positive for anorexia, which essentially means that someone loses their appetite because of an illness, in this case, cancer. So she did not have anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder, but she really had lost that appetite, and I could tell that her body was frail and weak.
And so when my mom died, I really felt like I was so far away from her, and I didn’t know how to deal with her death. I did what I knew how to do best, which was to pretend that I was okay. So I went to school the day after she died. I read the eulogy at her funeral without crying. And behind that happy facade, I really was crumbling. But I was praised for being strong and resilient because I wasn’t showing how sad and frustrated and upset I was.
And so the more time passed, the farther away I felt for my mother. And I found myself wanting to stop time. And so I conjured up this idea as a 12 year old old, that maybe if I stayed the same size I was when my mom was alive, I could somehow be closer to her. And this was happening around the time that I was taking a seventh grade health class where we were learning about “good foods” and “bad foods” and I was beginning to realize I could change the way my body looked depending on what I ate. And so I began to restrict my food intake, not as a way of trying to be skinny, but really as a way of trying to be small and safe.
And that food restriction, which was this weird form of time travel, in a way, did end me up in the hospital. And I remember being so struck by these parallels between my mom having been sick in the hospital, losing weight, and then about a year later, me being in the hospital having lost weight with an eating disorder. So for a time, the disorder did make me feel closer to her, but ultimately it left me feeling farther away than ever from her.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it’s such a contradiction because your relationship had this element of joy in food and pleasure in food as a major theme, and then the anorexia is really counter to that, but also made you feel closer to her. It sounds like in the way of you talk in the book about going into the hospital and sort of being in that place that you spent so much time with her at the end of her life and being around the doctors and nurses who felt caring and would come in and check on you, and just this sort of environment that had comforted you in a way and at a really difficult time.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Exactly. Yeah. When I lost my mother, I also lost that ecosystem of care. I had gotten so used to visiting her in the hospital, and I knew the nurses and the doctors, and in some ways that medical community was one of support. And so when my mother died, I lost that community of support. I lost my mom. And it just felt like I was missing that. And I was also missing the care and attention that I really needed at that point in time.
Because since I appeared to be okay in the aftermath of her death, I wasn’t necessarily given a whole lot of attention or there weren’t a lot of questions around, are you doing okay? Why aren’t you crying? And it wasn’t until I got sick that my body then spoke for me, and people realized, oh, Mallary needs help and she needs care.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. That effort to be strong and to not show it, it sounds like, was sort of you were suppressing the true emotions and the true grief that needed to come through for healing. And that kind of manifested in the eating disorder in some ways.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Yes, exactly. Yeah. It was very much tied to that trauma of losing my mom and also the suppressed grief.
Christy Harrison: What was your experience of trying to get help for an eating disorder at first, or really your dad’s experience of trying to get help for you? Because it sounds like you didn’t recognize at first that you had an eating disorder, as many don’t. There’s sort of this long period of denial. But your dad noticed and wanted to get you help. But it sounds like that was sort of this winding path.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: It very much was. My father, to his credit, knew that something was wrong, but he didn’t know what it was I was struggling with, and nor did I. I thought that people with eating disorders didn’t eat anything at all. And I was still eating. I wasn’t eating enough, but I was still eating. And so I thought, well, I mustn’t have an eating disorder. And my father didn’t suspect that I did because his only point of reference for eating disorders was the death of singer songwriter Karen Carpenter, who had died due to complications from anorexia in the 1980s. And so he thought that eating disorders only affected adults.
But he could tell that I wasn’t eating. He could see my body changing. And so he tried to take me to my pediatrician, who essentially told us that my weight loss was a passing phase. And I’ve since been able to obtain my medical records and could tell that my body suggested otherwise in terms of my weight. But he said, this is just a passing phase, she will get over this. But I did not get over it. And about six months later, my father took me back to the pediatrician and said, Mallary is still struggling with food. What can we do? And the pediatrician was at a loss of what to recommend and essentially gave us the same feedback that this was something I would grow out of.
So my father knew that it was much more serious than the pediatrician had made it out to be. And he took me to see a family friend who was a nurse who essentially told him that she thought I had an eating disorder, and she recommended that he take me to Boston Children’s Hospital. So I grew up in Massachusetts and Boston Children’s Hospital had and continues to have an eating disorder unit. And so he took me there, and I was hospitalized that night in the emergency room. And the doctors at that point diagnosed me with anorexia nervosa, which in some ways was a surprise, but also a relief because finally my father and I had a name for what it was I was struggling with. And we also were in the hands of medical providers who actually could diagnose me and could treat me.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. And what was your experience of that early recovery and sort of later stages of recovery? Because it sounds like you went into the hospital in sort of an acute fashion at first, but it didn’t really stay that way. Right?
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Yes. So I went to Boston Children’s Hospital on five separate occasions. I was hospitalized twice in the medical unit and three times on the psychiatric ward. Partly I was placed on the psychiatric ward because I needed more care than I could get on the medical unit and needed longer term care. And this was in the late 1990s, early 2000s. So the psychiatric ward stays were anywhere from six to eight weeks each time. So a lot longer in some cases than they are now. But I was also struggling with comorbidities, which are common among people with eating disorders.
And so I had obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety and depression. And when I was hospitalized, I was treated for those different symptoms, as well as the anorexia. And it was helpful in the sense that I was able to get stabilized medically, and I was beginning to be able to scratch the surface of the origins of the eating disorder. I was also beginning to try new foods and was learning how to develop coping mechanisms that didn’t involve food restriction or obsessive exercise.
But every time I would leave the hospital, I would end up relapsing. And so I was really caught in this revolving door of treatment, which is very common among people with eating disorders. And at a certain point, my doctors recommended a higher level of care. So I ended up going to residential treatment and was there for a year and a half, which, again, is a very long time compared to the average length of stay these days. But I was very fortunate in that my public school district and the Department of Mental Health in Massachusetts covered my care or else there’s no way.
Christy Harrison: Oh, my gosh.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Yes.
Christy Harrison: Also seems unlikely in this day and age, right?
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Yes.
Christy Harrison: Wow.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: I know. There are so many barriers to care now, and I can’t imagine what that would be like for my father to have had to pay for that care because certainly he did not have the financial means to do so. But it was really in residential treatment that I began to finally grieve the loss of my mother. I remember having these moments where I would be screaming in pillows and I would just be crying profusely. And it was the first time in the three years since my mom had died that I was really letting out these emotions.
And so a big part of my recovery was really learning to grieve the loss of my mother. I had held her on a pedestal for so long, and I needed to be able to recognize that she was flawed, because in accepting her flaws, I could then more easily accept my own flaws, because certainly, as someone who struggled with an eating disorder, I was also wrapped up in perfectionism and wanting to be perfect at my disorder. And so a lot of my recovery was recognizing that I didn’t have to be perfect and that there were ways that I could maintain closeness with my mother apart from anorexia.
And so I began to work on all of that in residential treatment, began to eat different foods. And part of that was also. Also re-engaging with the foods that I used to love eating and making with my mom. So that was a really important part of my recovery process. And I began to look at the eating disorder not as the solution, but really as the problem. I had to recognize the purpose the eating disorder had served, but also all that it took away. And to be able to explore both things was really critical for me in terms of being able to kind of carve out a sense of self, because for so long, the eating disorder had come to define me. And I remember distinctly when I stopped saying I have anorexia and began saying, I am anorexic.
I had been so entrenched in my eating disorder and so it wasn’t until residential treatment that I began to recognize that I was more than my eating disorder. But that didn’t happen overnight. It happened over this year and a half long stay in residential, which was ultimately really helpful in my recovery. But it certainly did not signal the end of recovery for me, that the journey continued for a lot longer after residential.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, tell me about that. Because the central thesis, I think, of your book is that there’s this in between place that so many people with eating disorders end up in or spend a lot of time in, and that striving for full recovery might not be the goal for a lot of people or might not work for a lot of people. And maybe this sort of getting more comfortable with it in between is beneficial in some way. And so what does your in between look like? How did it go after residential and how did you get to the place in recovery you are now?
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Great question. This is something I love to talk about because we don’t talk about it enough in conversations about eating disorders. And so when I left residential treatment, I no longer wanted to be perfect at my eating disorder, but I wanted to be perfect at recovery. And so I was trying to achieve the gold standard of full recovery, and yet I didn’t really know what that meant. I had heard medical providers talking about full recovery, and that was really their goal for me. And yet it didn’t feel like there was a very clear definition of it.
And so as a perfectionist, I equated it with a perfectionistic ideal. And I thought, well, I have to eat perfectly, I have to exercise just the right amount, whatever that means. I have to succeed academically. I have to join every extracurricular I can. And so when I went back to high school my junior year after leaving treatment, that’s exactly what I did. And I felt like I was getting an A plus at my recovery because I was doing all of these things, succeeding, maintaining my weight. I wasn’t going to therapy anymore. I had been weaned off the medication I’d been put on for some of my comorbidities.
And looking back, I wish that I had had not stopped therapy and that I had continued to seek help, but I felt like I was beyond that. And so I was also very afraid that if I made one wrong move, I would very quickly slide back into dangerous territory. So I was petrified of faltering because I thought that it would mean I would end up in the hospital again. So this was a really hard place to live in. And I maintained this full recovery, if you will, for about two years, and then ended up going to college, where I relapsed.
I fell into this very vicious cycle of binge eating and restricting. And I had never really binge ate before. Certainly there had been moments where I ate more food than usual, but this was different in that I was eating uncontrollably by myself, in secrecy, and feeling just very out of control. And so I thought I was failing both at full recover and at anorexia.
And I didn’t know until I started writing my book that it’s very common for people with restrictive eating disorders to then end up developing binging or purging behaviors. It’s referred to in the field as diagnostic crossover. But no one had ever prepared me for that, nor had anyone prepared me for relapse. And so for 10 years, I was caught in this binge restrict cycle and didn’t tell anyone. I continued to tell people I was fully recovered because I was asham to admit I was anything but. And I was very good at keeping all of this under the radar and being really secretive about it. And we know that eating disorders thrive in secrecy.
So it wasn’t until my late twenties when I began to work for a nonprofit and I was essentially helping journalists to tell restorative narratives. And these are stories that help look at how people in communities are making meaningful progress forward in the aftermath of illness or trauma or tragedy. And I was telling journalists that they should explore these messy middles and look for these quiet moments of hope, and that they didn’t have to write stories with tidy endings. And then I realized that this could actually be a really helpful framework for thinking about my own story.
So I began to kind of think through these questions of what would it mean to explore more of the messy middle of recovery? And what if I could look at my slips not as grounds for failure, but as opportunities for growth? And so it was at that point that I really then began to give a name to this place, which I call the middle place. And it really is this liminal space between acute sickness and full recovery.
And once I began to reframe my thinking around the middle place, once I stopped striving for this perfectionistic full recovery and let myself think about my recovery as this ongoing work in progress, I then actually began to make meaningful progress. And I still today, even 20 plus years in recovery, live in this middle place, which is really rooted in this idea that recovery is possible, but it is messy, it is imperfect, and slips happen. And when those slips happen, we need to be able to talk about them, because when we don’t, very often those slips turn into slides and relapses. And so I want to give a name to this space because it’s really not talked about. And yet I have found through writing my book and interviewing lots of people, that it is a very populous place, that is very prevalent.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I’m curious to talk about sort of the survey you conducted and the people you interviewed, but I want to dig in a little bit more to this idea of a slip, because I think that can feel sort of nebulous, and maybe it means different things to different people, right? Or this middle place, too, it can feel different to different people. I think for many people, when they’re in the process of recovery, it’s like it’s incrementally getting better. And so people will feel like they’re further along than they’ve ever been before, or they’re doing so much better than they ever were before that they can sort of look back and think, oh, I’m not like that now, so maybe I am fully recovered.
And so it’s sort of helpful, I think, to think about it as a continuum and to maybe help people understand, like, no, actually there might still be further to go. There might be more growth that you can have. This is a continuing path. And I think sometimes people can sort of feel like this is as good as it gets or something, that maybe there isn’t something sort of further to strive for.
So I’m curious just sort of how you think about the middle place and what a slip is versus what a relapse might look like without getting into a ton of detail, but just kind of thinking for people who are listening, who are thinking, am I in this middle place of recovery or am I on a slip or a slide, kind of trying to get a sense of where they’re at, what would you say to someone who’s in that place?
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Yeah, so sometimes this place can seem nebulous, and it’s partly because we haven’t traditionally talked about it very much. And so we’re still in many ways, trying to put words to what this place means. And I think there’s a lot of power in being able to name it, but then also thinking about what does this place mean for each of us individually. And so a lot of times this place can be referred to as pseudo recovery or quasi recovery. And those are terms that are pretty commonly used in the eating disorder field. But I think they’re actually pernicious because they can make people feel like their recovery is somehow not real or that it’s fake.
And so the middle place is not about settling for stagnancy. It’s about really aiming for more recovery, whatever that might look like for you. And it’s about recognizing that slips are not always a bad thing. I think it’s so easy to just demonize slips and to stigmatize them, and I want to try to remove that stigma and shame. Hence why I titled the book Slip. But I’ve also thought a lot about how very often we slip when we’re making choices in service of recovery. Because if you think about that word slip, the very word suggests some sort of movement. You can’t slip if you’re standing still.
And so if we think about this idea that we’re working hard on recovery, we’re trying to make good choices, we may slip up as part of that process. And so the important thing is to not stay silent about those slips. And this is the hard part in terms of being able to actually figure out who you can talk to when you have slipped and recognizing who those individuals are.
So for me, it’s my therapist and my husband, and I’ve had to tell my husband what kind of support I need in those moments, right? I let him know that I don’t want him to lecture, I want him to listen with curiosity and compassion. And so being able to help him to understand the kind of support I need has enabled me to feel like I can trust him and I can go to him when I’ve had slip ups, right?
Like if I have felt hungry in the afternoon, but I’ve just decided I’m going to skip my afternoon snack and just wait until dinner, right? That is a moment where I’ve slipped because I’ve let the eating disorder imprints make that choice for me. And so I think one of the sort of ways that I think about this is that a slip is an unplanned one time deviation from sort of your treatment goals or your plan. A lapse is a little bit more significant. It’s a more kind of significant engagement in eating disorder thoughts and behaviors over a period of time. And a relapse is more of a repetitive pattern of eating disorder thoughts and behaviors with an inability to get back on track.
So if we can talk about slips when they happen, we’re much more likely to prevent those slips from turning into a lapse or a relapse. And so I think that that’s really important to destigmatize those slips and prepare people for the possibility of them. I think it’s also important to recognize that slips can happen in an ongoing way. So sometimes we only talk about them as being something that happens in the immediate aftermath of treatment or in the early stages of recovery. But as I mentioned, I’ve been in recovery for 20 plus years and I’m in a much better place than I ever imagined I would be. And I continue to make progress in the middle place, but I still slip. And so I have to reckon with that and really try to figure out how do I get back up again when that happens.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. I really appreciate, too, that you talked about what people can do to help somebody who is in a slip and that sort of nonjudgmental approach and not lecturing, but listening and sort of holding space for the person and trusting really, that their recovery is still ongoing, even if they slip. I think it’s hard sometimes for loved ones to do that and for clinicians as well, especially, like, you’ve seen somebody doing really well for a long time and it might feel like, oh, God, is this gonna mean a relapse, a slide? People’s brains can go to sort of the worst case scenario. So I think helping caregivers understand that is helpful too.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: It is. And I think we need to be able to just prepare caregivers, too, for the reality that eating disorders can just be really hard to recover from. And it’s not to say that full recovery is not possible. I do interview people in my book who are fully recovered and consider themselves to be. But when we only talk about recovery and its fullest expression, it can create these unrealistic expectations for those who are struggling. And it can make caregivers and loved ones think, well, this person is failing or what’s wrong? They haven’t reached full recovery, which is supposed to be possible for everyone. And it may be that they just haven’t reached it yet, but it may be that they are in this middle place, and they might be for a while.
So I think if we can name this middle place, we can empower people to be able to talk more about these slips. Because when I look back at my own experiences and I told everyone I was fully recovered, I thought, there’s no way that I can tell people that I’ve slipped because I’m supposed to be all better. Whereas now, as a woman in the middle place, I feel like I can much more freely talk about my slips because I have been able to articulate where I’m at in my recovery. And I can talk about it as still being a vulnerability, as a opposed to it being something that I have completely overcome.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it’s more honest and it’s more sort of realistic, it sounds like. Less perfectionistic.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Yes, exactly. And it has helped me to give myself more grace. I, as a writer, love exploring gray spaces. And the middle place is in some ways this gray space in between acute sickness and full recovery. But I also think that in talking about this gray space, we can also think about grace spaces, kind of giving ourself grace in this gray space when we slip, as opposed to shaming ourselves when we slip. So that’s been an important part of my recovery process as well.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I really appreciate that. I’m curious to talk a little more about this notion of full recovery because some of the people in your book identify as fully recovered, as you said, as do I, or I have over the years felt fully recovered. And I think for me, that’s simply because I don’t do the behaviors anymore. For me, it was restricting, binging, over exercise, very occasional purging. I stopped all of that many years ago and haven’t done that. And then I don’t really have disordered thoughts about food. I still have occasional body image challenges and negative body thoughts, but I’m not bogged down by them the way I once was. And I’m able to move on pretty quickly and not act on them.
So for me, that sort of feels like, okay, pretty solid place of recovery. I’m a dietitian. I treat eating disorders. And at the start of doing that work, I think I sort of felt this pressure to be an example of full recovery and sort of a model of full recovery to my clients and hold this hope for people who didn’t have a lot of hope or who really wanted to hold hope but were struggling and to say, like, look, this is possible. It is possible to get to this place. And it’s so tricky because I don’t want to be perfectionistic about it or fan the flames of anyone else’s perfectionism about recovery.
And I’ve realized over the years that there’s so many factors in my life, I think, that made it possible to get to this stage of solid recovery. I never had food insecurity growing up. I never had anyone interfere in my relationship with food growing up. I was never weight stigmatized in the way of having been put on a diet or something like that, or told to lose weight by a doctor or a family member. I never lost a loved one in the way that you did where there was a grief trigger. I didn’t have the sort of major trauma that would have triggered it. I was very fortunate to have nothing sort of amiss in my relationship with food, really, just some cultural normative body image challenges as I went through adolescence.
Nothing made me eat in a disordered way or exercise in a disordered way until I got to college, did a study abroad program, gained a little bit of weight, and then all of the stuff that I had heard, all the diet culture messages I had gotten my whole life were right there to be ignited. And so I was off to the races pretty quickly with an eating disorder and then varying levels of disordered eating over the years.
I think I was fortunate to get some support around my eating, not sort of in a traditional way of treatment or even really a therapist who understood, but just a boyfriend who was really into food. And I really wanted to impress him. So that kind of helped pull me out of it a little bit because I couldn’t restrict around him. I couldn’t be weird around food around him. And then we started spending more and more time together. And so it was like almost a de facto exposure therapy. And then I started writing about food. And so it was kind of like I created my own little exposure therapy situation, I guess, in a way.
So all of these things are serendipitous. And so, so lucky that I sort of stumbled into the life I had and that I was able to afford therapy. And I eventually did get into therapy with someone who helped me address the eating issues really head on, and some of the underlying stuff that had contributed to them. And I had, like, 20 years of being an intuitive eater to sort of fall back on eventually. And I think that was really a huge part of my healing as well.
So I now see that I had all these things that were privileges that sort of insulated me from maybe the worst of it or helped me get out of the worst of it a little more quickly or without as much intensive support maybe, as some other people. And so I’m just curious, it’s tricky to talk about this because I don’t want to say that full recovery is not possible for people who didn’t have these privileges. And I also don’t want to say I’m some paragon of recovery that anyone should aspire to, because God knows I could slip tomorrow. There’s always times that even people who feel like they’re in full recovery could be challenged and fall back into disordered behaviors.
I’m just curious if through interviewing people in the book, and especially the people who identify as fully recovered or in full recovery, what those factors are that might be protective and what the factors are that might make it a little harder for someone to get there, make it a longer process of living in that middle place? And is it even helpful to have that conversation? Is it even helpful to sort of draw these lines?
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you sharing all of that. And I think it just speaks to the reality that we can define what recovery looks like on our own terms.
