But in 2003, one-third of inpatient admissions to a specialized eating disorders treatment center were for people over age 30, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. In an online survey published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, 13 percent of women over age 50 were found to have eating disorder symptoms. And many older sufferers of eating disorders, some of whom have been battling the disorder since they were young, feel shame at having a “teenager’s problem” and are reluctant to get help.

After decades of therapy — of great days and good years, relapses and starting over from scratch — I realize there’s an ending these movies fail to capture. Some of us are never going to be fully cured.

That doesn’t mean we return to our anorexia rock bottom.

For me, that was when I was 20 and had become so ill that heart palpitations kept me up at night. It was when I walked down Bayswater Road so weak from hunger that traffic sounds and accents blend into a single white noise loop. It was when two photographers stopped me on the same afternoon to ask if I wanted to model while my chest rattled from walking pneumonia.

Living with eating disorder thinking means actively ignoring a voice in my head that tells me it’s dangerous to have a favorite restaurant (Tanoreen in Brooklyn) or to lick my lips while savoring sumac shredded chicken. It’s forcing myself to use positive adjectives to describe my 5-year-old’s mac and cheese after she proclaims it’s the “best thing ever.” It’s never being able to engage in conversations with other women — and, boy are there many — about losing weight or trying out a fad diet. And it’s feeling their eyes on me when I won’t join in the ritual of bashing my own thighs.

They suspect it’s because I think I’m better than everyone else; I know it’s because my weak mind can’t afford dabbling in this sport.

I feel anxiety every time I realize my body is going to change as I age, with or without my consent, whether I weigh 89 pounds or 289 pounds. I don’t trust the body and fear the ways it can turn on you. At an early age I decided that the only way to stall death or pain, or both, is to wield a lion tamer’s whip and keep cracking at the body, change after change.

For me, change is as much an enemy as weight gain and the body itself. Puberty is one of the most frequently discussed risk periods for the development of eating disorders. The frustration I have with the focus on puberty and eating disorders is that it doesn’t address the fact that every stage of life for a person with an eating disorder presents enormous changes.