Welcome Media

Author. Advocate. Speaker.

Paige Gordon is an author, advocate, and speaker whose work explores the intersection of eating disorders, neuroscience, healthcare policy, and lived experience. After living with bulimia for more than twenty years, she became deeply interested in the biological mechanisms underlying binge-type eating disorders, including reward circuitry, reinforcement learning, and emerging research on GLP-1 pathways. Paige serves on the Board of Directors of the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), participates in multiple research advisory initiatives, and serves on the Santa Cruz County Women’s Commission. Through her writing and advocacy, she works to bridge the gap between patient experience and scientific understanding, challenging stigma while advancing conversations about recovery, treatment, and healthcare equity. Her forthcoming memoir, Searching for Full, will be published by She Writes Press in January 2027.

Download Headshot
Download Book Cover

Q&A

What made you decide to write this memoir?

The memoir actually started as something much less noble than “writing a book.” It started because after nearly three decades of bulimia, my symptoms suddenly stopped, and I genuinely could not understand what had happened to me. I felt like someone had unplugged a machine that had been screaming in the background of my life for twenty-seven years.

I started writing mostly to make sense of my own brain. At first it was chaotic and deeply unpublishable. More emotional archaeology than literature. But the more I wrote, the more I realized my story needed to be told. It was about, shame, survival, medicine, identity, and what happens when the story you’ve been told about yourself suddenly stops making sense.
At some point, a journalist I reached out to basically told me no one would care about the science or advocacy unless someone was willing to tell the human story underneath it. Unfortunately for me, that someone became me.
Your recovery story involves GLP-1 medication, which has become incredibly controversial. Why did you decide to speak publicly about it?

Because it changed my life.

I took a very low dose GLP-1 medication after hearing people talk about “food noise.” Within weeks, the bingeing and purging urges that had controlled my life for decades disappeared. Not improved. Gone.

I understand why these medications are controversial. Weight, eating disorders, and body politics are emotionally loaded subjects. But my experience raised questions I could no longer ignore. If my eating disorder was purely psychological or sociocultural, why did this medication affect me so profoundly?
I’m not interested in simplistic narratives or miracle-cure language. I’m interested in curiosity and in asking why something worked for some people and what that might reveal biologically.
For me, speaking publicly became less about promoting a treatment and more about advocating for better scientific investigation.
You describe your eating disorder as feeling “biological” long before you had language for it. What do you mean by that?
For years, people framed my eating disorder almost entirely through the lens of trauma, culture, or body image. Those things absolutely mattered. I grew up in a foster care situation from the age of 12. I experienced instability, shame, and weight stigma. Those experiences shaped me profoundly.
But underneath all of that, there was also something that felt physical. Primitive. Like a relentless drive that lived below conscious thought.

I often describe it as feeling less like vanity and more like compulsion. Less like “wanting to be thin” and more like being trapped in a feedback loop I could not shut off.

Now that researchers are beginning to explore satiety pathways, reward systems, gut-brain signaling, genetics, and neurobiology more deeply, I think many patients are recognizing themselves in those conversations.
How did growing up with your parents abandoning you shape your relationship with food, shame, and survival?

Being abandoned by your parents teaches you instability very early. You become hyperaware of whether you are wanted, tolerated, too much, or disposable.

Food became tangled up with comfort, fear, control, secrecy, and self-soothing for me very young. Then when I gained weight as a teenager, I internalized the idea that my body itself was a problem. Bulimia initially felt almost adaptive. Like I had discovered a solution to something unbearable.

What’s difficult is that eating disorders are rarely about one thing. Trauma absolutely matters. Environment matters. But I also think some people are biologically vulnerable in ways we still do not fully understand.

The memoir really lives in that tension.
What surprised you most once you entered the eating disorder advocacy and research world?

Honestly? How fractured it is.

I entered this world thinking everyone would be united around reducing suffering. Instead, I found a field that is deeply underfunded, emotionally exhausted, politically charged, and often polarized around competing frameworks for understanding eating disorders.

There are tensions around weight, identity, biology, language, treatment approaches, pharmaceutical involvement, recovery narratives — all of it.

What surprised me most was realizing how many patients feel caught in the middle of those debates.

I also realized how desperately more research funding is needed. Eating disorders have some of the highest mortality rates in psychiatry and historically receive shockingly little research investment.
You’ve spoken openly about the tension between biological and sociocultural explanations for eating disorders. Why do you think those conversations become so polarized?

Because people are afraid.

I think many people worry that emphasizing biology could erase trauma, invalidate lived experience, or reduce people to genetics and brain chemistry. On the other side, many patients feel frustrated when biology is dismissed entirely and their experiences are interpreted through only one framework.

I don’t see these explanations as mutually exclusive.

Human beings are complicated. Trauma can matter. Culture can matter. Biology can matter. Genetics can matter
I think the polarization happens when people start treating complexity like betrayal.
Your memoir discusses “food noise.” How would you describe that experience to someone who has never experienced it?

It’s difficult to explain because when you live with it long enough, you assume everyone experiences the world that way.

For me, it felt like an endless mental loop around food, urges, cravings, planning, bargaining, obsession, and compulsion. It was exhausting. Sometimes it felt almost impossible to think about anything else.

When the GLP medication quieted that noise, it was honestly disorienting. The silence felt unfamiliar.

I remember thinking: Wait… people just walk around feeling like this naturally?

That realization was emotionally devastating and liberating at the same time.
What has been the response from people with lived experience since you began speaking publicly?

Overwhelming.

I hear from people constantly — especially women — who say they thought they were alone in these experiences. Many describe years or decades of shame, failed treatments, secrecy, and feeling misunderstood.

I’ve also heard from people who disagree with me completely, and I think that’s important too. Eating disorders are incredibly heterogeneous illnesses. What helps one person may harm another.

That’s part of why I advocate so strongly for research rather than ideology.

I’m less interested in being “right” than I am in understanding why different patients respond differently.
Why do you believe eating disorder research is so underfunded compared to other psychiatric and medical conditions?

Partly stigma. Partly misunderstanding.

Eating disorders are often trivialized, moralized, gendered, or framed as lifestyle issues rather than serious neuropsychiatric conditions.
There’s also historically been a tendency to split eating disorders into competing narratives — vanity, culture, trauma, control, addiction, biology — instead of investing heavily enough to understand how these systems interact.

Meanwhile patients are suffering and dying.

One of the things that shocked me most entering this space was realizing how little funding exists relative to the severity and prevalence of these illnesses.
You now serve on the Board of Directors for NEDA and advise on lived-experience research initiatives. How has that work changed your perspective?

It’s made me appreciate how complicated institutional change really is.

From the outside, it’s easy to imagine organizations as singular entities. From the inside, you realize they’re made up of people trying to navigate limited resources, competing priorities, evolving science, politics, advocacy pressures, and patient needs all at once.

Serving in these roles has also reinforced for me how important lived experience is in shaping research and policy conversations.

Patients notice gaps. We notice what gets missed clinically. We notice where language breaks down. We notice what suffering actually feels like in the real world.
I think the future of research has to involve much stronger collaboration between clinicians, scientists, and people with lived experience.
What do you wish clinicians better understood about bulimia?

How physically and psychologically exhausting it is.

Bulimia is often misunderstood because many people with it look “functional” from the outside. They go to work and raise children. They appear high-achieving or socially intact.
Meanwhile they may be living inside relentless cycles of shame, compulsion, secrecy, and physical distress.

I also wish more clinicians understood how heterogeneous bulimia likely is biologically. I suspect we are grouping together multiple subtypes and mechanisms under one diagnosis.

That matters because different patients may ultimately require very different treatment approaches.
You often say curiosity is missing from this conversation. What do you mean by that?

I think many conversations around eating disorders become ideological very quickly.

People become attached to frameworks. Attached to certainty and defending narratives.
But science advances through curiosity.
If patients are reporting experiences that don’t fit neatly into existing models, I think we should investigate those experiences instead of immediately trying to explain them away.
Curiosity does not mean abandoning caution or critical thinking. It just means being willing to ask better questions.
What role do you think storytelling plays in changing medicine or public perception?

Stories create emotional context for data.

A statistic can tell you prevalence rates. A memoir can tell you what it feels like to live inside an illness for twenty-seven years.

I think storytelling has the power to humanize complicated or stigmatized conditions in ways research papers alone sometimes cannot.

At the same time, I’m careful not to confuse one person’s story with universal truth. My memoir is one lived experience, not a definitive explanation for eating disorders.

But stories can open doors. They can make people curious enough to start asking different questions.
Was there a moment during recovery when you realized your life might actually become bigger than your illness?

Yes.

I remember sitting in my kitchen one day after the bingeing and purging urges had quieted and realizing I suddenly had enormous amounts of mental space I had never possessed before.

I didn’t know what to do with it. For years my life had revolved around managing, hiding, surviving, compensating, recovering, relapsing.

Suddenly there was room for curiosity, advocacy, writing, motherhood, relationships, and future-thinking in a way I had never experienced.

That was the moment I realized the illness had occupied far more of my life than I had understood.
What do you hope readers take away from your memoir?
Mostly, I hope they feel less alone.
I hope people with eating disorders feel seen in their complexity instead of reduced to stereotypes. I hope clinicians and researchers leave with more curiosity. I hope readers understand that recovery stories do not always arrive in neat, culturally comfortable packages.

And I hope the book encourages more compassion — not just for people struggling with eating disorders, but for the uncomfortable uncertainty that still exists in trying to understand them.

I think uncertainty is hard for people. We want clean answers. But sometimes progress begins with being honest about what we still do not know.

“I spent twenty-two years believing my eating disorder was a moral failure. What changed my life was realizing it might also be biology.”

Featured Articles

Paige Gordon Of The National Eating Disorders Association On How To Support A Loved One Who Is Struggling With An Eating Disorder

ANAD: Letting Go of the Shame That Kept Me Sick

Photo by Helynn Ospina for WSJ

The Wall Street Journal: How GLP-1s Changed One Woman’s Battle With Bulimia

YFS Magazine: What 22 Years of Self-Blame Taught Me About Leadership

Featured Podcasts

The Power Hour with Dj Larry Jones:
From Bulimia to Freedom, Paige Gordon’s Story of Recovery

The Relatable Voice Podcast: From Bulimia to Hope – Paige Gordon’s Inspiring Story

Sharing Out Loud: Can GLP-1 Medications Change the Future of Bulimia Treatment? With advocate and author, Paige Gordon

The Self Esteem and Confidence Mindset: Paige Gordon – The Shame That Keeps So Many People Silent

Featured Radio

Moments with Marianne Radio Show What Can Food Noise Teach Us About Human Behavior with Paige Gordon