The-F-Word.org

With the exception of Monday’s behemoth of a post, posting will be pretty light again this week.  I’m mad crazy busy with both work stuff and a few personal projects and now with the sun making its grand reappearance along with blue skies and spring-like temps, will most likely be spending any and all leisure time soaking in the vitamin D and preparing my cottage garden for planting season.  In the meantime, I urge you to take up a call issued today by Dan Savage.  Dan might not totally *get it* on issues of fat stigma and discrimination, but he’s right on when it comes to the case of Constance McMillen, an out teenage lesbian and senior at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi.  Dan writes:

When [Constance] asked if she could attend prom with her girlfriend, she was told no. When Constance pressed her case, the Itawamba County School Board canceled prom rather than allow Constance to attend with her girlfriend. The school board had to know what would happen next: The other students blamed Constance for getting prom canceled and “ruining senior year.” Constance is now being harassed and bullied.

The school board claims it canceled prom to avoid “distractions.” Now it’s up to us—to decent people everywhere—to make sure that bigotry and discrimination are a much bigger distraction for the Itawamba County School District than inclusion and tolerance ever could’ve been.

E-mail, call, and fax Itawamba Schools superintendent Teresa McNeece (tmcneece@itawamba.k12.ms.us, phone 662-862-2159 ext. 14, fax 662-862-4713) and Itawamba Agricultural principal Trae Wiygul (twiygul@itawamba.k12.ms.us, 662-862-3104). Then join the Facebook page “Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom.” And, finally, make donations to the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition (www.mssafeschools.org), which is organizing an alternate prom that will welcome all students, and make a larger donation to the ACLU LGBT Project (www.tinyurl.com/yl9mvkb).

Call, write, fax, donate. Constance needs to know that there are people all over the world who are on her side. And, more importantly, Itawamba County Schools needs to know that we’re not going to let them get away with this. Be respectful, but be relentless. Let’s show these bigots what a real distraction looks like. Get ‘em.

My best friend in high school transferred to my school because of the emotional and physical abuse and harassment she received from students and even a few teachers after taking a girl to the prom at her old high school.  One of the chief reasons I think we bonded is that while I was a Rush-parroting conservative Republican at the time (like my parents),  I, too, was often on the receiving end of emotional and physical abuse and harassment because I was fat.  That was more than 13 years ago and yet how very little times have changed.  As Shirley Chisholm said, ““In the end antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing – antihumanism.”  We’re all in this together, folks, so take a few minutes to help Constance out.

A contact passed on this opportunity for journalists who write on eating disorders and health professionals who interact with them.  This would be a great opportunity for health professionals to harness the power of the media, while also educating them on how to report on eating disorders responsibly.

• SAMHSA ADS Center Training Teleconference: The Power of the Media and Its Impact on Mental Health Recovery: How can the mental health community work with the media to positively and more accurately portray individuals with mental health problems? To help consumers, the general public, and the media explore this question, SAMHSA ADS Center invites you to a free training teleconference entitled “The Power of the Media and Its Impact on Mental Health Recovery.” The call will be held Friday, March 26, 2010, 3:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m., (ET). To learn more and to register, visit the following page: http://promoteacceptance.samhsa.gov/teleconferences/default.aspx. We encourage you to share this invitation with interested friends and colleagues. Please note: Registration will close at 5:00 p.m., ET, on Friday, March 19, 2010. Explore the SAMHSA ADS Center Website for more information at http://www.promoteacceptance.samhsa.gov

I’d heard of Angie Jackson, the Florida mother who’s been making the news rounds since she live-tweeted her abortion last month, but it wasn’t until I saw this Slate story on Jackson’s bizarre, evangelical fundamentalist upbringing that I took the time to read further into it all.  Religious cults?  End-of-days extremists? Demonic energy purging and faith-healing?   Even the National Enquirer couldn’t make up stuff this juicy.

Aside from the obvious connection between abortion and this blog’s focus on feminism, it seems that Jackson also has some experiences with the other two F-words discussed here.  First some background:   Jackson was raised  in a conservative, evangelical household that would make Rick Warren look like a lefty liberal by comparison.  Her grandmother, a fringe Christian leader and author of Christian apocalyptic thrillers, acted as a “spiritual midwife” in “Zion home births” conducted without medicine or medical intervention (which she considered to be “pagan religion”).  In her mid-20s, Jackson googled her grandmother’s name and discovered a trail of deaths and tragedies that occurred as result of her grandmother’s extremist teachings and shortly after began an antithetical blog, Angie the Antitheist, where she writes frequently about atheism and the abuses of faith healing.  It was on her blog that Jackson, the mother of a four-year-old special-needs son, announced her decision to terminate her second pregnancy after her birth control (she was on three different forms) failed.  Read more of Jackson’s background in her own words here.

In an interview with The Frisky, Jackson said that she initially thought that people might be more accepting of her decision to have a non-surgical abortion in her first trimester because of the serious health risks a full-term pregnancy would hold for her (it still didn’t stop the death threats lobbed at her and her family by good “Christian” folk).  She suffered from such severe sexual abuse as a child that she was told beginning at the age of 8 that she would never be able to have children, but got pregnant at 22 and went on to deliver her son after a grueling 98-hour delivery.  Yes, you read that right — a 98-hour delivery.  Yikes!  On her blog, Jackson details some of the serious health problems she suffered from at the time of her first pregnancy, including anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphia and self-harm (cutting) — all of which she says is closely linked to her cult upbringing.  She writes:

I was told, over and over and over, in the repetative indoctrination style of a cult, that I was a burden, that I had too many needs, and that I was no good. I tried to cut away my flesh (my “Adam nature” or sinfulness) with a razor blade. I tried to make my physical body as small as possible, thinking maybe then I wouldn’t take up too much space or be so in the way. I starved and I ran. When my hip went out, I couldn’t run anymore so I went back to throwing up. I once carved the word “FAT” into my left thigh, and the scars are still there.

And from an excerpt in her forthcoming book (trigger warning for glamorizations of eating disorders):

My grandmother taught that there were worlds or realms – the spirit realm and the flesh realm. Flesh was always bad. I can’t help feeling like that has to mean something in the origin of my eating disorder. Starving was a way of making myself less about my body – that evil, human, sinful natured, Adam and Eve descended, recently molested and victimized body – and more about my thoughts, and the voices in my head. After all, that’s what I was taught to do.

So, given her history, Jackson just assumed her missed periods to be amenorrhea caused by a “particularly bad bout of anorexia.”  In fact, she only found out that she was pregnant because her weight loss had plateaued and she had trouble reaching her goal of getting below 100 pounds.  Anorexia wasn’t Jackson’s only problem; she was in an abusive relationship, had struggled to get off drugs and was struggling financially.  She describes that first visit with her doctor and her consequent efforts to get healthy:

“You need to gain weight,” he told me, looking at my 5′3″ 104 lbs frame. “You need to gain 50 pounds, and you need to do it yesterday.” That was my battle for the next four months, trying to put on and keep on enough weight to make sure the fetus’ brain developed properly.

I quit smoking pot, and mostly quit smoking cigarettes. (Yeah, I snuck a few here and there, most memorably on my wedding day, early in my third trimester.) I laid off the diet sodas, energy drinks, and diet pills I’d relied on to get me through school, and dropped out of college. I changed everything about my body, from what I put into my body, to how long I kept it there (no bulimia for me, as the electrolyte imbalance that would cause could be extremely damaging to the fetus), to what size I tried to be. I dropped bad habits, bad friends, but regretfully, picked up again the bad relationship I had with my ex-boyfriend…

I struggled to stay healthy, while planning a wedding (on an extremely lean budget), fighting with my fiancee, fighting with my mother, and moving three times. I didn’t always win that fight, and I spent days and days in the maternity wardmergency room, on IV drips and supplements. My iron levels were low, but the prenatal vitamins with iron in them made me throw up. I was living off pizza, ice cream, and Subway sandwiches, but I couldn’t keep weight on to save my life (or my fetus’). A week after my honeymoon, I went into the ER with a fever and a stomach flu, and over the course of that week I lost 10 pounds through vomit and diarrhea. I wondered if either one of us would make it out alive.

Miraculously, Jackson and her son did make it out alive, but with her doctor’s warnings that a second pregnancy could be seriously risky for her health.  And from some of her recent blog posts, it appears as if Jackson is still struggling with body image and disordered behaviors, thus complicating her preexisting health risks all that much more.Jackson’s case is a biographer’s dream not only for her bizarro religious upbringing and decision to live-Tweet her abortion., but what I find most interesting is how the issue of personhood (generally defined as personal integrity and autonomy) plays out here in relation to abortion and eating disorders.  Indeed, it’s an issue that lies at the very heart of the heated abortion debates.  Anti-choice zealots argue that personhood begins at conception, with some going so far as to claim that even sperm or ovum possess all the rights of personhood, while pro-choice activists maintain that to affirm the personhood of the fetus is to, in effect, deny personhood to the woman bearing it — and by proxy, to all women.

I’m sure you can guess which side of the abortion fence I straddle. As a Buddhist, I would have a difficult time reconciling a decision to have an abortion for myself, but as a feminist, I absolutely believe in a woman’s right to make medical decisions for her own body. Abortion is about so much more than women’s reproductive rights; a woman’s right to decide on abortion when her health and life are at stake is synonymous with her very right to be.  Uh huh, I see you nodding, but how exactly does the issue of eating disorders come into play?

It may be a leap here on my end, but I see the denial of bodily integrity to women when it comes to their reproductive choices as representative of a much larger and historical devaluation of the bodies of women in general. And I’m not alone. In the anthology Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo includes an essay titled “Are Mothers Persons?” in which she examines women and reproductive rights that, at first blush, appears incongruous in a book about women, body image and eating disorders. Bordo’s motives become increasingly clearer, however, as she examines court cases and legal decisions in which pregnant women have been systematically denied agency over their own bodies and in making medical decisions for themselves and their unborn babies. The American legal tradition has traditionally upheld cases involving bodily integrity or “the right to one’s own person” — that is, in cases brought before the court by male plaintiffs. Cases involving pregnant women and mothers, however, evoke a legal double standard.

Social control of women is predicated on bodily control of women — throughout the centuries, women’s bodies have been subject to assault, rape and other forms of violence, their movements restricted both literally and figuratively, their sexual expression and self-determinations denied, their bodies sexualized and commodified, their health issues dismissed and undertreated, access to food restricted and regulated, ad nauseum.  Is it any wonder then that 90 percent of eating disorder cases are seen in girls and women? Women seek to control their bodies precisely because they continue to lack control over their bodies.

And that’s what I find most interesting about the case of Angie Jackson, a woman with a history of abuse, both externally and self-inflicted. Sure, Jackson has serious medical problems that could complicate a full-term pregnancy, but as she very plainly stated on her blog, she also just didn’t want to be pregnant. For Jackson, terminating her pregnancy represented the best possible choice she could make for her physical and emotional health, and by live-Tweeting it, she declared her rejection of some of the same fetters that helped make her a victim of sexual abuse and eating disorders.  If that’s not good enough of a reason to trust women, what is?

So, I mentioned in yesterday’s post that we were going to start fostering rabbits soon.  I joined a few local organizations that takes in rabbits and picked up my first foster from the county shelter today — a black and white speckled mini-lop I named Stella… and her three babies!  Stella and her mate were surrendered to the shelter last week and shelter workers were quite surprised to see three little balls of fuzz born on Monday, which may have had something to do with why she was surrendered to begin with.   Two of the babies are white with  black-ringed eyes and spots and one is a rich chestnut color; all are as big as a hamster.   I’m trying to think of names for them, but since we won’t be able to determine their genders for another two months or so, they have to be gender-neutral names.  I also have a peculiarity in that I have to give my pets proper names (side note: I got my first bunny at about age 11 and named him Snuggles.  I  always suspected this to be the reason for his cranky disposition).  Any suggestions?

Meet Stella.  She’s the gorgeous bloodhound who spent an hour happily slobbering on a bone in the backseat of my car on Saturday as part of an animal rescue transport operation I volunteer with.  An owner-surrender to an animal shelter in northern Ohio, Stella eventually reached her destination later that night with a nonprofit bloodhound rescue group in Tennessee, who will train her to work with law enforcement.

I’m passionate about many causes, but grad school really ate into any free time I had to volunteer the past couple years.  After I graduated last year, I, in typical ADD fashion, wanted to immediately throw myself in an avalanche of causes.  Part of successfully living with ADD is realizing that your zeal and enthusiasm often exceeds the grasp of your limitations and so these past few months I’ve thought long and hard about what it is that I’m most passionate about.  Yes, I’m very concerned about poverty and homelessness issues and this blog is evidence of my commitment to eating disorder awareness and promotion of healthy body images, but what I’ve been most passionate about since an early age is animal rescue.  Our house was always overflowing with both kids (there were four of us) and animals and our pets were all very much beloved members of our family.  I rescued my first animal at the age of six — a box turtle slowly meandering across the street I lived on who found a new home in the woods behind our house.  My mom worked as a 911 dispatcher at a police department and through it we adopted a black lab puppy some cruel boys tried to kill by cinching it in a plastic garbage bag and throwing in the dumpster (Bear lived to the ripe old age of 15), and a Irish Setter mix puppy, abandoned with his litter mates in the snow (all but one of the seven puppies found homes within the department).

Our family menagerie has included cats, dogs, fish, hamsters, rabbits and even a trio of baby Lovebirds I tried to nurse after their mother died.  A family who lived down the street from my childhood home had a mini-farm with cows, goats, chickens, a turkey and even burros and they’d hire me to “farm-sit” whenever they went on vacation.  The hours I spent there at the farm, laying in the hayloft with only the quiet cooing of speckled chickens insulating their eggs, are among my favorite childhood memories.  My mother sometimes referred to me as Dr. Doolittle for all the time I spent with both our critters and various wildlife and indeed, as a fat kid who was taunted and harassed virtually every day of the school year, I often preferred the company of animals to that of other kids.

Just months after moving into my first apartment, I defied my no-pets lease and rescued two kittens I’d found on the side of the road.  Word must have spread, because I was soon “found” by a succession of stray cats, none of whom I could resist.  A few years later my eating disorder struck and I went vegetarian, originally because it offered me a convenient excuse to exclude large swaths of foods from my diet.  Later, I saw a flier for a local Earthsave chapter that held monthly potlucks and was amazed to find that there were actually other vegetarians in Porkopolis.  It was then that I began to learn about the horrors of animal slaughter and the often brutal and inhumane treatment of the animals and I soon realized that I couldn’t very well say that I was for animal rights so long as I continued to eat them.  As I learned more about factory farming and animal abuses and progressed in my own personal eating disorder recovery, I became an ethical vegetarian, a lifestyle I remain firmly committed to today.

Our furfamily now consists of two rabbits, six cats and a foster-who-am-I-kidding-I’ll-probably-keep-cat and I will be picking up several bunnies this week to foster until I help them find their forever homes.  We recently got involved with rescue animal transporting, which some have called kind of like an Underground Railroad network for dogs.  The way it works is this: dogs are rescued from high-kill shelters and/or abuse and neglect and transported by volunteers to shelters or adoptive homes waiting for them.  States like Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia are considered non-adoptive states for the high numbers of unwanted/abandoned animals, so sometimes these animals can only find temporary or permanent homes in regions like the Northeast where there are more adopters than adoptees.  The transports are broken down into legs of about 60-90 miles one-way and volunteer transporters — or pet taxi drivers –  then hand off  the animal to the volunteer taking the next leg of the journey.  Sometimes these travels can be two- and even three-day long events.  We transported three dogs a couple Saturdays ago that were coming from the Midwest and going to Canada!

Volunteerism is supposed to be altruistic, undertaken selflessly in the name of helping others without the expectation of personal gain, but I have to admit that I’m a selfish volunteer.  What do I get out of animal rescue?  Joy. Pride. Laughter.  Confidence.  For me, helping animals is not only the right thing to do but I find the gratitude of a fast wagging tail and sloppy kiss rewarding beyond measure.  I get to meet lots of like-minded people who don’t think I’m crazy for the number of cats I keep and get the chance to indulge my dog fix (I can’t have one of my own as our lot isn’t suitable for a dog and Brandon is adamant that he doesn’t want one).  I also do rescue work as a tribute to all the pets who have immeasurably enriched my own life and for those I was unable to save.  But perhaps  most of all, helping animals helps me feel better about myself.  Knowing that you’re needed, that you’re making a difference even if only in the life of one dog or cat is one of the biggest self-esteem boosts I’ve ever found and the animals never gripe that you’re doing it wrong.

How about you?  Are you involved with any causes, organizations or activities that you find enriching and rewarding and help you feel more accepting of yourself?

It’s Friday, the sky is blue, the sun is shining and I’m much too buoyant to dwell on frustrating and depressing news, so instead I’ll share some fuck-yeah! good news from the north. Canada’s National Eating Disorder Information Centre has teamed up with Toronto-based advertising agency Zulu Alpha Kilo to creatively combat unhealthy body images promoted by the fashion industry.  The small-budget guerrilla-style advertising campaign involved sending fashion editors and brand marketing directors across the country a Hallmark-style greeting card which reads, “Thanks for helping to make me such a successful anorexic.” They also sent out T-shirts with an absurdly small waist featuring the message, “Please try this on to experience how your ads make us feel.” And an interactive transit shelter with a poster reading “Shed your weight problem here” currently functions as a garbage bin for fashion magazines, complete with a slot at the front which allows consumers to add their glossies to a growing stack of Glamour, Vogue, and Fashion magazines.  The campaign’s broader goal asks marketers and fashion leaders to “cast responsibly and retouch minimally.”

More than half of all Canadian women diet, according to NEDIC, and one in four teenage girls engage in eating disordered behavior (in the U.S., it’s estimated that three out of four women have disordered eating and as many as 10 percent may have a full-blown eating disorder).  The fashion industry often bears the brunt for instilling unhealthy body images in girls and women and while NEDIC director Merryl Bear acknowledges that “a range of factors” are at play when it comes to eating disorders, the organization’s goal, she said, was to “focus on different audiences at different times to look at a broad range of some of the influences on body image and disordered eating.  We wanted to show that both the public and some fashion thinkers are ready for change. It may look provocative and edgy, but it is a very substantive campaign.”

NEDIC is collecting digital signatures for its petition, which asks fashion leaders and marketers to “broaden their definition of beauty and inspire us with looks that are beautiful and attainable.”  Watch highlights from the campaign below (beware: the video contains potentially triggering images of emaciated models).

The-F-Word has been awarded the “Beautiful Blogger Award” by Andrea Owens at Live Your Ideal Life.  Thanks, Andrea!  To claim this award I have to regift it to 15 blogs I love and read, so drumroll…. the awards go to:

1. Big Fat Deal
2. Frozen Oranges
3. Feed Me!
4. 5 Resolutions
5. A Celebration of Curves
6. Blogxygen
7. Body Love Wellness
8. Fat Nutritionist
9. ED Bites
10. Life With Cake
11. Oh, the Profanity!
12. Weighing In
13. Pretty Pear
14. Operation Beautiful
15. AnyBody

And to claim this prestigious award I also have to tell you seven things about myself, so I’ll try to tell you a few things you might not already know.  Without further adieu…

1. I have a phobia of bugs.  Ladybugs, ants and even some spiders are okay, but most other bugs send me climbing a chair and shrieking for my husband like a 1950s housewife.  My sister even has to walk me through the bug house at the zoo, eyes closed, before reaching the butterfly house at the end.
2. I am obsessed with plucking my eyebrows.  I didn’t start until my early 20s when a bunch of women I worked with talked about eyebrow waxes and I decided to get one on a whim.  I have naturally bushy eyebrows and the contouring made a big difference in the way I looked and my self-esteem, but it’s become somewhat of a stress reliever for me now.  My husband even got me a pair of eco-tweezers the other year for Christmas.
3. I have ADD, which is to say that I lose my car keys and cell phone on a weekly basis.  But I can remember weird things like phone numbers and birthdates with aplomb.  I still remember the phone numbers of some of my childhood friends from 15 years ago.
4. I absolutely despise skirts and dresses.  The only occasion of me wearing a dress (since childhood, that is) was on my wedding day and it’s the only dress I own.  Give me a nice pants suit with low heels any day.
5. I once slept beneath a freeway overpass with a homeless camp I befriended and it was a better night’s sleep than I’ve had in some hotels.
6. My name is Rachel and I have a book-buying obsession.  It’s not nearly so bad as it once was, but we still venture to the Half Price Bookstore a couple times a month to indulge my obsession.  I have stacks upon towering stacks of books in my office, boxed up in crates in the basement, and I’m loathe to part with 98 percent of them.
7. They say that the average American will have eaten 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before graduating from high school.  I can count on one hand the number I ate.  I hated peanut butter as a kid and it wasn’t until my early 20s when the college cafe was out of celery sticks and Ranch dressing and substituted peanut butter instead that I discovered I liked it.  I still don’t like PB&Js, but I’ll have a spoonful of peanut butter every so often with apples as a snack.

Looks like the powers-that-be at the University of Southern California are seriously out of the loop on what NEDAW is and who sponsors it (hint: it isn’t The-F-Word).  I found this email from them in my overflowing inbox:

Hi Rachel,

We found chalking regarding the NEDAW posted illegally on the USC campus. Because this was the only email that we could find on your website, we are emailing you this warning. We have kiosks and bulletin boards around campus where you can legally advertise. Otherwise, please refrain from chalking anywhere on campus.

Attached you will find a picture of the violation we are referencing.

Seeing as you have no illegal advertising violations in the past, we are only issuing a warning.

Let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Thanks,

Jacob Yum
–
SCheduling Office
3551 Trousdale Parkway
ADM 299
Los Angeles, CA 90089-4014
Tel: 213-740-6728
Fax: 213-740-8157
Email: SCevents@usc.edu

My reply:

Sorry, I don’t run, sponsor or coordinate NEDAW, which is a NATIONAL movement sponsored by the National Eating Disorders Association.  I’m pretty sure they’re not behind your illegal chalking violation, either. Chances are it was a few students who acted on their own in order to promote healthy self-images on your campus.  The nerve!

-Rachel

Stay strong, fellow USC’ers.

I cannot go through this again
I cannot go through this again
I cannot go through this again
I cannot go through this again…

The words fade and give way to a synthetic drizzle of the melody, piano following along in the background. Together, they create the calm static of a dreamlike state, where all is zen. You’re floating oh-so-comfortably…

…and then, without warning, the rest of the band hits the ground running with its assault of drums, guitars and more synth. You are suddenly shattered back to chaotic reality.

“A-with a-teeth-a,” Trent Reznor sings with a venegance only he fully understands. I picture him literally biting the object of his passion and ripping it to shreds with the intensity of emotion matched in his voice.

She will not let you go
Keeps on and on
She will not let you go
Keeps on and on
This time, I’m not coming back
(she will not let you go)
-Nine Inch Nails, With Teeth

If I ever needed a song that described my emotions during the first year of my recovery, it was this one. Put simply, I was a mess. My state of mind changed rapidly from “I’ll never purge/starve/put my body through this shit again” to chaos and self-destruction. I never knew what would flip my emotions upside-down, for better or worse; sometimes it depended on the hour, the minute, the anything.

Everything felt like punishment. If I ate, I felt disgusted with any feelings of satiety I might have given myself. If I didn’t eat, I knew I wasn’t doing what I was “supposed” to be doing as a part of recovery, and therefore I felt like crap about that as well. If I had it both ways and ate/purged, the emotions doubled in their intensity each way. No matter what I did, I couldn’t win. At least with the eating disorder, I knew what I could expect. In this mess called recovery, I still felt like a prisoner to my eating disorder, only now I was attempting escape, getting caught, and paying what seemed like even more brutal consequences than what I was dealing with before.

I hated everything. I hated myself for getting into this mess in the first place, for my lack of understanding the world – and myself – without an eating disorder. I hated gritting my teeth and moving forward with recovery, because dammit, it was hard, and I felt absolutely clueless about whether I was really getting better or if I was completely fooling myself (and everyone else). What if everything I knew was a complete farce? I felt alien in a world where everything should have felt familiar, but the rules had changed, and I no longer knew the rules. Once I thought I had them re-learned, there was always that one little exception where, of course, I screwed everything up. Or so it felt.

As much of an emotional roller-coaster 2005 was for me, I had two inspirations that guided me. The most important was my husband, Patrick, who I met in October 2005. He didn’t miraculously save me from my woes, as he can attest, but he helped me help myself by making me feel worthy of being saved. Even when in doubt, that kept me going in the years that have followed.

The other inspiration was With Teeth, the Nine Inch Nails album released in May that year. The timing and theme of this album couldn’t have come at any better time for me. After a four-year absence from releasing new music and touring, Reznor finally revealed his biggest project ever: putting himself back together.

A  near-fatal heroin overdose woke Reznor up; he realized he would lose himself to drug and alcohol addiction if he didn’t stop. He checked himself into rehab and endured a detox that “makes him shudder to this day.” He’s been sober since June 11, 2001.

Reznor warmed slowly to writing new music. He wasn’t sure if he had anything to say now that he was sober and questioned his future in the music industry altogether. However, a renewed clarity surfaced once the process began. Eventually the words came together and Reznor recorded With Teeth, the soundtrack to his journey of re-defining himself.

Learning that Trent Reznor, a musician whose music I had adored since the age of 13, had undergone his own process of recovery, sparked inspiration in me. It not only gave me a new appreciation for his music, but I also developed a deep sense of respect for him as a person – not just for surviving, but for speaking openly about his addictions and the journey back. It was exactly what I needed. He returned from his own private hell stronger than ever…and so could I.

I listened to With Teeth for about a year straight with little interruption from other music on my playlist. Every song resonates with some stage of recovery, from the confrontational “Don’t you fucking know what you are!” in the song You Know What You Are? to “What if everything around you isn’t quite as it seems?” in the ending track, Right Where It Belongs. In the same way that I identify with certain songs because I listened to them repeatedly when I was active in my eating disorder, this album became my recovery anthem. The title track, With Teeth, represents the turning point for when healthier days started outnumbering the disordered days. The album as a whole is not only Trent’s story of moving forward, but it became embedded into the soundtrack of my own story as I took a leap of faith and kept going myself.

How has music played a role in the course of your disorder and recovery?

MSNBC interviewed U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin about weight and fitness and her “vision for a health and fit nation.”  Benjamin, you may recall, was attacked and criticized for her weight after her nomination (she appears to be about a size 18).  But while Benjamin is enthusiastically joining the “nation’s war on fat,” I’m glad to see that she’s more even-keeled and sensitive about it than, ehem, others.

So how do you reach more people?

If you talk to the average person, what’s clear is we need to give them tools to make it easier. We need to get people to make good health part of their lives. I’m showing my age, but I remember going out dancing, doing the hustle and sweating off my makeup. That was fun. People need to exercise and eat well because they enjoy it and they want to be fit. It could be taking a walk in a park. But we need nice parks. We need people to buy better foods. But a lot of communities don’t have access to fresh produce. Right now, it’s very difficult to find a meal that’s healthy and competes with a “dollar meal” like a burger and fries. We need to ask the communities and food manufacturers to offer more healthy choices not as alternatives, but as first choices.

Your weight was made an issue when the President picked you for the post, and you said it was hurtful. So how do we talk to our kids about a sensitive topic like weight?

I’m very secure in my own self esteem, but yes, it was hurtful. There were some mean comments. But what about those kids who will be looking at me as a role model? They may be very discouraged by some of those comments. I exercise regularly, at least four days a week. If I didn’t I probably would be a big blimp. And I try to eat pretty healthy, as much as I can. I know the things that I’m doing. I tend to stay on the elliptical as long as other people. I’m not out of breath. You can be healthy and fit at different sizes. The real message is that you don’t want to limit yourself by your dress size. You need to be comfortable with yourself and have a good body image. Don’t have some dress manufacturer tell you what size to be. Be a size that makes you fit.

I dislike Benjamin’s near exclusive focus on obesity — as if Not Getting Fat is the only worthwhile reason to encourage people to make healthier choices — and I am vehemently against workplace wellness programs and challenges, which she also promotes, but I’m glad to see that not only does Benjamin appear to support HAES, she also seems to recognize the racial, environmental and socio-economic forces at play that contribute to body weight.  Now if we could only get her to heed her own words and redirect her health and fitness outreach efforts from just fat people to all people.