Misty Tripoli recounts a severe, 16-year eating disorder during which she repeatedly induced vomiting—at one point vomiting blood multiple times daily—and an extreme binge/purge collapse that left her unconscious. Upon waking she experienced a profound inner shift: a voice saying “you weren’t born to hate yourself,” which prompted deep questioning and the beginning of recovery, with dance emerging as a central healing practice.
Chapters
I literally was at the point where I was throwing up three to four times a day, every single day for 16 years. Now I wouldn't be satisfied until I threw up blood. So I was literally vomiting blood up to three times a day. I almost killed myself. This throwing up culminated to a point where I had gone through an episode. I taught all my fitness classes that day. I had burned a bazillion calories. And on the way home, I stopped at, you know, McDonald's and Taco Bell and stopped and got a half gallon of ice cream and filled my car to the brim with food. And on the way home, I'm shoveling food in my mouth. And I remember looking next to me, you know, as I'm driving and I'm at a stoplight and someone's looking next to me. And the humiliation that I felt as I was literally just shoving food in my mouth and that, oh, my God, could they see, you know, how embarrassing it was and the shame that I had, that I had this disorder as a fitness professional with this eating disorder, that I had no control over my food. And I went home and finished gorging myself and drank my epcak syrup and vomited profusely. And then I did it again because I had food left over. So I did it again. And this time at the end, I was so exhausted that I literally just passed out on the. On the bathroom floor. And I was in a pool of my own blood and vomit all over the toilet, up the walls. And I don't know how long I was there, but I woke up. And when I woke up, this voice just said to me. It was like, misty, you weren't born to hate yourself. It's like wisdom or the shift in consciousness came about where I actually started to question, wow, like, why am I miserable? Why do I hate my body? Why do I have such a dysfunctional relationship with food? Why am I a different person with everybody? What is actually truth? And so I started to question everything. And through the questioning and sitting and really sitting with myself and contemplating the answers to these and allowing my brain to just mull over them, this voice inside of me as I was altering my consciousness and seeing things differently, it kept saying, misty, you gotta dance. Dance.
