Life

Tapestry wove recovery and a new mission

Marybeth Burns

By Bill Moss, Published: January 25, 2013

Marybeth Burns knew only one speed, fast, and aspired to only one body type, thinner.

"What purging is to a bulimic exercise was to me," she says." I could not do without it. I was getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning every morning and working out for two hours, and then on the weekends it could be up to five or six hours a day. I would go bike for two hours and then take the kids hiking for three hours."
While she was sweating at the Y, her husband, Chris Burns, filled the parent role.
"Chris was getting the kids up and feeding them and getting them to school and I was working out and I'd go straight to the office," she says. "They never saw me in the mornings. I was isolating." She brushed off social invitations. "I was too afraid to be in a situation where there may be food ... It was just too hard."
Anorexia was not new to Burns, although she never used the name to describe her manic exercise habit and wren-like intake. She had had an overwhelming desire to be thin and to exercise long and hard for 25 years.
"It started when I was 17 and I became very anxious," she says. A doctor dismissed her suspicion that she might be anorexic. "He said you don't have anorexia because anorexics don't have family relationships."
Yet everything about her life said she did.
"On weekends (in college) I would binge, and during the week I was running constantly and very strict about what I ate, and then I'd binge on the weekends. So this cycle went on for a while. I never threw up. I used exercise to purge."

When her dad had heart surgery, more running, less eating. When she and Chris adopted their children from Russia, more running, less eating. When they started their media company, more stress, more running, hiking, biking, swimming, no fat or sugar to replace the vast amount of calories she burned.
She went to a nutritionist and got better for a while.
"She got me up to a healthy weight," she says. "And she said, 'Marybeth, you got this.'"

'Scared the heck out of me'

But Marybeth didn't have it, because anorexia, like any addiction, has a hold that can only be broken through a strong therapeutic approach. Last March she attended a program at MAHEC in Asheville and heard a speaker talk about anorexia.
"It was nothing I had not heard before but it was the way she said it," Burns says. "She was talking to therapists and physicians, not like she was trying to scare anorexics, she was just being honest, and it scared the heck out of me. Something told me, this is it, you have got to do something."
Although she had been in outpatient therapy for two years, her counselor was not an eating disorders specialist. Burns had a feeling she needed residential treatment.
"That weekend I really just thought about it and prayed about it and went to Chris before my doctor's appointment. I said I really think I need to go somewhere," she says. "And there was this relief."
Her husband was all for it. They began to research options. A specialist she knew at Park Ridge Health suggested a treatment center in Arizona. "It was $85,000 for three weeks, and I was going to have to be there for at least six," she says. "Can you imagine?"
Then someone told her about Tapestry, a residential treatment program in a restored 100-year-old house in Brevard for women with eating disorders — anorexia, bulimia, binge eaters. She signed up. She weighed 85 pounds.
"You go and you live there, you have 24-hour care," she says. "You have a nurse, resident counselor, you are working from 8 in the morning until 9 at night doing therapy of all kinds. It's really an amazing place, and the people that work there are fantastic. I was there for seven weeks, and Chris and the kids would come on Saturdays for family therapy, and then after seven weeks when I got up to a weight where they felt like I was in a safe place health-wise I got to come home and started in my day program, which meant I was there five days a week from 11 to 4. It was more of the same but on a different level, a little more advanced, trying to get you ready to go fully back into your life."
What did she eat at the treatment center?
"Anything and everything," she says. "Nothing's locked, we plan our menu, we go grocery shopping with our nutritionist. It's a plethora of great food in the house, from M&Ms to wonderful salads to vegetarian stuff to any kind of meat you wanted.
"I embraced it differently than most of the girls did. ... If I was 18 I don't think I could have done it. I was just so done. I was so tired. I'd lost so much of who I was to the eating disorder that I was ready, I was ready to embrace the food. I just kind of went there and said just tell me what to do and I'll do it."

A passion to help
Walking out the door of Tapestry was scary, she says. She's still subject to the triggers that brought on anorexic behavior before. But now she has a cause. She's as passionate about helping other women recover as she once was about running 10 miles.
"I think what people don't understand is that it is a mental illness," she says. "This is not a 'middle class white girl oh I really want to go on a diet, look at my great body' illness. The other thing I think people really need to know is this is not a teenage disease. There are tons of middle-age women developing it at middle age."
"What's perceived as the perfect body has changed so much. Israel has passed a law that women have to be a certain weight to be a model; they can't be so underweight anymore. That's what we've all turned to is the Twiggy-type model ..."
And the cultural pressure that used to tug teenagers toward impossible thinness now paints the picture for older woman.
"There's a new perception of what grandma should look like; grandma should be in shape now, grandma should be megawoman and have a facelift and blah blah blah. When I went to Tapestry, I was 41. Everyone was 18, 19, 24. But then when I was getting ready to get out we got a 53-year-old and 54-year-old, a 58-year-old — they were all in their 50s."
Burns and Sherri Holbert had cofounded women's conference four years ago called the Frenzied Female. They decided that the theme this year would be on women and their body image. The daylong event, "Embrace the Fabulous You," features programs on eating disorders, reclaiming beauty, "Making Peace with Food" and "Lunchbox Makeover."
"We've got to make this around women accepting themselves for who they are because there's so many people dying from this," Burns says. She says 10 million women and 1 million men suffer from an eating disorder, and four out of women die from a resulting cause like stroke or heart failure. Anorexia is an illness that to many people looks more like good health.
"Because our society is so geared toward fighting obesity that when they see an anorexia person, they think, wow, I wish I could be that disciplined. They don't see it. The doctors ... in my experience, they don't have a clue. ... They get one day about it in medical school. I think they're afraid to approach women and say, 'Look, I've got some concerns about you,' because honestly I don't think they know what's the next step to take."

Healthy mission
Burns is now on a mission. She's on a treadmill again, as determined as ever to reach a goal, this time a healthy one.
"What I feel like I'm meant to do, and I haven't been able to because I've been sick, I want to educate our community, I want to educate Henderson County, I want to educate Western North Carolina if I can," she says. "I've also been talking to a lot of school-age kids."
In recovery, she knows she could be tempted to go back to her too-skinny ways. She still doesn't see herself as others do.
"About everybody in town knows about it so they're usually like, you look really good," she says. But the change in perception "has to come from me. Nobody can do this for me. As much as people tell me, you look good, you look good, I can walk past my mirror and still I'm like, who is that person, oh my God. It's hard."
How much does she weigh now?
"I don't know," she says. "I really don't. They're really working on me to forget about those numbers. My nutritionist knows. Every week she weighs me, because she makes sure that I'm in healthy range, that I'm not losing — trying to find that steady place for my body. Some day I'll know."