What do you all think of this?

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http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... 99,00.html

Essentially, if I'm reading this correctly, they're saying that was Aspergers is to Boys, Anorexia is to Girls. Again, if I'm reading this right, that sounds like total BS to me.

-TB

What about boys who have AS and have/had anorexia?

Ha ha ha.

(I didn't read the article.)

I've noticed how AS and anorexia share the same symptoms. I've suffered an eating disorder for years now since high school. I started in 2001 when I lost five pounds over the weekend and I started dieting after that. I was still eating regularly and I was always obsessed about my weight, then I started to fight it when I was 18. I hated my weight though when I was 15 and weighed 153, then I got down to 128 by summer of 2001 after dieting. My clothes got big on me so here I was wearing baggy clothes and I remember reading on the internet about people with eating disorders wear loose clothing to hide their body (that was one of the symptoms of an eating disorder) and I thought that's me but that's not why I am wearing them, it's all I have because they got big on me so it's different for me. Now my weight is going down again thanks to working out.


Oh yeah when I was being evaluated from Social Security, the doctor was asking me questions and he said something about me being obsessed with my weight and food and I said "yeah but that's different, people with eating disorders have that obsession."

No, I think that is an oversimplification of what the article says. Anorexia appears more common in women and girls, that is why they focus on girls in this; and they do suggest that 20% of anorexics may be Aspies.

I find the article interesting, because I was once tempted to diet obsessively but I was able to stop myself because I remembered what had happened to a friend of mine (we grew up together) when she dieted without setting a bottom limit to her weight. She eventually did get over it and gained weight again... but what makes it interesting is that in recent weeks I have been thinking a lot about her, and that I think she is probably also an Aspie (haven't seen her in 20 years or more). Another childhood friend died of pneumonia in her teens (from a body weakened by anorexia), and she was such an obsessive academic that I suspect that she may have been an Aspie too.

I am so glad you posted this article! I wanted a more up-to-date article on this topic to take to my therapist to convince her my eating problems are autism-related, not anorexia-related (which my doctor knows), and that both types of eating issue have strong neurological basis. It would have been much harder just giving her pages of journal article abstracts. I am leaving therapy because she is a psychodynamicist and will not listen.

As for anorexia being a female autism, that's a very simplistic view, and I don't see where it's explicitly stated in this article. Even if it's implied, Baron-Cohen does mention the complexity of the issue of AS underdiagnosis of females:

link to description of my issues:http://www.wrongplanet.net/postxf21516-0-16410.html

It's interesting. I think though that Autism and Anorexia are different. I think a person with Autism can have Anorexia, but I also think that if someone on the spectrum has Anorexia that it may be for different reasons. It may be that Anorexia is genetic, I'm not denying that by my post, I just think that it would be on a different part of the dna. Though as regards the article, I don't think there's enough details.

It's the obsessiveness and the paranoia. I can see aspies as being more likely to get all obsessive about being skinny and getting all paranoid about looking fat.

I've heard about a co-relation between AS and eating difficulties, but that may be related to food intolerances, oversensitive nervous systems, physiological problems, fussiness with textures or tastes etc....

You can't automatically lump ASD in with anorexia, both are such complex issues.

That said, if there was someone with both conditions- the stress of one could well feed the other.

My NT sister is growing more and more AS beahviours and way of thinking as she grows up (24), maybe it's just because her role model is our aspie mom, and at the same time she's eating less and less, I think she eats way less than the needed amount, but right now she's ok, apparently.

About 10 years ago I went on diet during a time that I was suffering from clinical depression. Knowing that my emotions could drive me to obsessive and self-destructive behaviour, I decided to start my diet by looking for Internet references on ideal weight for your age and height. I got three sources which said that the lowest healthy weight for me would be 53 kg. I reckoned that if I had an objective reference like that to guide me, I would not have the problem of friends telling me I was too thin or me telling myself I was too fat. So whenever I was tempted to get out of control, or when someone said they felt I was losing too much weight, I went back to that neutral opinion of those unknown experts.

I eventually went down to 54 kg and that felt pretty good. I looked at pictures of models in books and they looked thinner than me, so I concluded that they must be unhealthy based on what my references said. I made no effort to lose more weight when I got to 54 kg.

I now weigh 61 kg again, grrr... I'd be happy to be 57 kg. Then I'd fit into my camo pants which I last wore in January 2008!

AS and anorexia DON'T have the same symptoms!! !! !! ! BOTH may first appear as social problems, but that is where they STOP!

Anorexia is almost like a singleminded goal of losing weigt, and missing the fact that the goal has been attained. It may even START with a thin person.

There is evidence in the research literature that anorexia and autism share certain similarities in cognition. For example: weak central coherence, theory of mind difficulties, impaired emotion recognition in faces, impaired set-shifting and cognitive-behavioral flexibility (i.e., executive functioning), and obsessiveness. A pilot study found they score significantly higher than controls on the Autism Spectrum Quotient.

I have been "functionally anorexic" at times of extreme stress (so-called "typical" major depression, where appetite drops), including now. Maybe (probably) this term is insulting to true anorexics and should not be used, but I lost a startling amount of weight that I could really not afford to lose in a very short amount of time because food had lost all its appeal to me and my metabolism is now pretty much that of a shrew (VERY fast).

I have to speculate if actual anorexia on one hand, and extreme loss of appetite and inability to eat due to anxiety/depression on the other, differ only in whether the conscious mind has co-opted the person's volitional self to think that the inability to eat is a choice of their own doing rather than an unavoidable symptom of extreme anxiety/depression. I weigh myself obsessively just like an anorexic might, but I am hoping to gain weight. But a tiny part of me gets some sick mental reward when I see I've lost even more weight, as if I'm looking forward to the possibility that this is getting so bad I might really truly get into a dangerous state because of it. So I can easily see the missing link between anxiety-induced appetite loss and anorexia and I've even felt the switch that could change condition A to Condition B being tugged at a bit.

To be clear: when I look in the mirror I see myself as horribly underweight, which I am, and I want nothing more than to gain back what I lost. I also in general find a wide range of body types healthy and beautiful. For me at least this is strictly an anxiety result.