I'm Allison Barringer and this is Bodies, a podcast about people solving the mysteries of their bodies.

This is the last episode of season two and I've been thinking about how one of the common

injustices in many of the stories this season is how the medical establishment and a lot of

big structures in our society want us to be one thing. But we are many things, and that can be

lonely in a world that doesn't make space for complexity. Bodies is about illuminating every one of those complex layers

and sitting in the chaos of our inner worlds,

not to fix the messiness, but to examine it and honor it.

Today we're doing something new. We're featuring a rising independent producer named Nico Whistler.

This is Nico's story, and it's about that complexity. It took Nico a long time to realize

they could be many things at once. It's a tale of two mysteries that become one.

Here's Nico.

In the spring of 2014, I was 23 years old. I had just moved to San Francisco for my first real job. Things were good. And then, all of a sudden I stopped eating. I became

obsessed with counting calories. I didn't let myself eat more than five or

six hundred a day.

A banana for breakfast, a salad for lunch, steamed broccoli for dinner.

If I had a meal that felt unhealthy, I would make myself throw up afterwards. I wasn't sure why I wasn't

letting myself eat. It wasn't that I wanted to look different. It was more like I wanted my body to feel different. I wanted parts of my

body to disappear. When I pulled on my genes, I did it quickly, trying to avoid touching the curve of my hips.

In the shower, when I ran the washcloth over my body, I tried to turn my brain off when I cleaned

my chest. But this compulsion to count calories didn't line up with the

identity I had built for myself. Most weekends my friends and I went for bike rides outside the city. It felt

rad to ride as part of an all-women crew. My friend had a jersey that said blue skies

...