Let’s Talk About Lying
By Kyle King
My first bout with anorexia (AN) came when I was 17. After being diagnosed, I struggled in therapy for months in south Florida but it was really only after finding family-based treatment (FBT) in San Diego that I started improving.
And as I gained weight, I remember desperately wanting to get back to my old life. Specifically, about a month after starting FBT, I remember really wanting to be able to hang out with my friends in the afternoon without having to come home for a supervised snack. So, as an acknowledgment of my progress up to this point, my parents and I made a deal: I could have afternoon snacks out with friends, as long as I sent my parents a video of myself eating.
I genuinely think I followed through with this plan the first couple of days. Quickly, though, I got the idea that maybe, just maybe, I could take a video of myself eating one bite and hide the rest. So I did, and when I wasn’t terribly hungry after and no one had caught me, I did it again. And again. And again and again until my mom looked in my backpack one morning and found a stack of Cliff bars each with a single bite taken out of the upper right corner. I still remember the disappointment shooting across her face.
Let’s talk about lying
As you may have gathered, I want to talk about lying.
I lied to my parents a lot on the road to recovery, and I think my deception hurt them more than any of the cruel things I yelled at them. That said, I was so caught up in my own head during treatment that, honestly, I didn’t really care. Of course, I didn’t want to hurt my parents by deceiving them, but this want paled in comparison to my fear of AN. And I know I’m not alone here, too. A lot of adolescents lie during recovery from eating disorders. It’s common, if not expected.
So my goal is to write about lying, not to try and convince you that this behavior is acceptable (it’s not) but rather to try to explain why I lied and what was going through my head each time I did. I do so in the hopes that you and your kid can have a stronger relationship than me and my parents had, partly as a consequence of my lying.
I racked my brain for an hour or so and came up with four reasons I lied, one of which I’ll call the Main Reason and the rest of which I’ll call Secondary Reasons. The Main Reason, as you can guess, at least partly motivated every lie I told my parents. The Secondary Reasons are each drivers that often, but not always, pushed me towards lying given my base state of wanting to avoid treatment. They functioned to complement the Main Reason rather than to be a Main Reason alone.
Main Reason: I simply didn’t want to do the treatment.
That’s it. Pretty simple. I was in treatment, but I still wanted to lose weight. I still wanted to reduce my intake. I still wanted to push food around my plate to make it look like I’d eaten more, to hide cheese under lettuce scraps, and to “drop” cashews on the floor.
And I know this isn’t a terribly surprising insight, but I think it’s worth naming clearly: beneath any lie was the overwhelming desire to avoid the pain anorexia promised would come if I ate just one more bite. In the throes of the disorder, nothing mattered more than obeying AN. I knew intellectually that continuing to listen to my AN could kill me, but that was only a theoretical concern – distant and abstract. The anxiety from eating one more tortilla chip was immediate, sharp, and physical. I’d feel it in my gut for hours and think about it for days. Plus, despite intellectually agreeing with treatment, I still somewhat believed the sick narrative AN was feeding me, that food was somehow bad. So, to avoid anxiety and disagreeable treatment, I lied.
Secondary Reason 1: The desire to live my own goddamn life.
I was 17 when I first developed anorexia and 21 when I relapsed. Neither is a fun age to suddenly have a 10 p.m. curfew and mandatory evening snack with your parents.
In this context, I sometimes lied to create the impression I was doing better than I was so I could keep doing the things that Kyle, not anorexia, wanted to do. Kyle wanted to go to college. Kyle wanted to hang out with friends. Kyle wanted to play basketball at the park. And Kyle wasn’t faking weigh-in videos or hiding granola bars only to dodge treatment, he also genuinely, desperately wanted to keep living the life of a “normal” kid.
So, while avoiding the disorder was the primary motivation, there was a real secondary one: clinging to normalcy for as long as possible.
Secondary Reason 2: Spite.
When I was between 17 and 21, I genuinely did not like my parents. I didn’t enjoy spending time with them or talking to them and I thought FBT, broadly, was authoritarian and restrictive and doing more harm than good. So sometimes, in what I fully acknowledge is twisted logic, I lied out of revenge, a way of sticking it to them for keeping me home and imposing this treatment.
I know how ridiculous this sounds. FBT saved my life. My parents were helping me. My lying only prolonged treatment and made everything worse. I understand this now and, believe it or not, understood it at the time. Didn’t matter, though. Anorexia makes you myopic, only prioritizing the short-term over long-term benefits you can’t clearly see, and I got a strange, perverse satisfaction from defying them.
Secondary Reason 3: It was easy.
It was genuinely easy to avoid eating things when no one is really watching. Eating takes every ounce of willpower, hiding food takes almost none, and isn’t hard. I know, again, this isn’t profound, but it’s true. So, one reason I lied was because I knew I could get away with it, at least for a little.
So, what’s a parent supposed to make of all this?
Well, I’d like you to take away two things.
First, the main reason anyone lies during this treatment is because they’re in the grip of their disorder. I can tell you from experience that it’s very overwhelming. The eating disorder makes you feel that nothing else matters except appeasing it and lying, unfortunately, is often a means to this end.
This, though, is important because it means that your child’s lying often has little to do with you. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about you, it doesn’t mean they disrespect you, it doesn’t mean they don’t see all the trouble you’re going through to make them better — it just means they’re sick. I know because I was there. And because I was there, I also know that lying doesn’t mean that you’ll never recover. I did, and I lied a lot.
Second, as much as most lying is driven by avoiding treatment, other things are often at work too and it’s important to explore them rather than reacting with anger or shame alone.
If the lying is partly about wanting freedom and a normal life, maybe there’s a new structure that honors both the requirements of FBT and your kid’s need to feel like themselves.
If it’s rooted in spite, maybe it’s worth asking why they feel that way and trying, as openly as possible, to remind them that you are on the same team.
If it’s partly because hiding food is just easy, maybe the monitoring approach needs to change.
None of this is simple. Lord knows I wouldn’t know how to implement it from the parent’s side and I don’t know how I would have reacted if my kid lied as boldly to my face as I did to my parents. I’m just grateful that they never gave up, many semi-eaten Cliff Bars later.
Keep up the fight.