I’m a author, advocate, mother, and accidental participant in what has essentially become a multi-decade psychological science experiment involving bulimia, reward circuitry, shame, medicine, and the very American tendency to call complex biological problems “behavioral choices” so nobody has to pay for them.
For more than twenty years, I lived with bulimia. During that time, I moved through treatment programs, therapists’ offices, medical systems, and recovery spaces that often helped in pieces, but rarely explained what was actually happening biologically underneath the behaviors I was experiencing.
During those years, I became less interested in recovery slogans and more interested in questions nobody seemed able to answer:
- Why did my brain lock onto this behavior so intensely?
- Why did it feel neurologically reinforced in a way that bypassed logic completely?
- Why were some people recovering while others seemed trapped in the same loop for decades?
- And why did so much of the conversation around eating disorders feel strangely disconnected from biology?
At some point, I stopped wanting vague explanations and started reading research papers instead, which is probably how you accidentally end up on advisory boards and emailing scientists in London at three in the morning about GLP-1 receptor pathways.
Today, my work sits at the intersection of storytelling, lived experience, and scientific curiosity. I spend a lot of time thinking about reward circuitry, compulsion, motivation, reinforcement learning, and the biology underneath binge-type eating disorders. I’m particularly interested in emerging research on GLP-1 pathways and what it may reveal about satiety, addiction, compulsive behavior, and psychiatric illness more broadly.
I serve on the Board of Directors of the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), participate in multiple lived-experience advisory groups supporting research and grant initiatives, and serve on my local Women’s Commission, where I advocate for healthcare equity and gender-informed policy reform.
My forthcoming memoir explores recovery, trauma, medicine, motherhood, stigma, and the bizarre experience of surviving long enough to eventually become intellectually curious about your own suffering. It is darkly funny in places because, frankly, some parts of this experience are absurd. The human body is absurd. The healthcare system is absurd. Insurance companies are absurd. And if you don’t laugh occasionally, you will end up lying face down on the kitchen floor staring at a Cheerio wondering how your life became this emotionally expensive.
I believe patients notice things long before institutions do. I believe lived experience and science belong in conversation with one another. And I believe we still understand far less about eating disorders, reward systems, and the brain than we like to pretend we do.
I live in California with my partner, our two children, and a deeply codependent Saint Berdoodle named Marble, who approaches every closed bathroom door as if I have died in a mining accident.
Listen to “Paige Gordon Guest Author – SEARCHING FOR FULL” on Spreaker.