My Eating Disorder Made Me Look, Act and Feel Like A Teenaged Boy

Not a man, mind you. A boy, taken care of, athletic, existing on the 7/11 diet of caffeine and sour candy. Sure, I lost teeth, stomach lining and fertility, but I never got my ass grabbed.

Hello and happy day, equally incredible people!!

Here’s an advance warning that I’m asking for a LOT from you today.

It was a few months into starting Jane magazine. (This is where you roll your eyes and say Grandma’s going to tell us some boring story from the old days again - and you’re right! But don’t roll them too much because they’ll get stuck that way.) I had a realization.

I had been doing Sassy magazine for eight years before that (which seems to be my statute of limitations on excitement about a project - or my built-in obsolescence for those projects? - because that’s how long I was at Sassy and Jane and Jane Radio and then hosting all of my dumb TV talk shows, also obnoxiously named after myself, combined - and I’ve been doing a lot of talking about myself lately while discussing my memoir with publishers, as I keep mentioning, so just bear with me while I do it some more.) In any case, the epiphany I had was completely self-servingly lovely. It was that I had been in the position of helping Sassy readers live and love their lives for all that time and I loved doing that and still wanted to help Jane readers too, but figured out that Jane readers, unlike Sassy readers, were older and now had things like medical degrees and legal backgrounds and veterinary skills and professional dry cleaning service franchises and could help me also! So I started a column in Jane called “Jane Needs Help” and boy was it helpful! To me!

It’s recently come to my attention (meaning my brain just grasped it) that a lot of what I do when I write to you here in these introductory notes is a continuation of that Jane magazine column where I asked you to help me out. But before you read today’s requests below, know that the truth is all I most want to do still is help you, so let me know what I can do for you and I will. Take advantage of my codependence. Writing feedback? Editing assistance? Dog grooming? I got really good at that during the pandemic.

And here is the short list of things I ask of you today:

Assignment 1: Send good vibes all day while I am making the decision about who I’m going to go with to publish my book, the one you’ve been hearing about so much that by the time it comes out, you will be like “Didn’t that thing come out already? Isn’t that person who wrote that dead?” But it will be so good that you won’t mind.

Assignment 2: Consider buying a T-shirt because even if you don’t love Sassy magazine or the shirt, the proceeds go to Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Freedom For All, so they really need this $ now and you can wear it inside out or only to bed or whatever. It’s more important than your aesthetics!

Assignment 3: Send me your story submissions! When I asked last time, within minutes I got this piece you are about to read. (Or at least I assume that’s why you’re here. Maybe you have other reasons you enjoy visiting websites that you don’t read. It’s all ok with me!) You can send me “It Happened To Me” stories or “Unpopular Opinion” rants or whatever else you are into sending. I am right here at Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com. There are also a bunch of you who have sent me submissions over the last months that I have acknowledged but haven’t given you final word on yet because I have questions or want to work with you more on them. So if you are one of those people, do not hesitate to forward me everything again so I can get it together. And if you just never heard back, definitely resend. There are a trillion reasons I could have just not gotten it. Especially now with Mercury. (Although, just to go off on one more tangent - and any book publishers reading this need to know that I will not write my book with THIS many annoying parentheticals, I promise - Mercury in retrograde has always been a time when my communication and business deals, etc, have gone the BEST! Ani is like that too. Anyone else?)

Now on to today’s It Happened To Me from Amanda June - I like saying the whole name together, even if no one calls her that. The premise of her story, even if not the specifics, will I think be familiar to a lot of us in its overall thesis that:

It’s hard to be a woman in a body.

And a man too, increasingly so, as Charlie has eloquently talked about here. So let’s all get in there in the comments and support Amanda and each other the way we do. I love you all so much.

xo Jane

PS One of my favorite lines Amanda and I came up with while emailing edits back and forth, which I was deciding between for the subtitle above and can’t not share also, is the enticing: “Sure, I lost teeth, my stomach lining and fertility, but I avoided ass-grabs, awkward work dinners and cooking for my husband.” Feel free to tell me I made the wrong call. And now, let’s READ!

PPS Wish me luck today!

Robert’s nickname is Stick, and even in my skinniest, disordered years, I begged the kids of the friends who gave him that nickname to never call me Mrs. Stick. This is us at his first apartment on Christmas Eve, 1999. There was no dinner.

By Amanda Long

In 22 years of marriage, I have never made dinner for my husband. I didn’t make it for myself either, until very recently, but man, that feels oddly liberating.

I have never sat in four hours of traffic one day to pick up my kid from school, while fielding texts from my other child about homecoming dresses, because that’s what moms do. I have also never felt the love of a human that came out of my body, because my body didn’t have a period for all the years of child-bearing.

A few months after this photo was taken, I went to volleyball camp where I learned about how many calories I needed to consume a day in order to lose weight. It’s taken me decades to let go of that “control” mechanism. I’m on the left.

I avoided the unpaid work of work potlucks by laughingly bringing Twizzlers and Diet Coke, because everyone knew that the skinny editor who never ate lunch wasn’t about to contribute anything not purchased at the CVS below the newsroom — just like the boys.

Robert and me sharing a cubicle, after telling our coworkers that he was quitting and we were in love in 1999.

I have never had my ass grabbed at a work function, one because I had no ass, and two, because I avoided after-work functions with all my might, because, duh, that’s when I’d be biking home or staying late to finish editing and avoiding eating food with coworkers. I did have my breast lightly fondled by a chiropractor as he sat behind me on the bench in a position I now recognize as unnecessary. He thought it was fine to touch me as if I were a skeleton and I reveled in my presentation as muscles easily detected by practitioners.

I have used my freakishly bony body as a force field to ward off unwanted advances. Once at the gym, of course an older man came too close to me and asked how I had no body fat, I was brave enough to “joke,” that I “do a lot of cocaine, don’t eat much more than Skittles and work out all the damn time.” I have never done cocaine. I think I would combust upon the first snort. I’m already hyperactive, sometimes, thanks to an off-kilter thyroid. My skinniness and my seemingly unlimited cardio would often render others speechless. There’s a twisted power in that too, an owning of the room, as the grunting boys on the weight bench well know.

At frat parties in college, where my eating disorder first took over, the meat market of it all was made more clear by the lack of full-calorie beers that I could not bear to stomach. I kept up my cardio dancing to Tainted Love on those sticky floors and left at a safe hour so I could get up and go to 9 a.m. step aerobics.

The Going-Away Front Page from my first newspaper gig. There are at least 12 references to cracker and bubble gum lunches, aerobics and one co worker saying “he’ll never eat a real meal again in my honor”

I was never part of the “I feel fat,” women-bonding conversations in the locker room, or at work, because, I mean, I had access to mirrors and way too many scales, and even though my body dysmorphia made me hate my body, I couldn’t commiserate or find comfort with other women out of fear of pissing them off or starting a conversation I wasn’t yet ready to have.

At the gym, I avoided group fitness classes with the gals, as my eating disorder thought they were too easy. Instead, I ran with the boys, jumped rope in the boxing gym and compared running injuries with my male massage clients who confided in me that running was the only sport at which they excelled, and therefore also made them feel like one of the boys.

When I met Robert, my husband, at work,