Glennon Doyle is getting candid about her eating disorder.
The Untamed author shared in a recent episode of her podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, that she has been diagnosed with anorexia and is in recovery from bulimia.
"There is no way I can explain to you the level of bafflement, shock, denial, confusion," she recalled on the Jan. 2 episode, according to People. "I said [to the doctors], ‘I am a bulimic and I have been recovered and I am having relapses, and I just need to understand how to get these relapses of my bulimia under control so I can be less scared and freer and not in danger.'"
After Glennon was evaluated by her doctors, she shared that she was told she had anorexia—a diagnosis she did not expect.
"The shift of my identity as bulimic, bulimic, bulimic... anorexia is a totally different thing," the 46-year-old author said. "It's like a different religion. It's a different identity. It's a different way of thinking. It's so confusing and it shook me very deeply. And I did not believe it."
Recalling a previous difficult conversation with her wife Abby Wambach, who is a co-host on the podcast along with her sister Amanda Doyle, Glennon described the moment her wife told her she had to fight struggles on her own, saying, "I can't do this for you."
"This was a hard thing for me to say," Abby told Glennon on the episode. "I knew I had to say it. It had to be out loud, because you needed to take complete ownership over this process."
Glennon continued, "I have never felt so alone on my own body. I'm the sick one, everyone is telling me, and I am also the one who has to fix the sickness?"
In response, Glennon shared that she decided to turn to reading books on anorexia in order to figure out how to properly educate herself.
"It was a big shift in thinking for me," she said. "I don't know how to explain the feeling of reading things that you thought were part of your personality and who you were, and reading that they're actually just a collection of symptoms, of an effing disease."
Glennon admitted she felt ashamed of her lack of knowledge on the disorder.
She explained, "It was stunning to be a person whose life and work is about self-examination, is about discovering the nuance and minutiae of who we are and talking about it every day and then not know this information about yourself. It's humiliating on a level."
On her Instagram, Glennon explained why she made the decision to open up about her road to recovery.
"i'm not waiting to speak until i have my ‘tada' moment because if i do, i'll never speak," she wrote in a Jan. 3 post. "This year, we are going to be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyway."