anorexia and AS

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One thing that i've struggled with a few yrs back was anorexia. It was an obsession i was obssesed with how small i could get and things like that I wondered if it could have stemmed from my AS. Is anyone else here had a simliar experience with an eating disorder anorexia or bulimia? The anorexia seemed to take place after my other interest went away and then all my time and focus went to the anorexia and what a starved body goes through and i thought it was cool! I know its sick to think about now.

t is caused by lack of control...in your case the lack of your passion was the cause.

I have read before that ASD and ED are related. In numerous places. I had issues with ED when I was younger and it was definitely not what people usually describe it as. When I was anorexic, for example, I had no fear of being fat and did not think I was fat. The mechanism was different. I suspect the ED in ASD and AC people is different than mainstream ED.

For me i remember feeling abit chubby and wanted to lose a few pounds but in the beginning, once i lost like 10 pounds or so i didnt think i was fat at all i just wanted to keep losin weight cus i was obsessed.

daydreamersworld, to be blunt, that is the talk of a psycho. You wanted a sense of control from losing your passion. It is no different from how anorexia starts for everyone else.

I don't think it came from my AS. My eating disorder was all about being thin and thinking I was fat. I also used it for control. I wanted to control my body so I used food for it. I think I started to head down that way in high school and people kept on encouraging it because they were all telling me what great self control I had. I was only eating three meals a day and no snacks and seconds. I was counting calories and if I were to get a huge chocolate, I would eat a piece of it everyday. Plus in my senior year, I would have dinner and then go upstairs to the treadmill and burn it all off and I be doing it for an hour. My parents commented on about how great I was with it. That also encouraged it too. I hear all this is signs of an eating disorder even though they don't always mean it but it can also mean a sign for someone is heading there. People don't even realize they are leading someone to take that pathway to an ED when they make those comments. I also think telling someone they are skinny and thin enough or that they need to put on a few pounds will just make them want to lose even more weight and be even more obsessed with their body size and weight and maybe starve themselves even more or eat less food even more. That was the case with me.


Oh yeah I was also obsessed with losing weight. It all started when I came home from the weekend with my family and my brothers friends and we were all skiing. I had lost five pounds over the weekend. I hardly ate that weekend due to lack of food in our condo. I decided I wanted to keep it up and I remembered reading in the alamanic book my brothers that that if you give yourself calories less than your body needs, you will lose weight. I had found a short cut to losing weight. You didn't need to work out to lose weight, just eat less food so that is what I did. No more snacking, just eat three times a day, no seconds. I was 15 then. By June of 2001, I was down to 128 and my body stopped right there. I went from 153 all the way down to there. I was told this is a mind of an eating disorder and they have this mind concept about losing weight. They see a fact about giving your body less calories than it needs, it gives them an idea how to lose the weight. They find a short cut. I used to call it the lazy way of losing weight, I still consider it that.

Eating disorders generate from a lack of self confidence, I'm sure many people on the spectrum suffer from low self esteem, and feeling as though we are disconnected from mainstream society which idolizes perfection. I can't help but squirm at the sight of the word anorexia, just because it brings back a lot of bad memories, but it also makes me miss the control that I had over my own image, even though, realistically I was out of control since I could not get rid of the nagging feeling that everything I put in my mouth is making me fat.

I think it's a bit like alcoholism, and any other addiction/ mental illness (not that I believe addictions are mental illnesses, but the mindset may very well be), you never get through it 100%, it will always stay with you in a haunting sort of way, it's something you just want to forget because if you slip and fall back into that pit, it's such a long way back out.
That's how it is for me, anyway. But I count myself lucky that I didn't succumb to the levels of so many people with eating disorders, I regained a portion of control which was enough for me to "get out".
It is such a dangerous and dark place to live, I wouldn't wish it upon anyone.

I've had ED problems too- was anorexic for a few years and it was through seeing someone for that that the idea of ASD came up (the woman I was seeing happened to have been trained in ASD before she changed to ED). For me, they're definitely linked and even now I don't know what is from which. I'm very structured anyway and with an ED, that became a lot more food-focussed as well as routine and I already didn't eat lots of different foods, so that became more restricted. I wanted to lose weight, partly because I thought it would make more people at school like or accept me and partly because (this is going to sound weird, sorry) when I went under a certain weight, my obsessive feelings and anxiety (particularly about other people) would fade a lot and all that mattered was routine/structure which was a lot easier to cope with. Now I'm a 'recovering anorexic with bulimic tendencies' which basically means that my weight's 'normal' but I still eat an anorexic diet during the day (less stress) and binge/purge at night to cope with a feeling I can't identify (a bit like a really nervous, guilty nausea) which comes when I stop (I keep as busy as I possibly can during the day so I don't feel it much then but it's like an underlying feeling that surfaces when I stop).

I have struggled with an eating disorder for the last decade but I've had eating problems since birth. A lot of it is due to sensory problems. I am sensory seeking in my mouth but I have big problems with 1) sensory discrimination and 2) tolerating the sensation in my stomach. I cannot tell if I am hungry or full and I cannot tell if I am thristy or not. I also strggle with hypoglycemia which further complicates things. Then I have OCD which makes it a bit more complicated (including a phobia of involuntary vomiting), add in the further ASD complications and you have yourself a compleatly chronic and severe eating disorder.
I am severly bulimic, I vomit pretty much everything (voluntary vomiting in my head helps prevent me getting sick). It also means I don't have to have that horrid feeling in my stomach that feels like being tickled and I hate it. Food has rules and numbers like everything in my life and I don't get how people are able to just eat. How do you know if you have too much? When I was little I would eat till I was sick because I can't tell when I am full, by the time I started to feel sick it was too late.
The big problem is, ED treatment revolves around the idea that eventually you'll learn to 'intuitively' eat but that implies that you have the ability to register body sensations, if you don't then it's hard to do if not impossible.

Here's an article from Time magazine: http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... 99,00.html

As soon as I had to ween off the bottle (around age 2) I developed Selective Eating Disorder, which was horrible.
I ate the same 5 things every day for almost seven years.

Then I was on the chubby side for a few years, always trying to expand my "acceptable foods library" and exercising to lose weight.
Around age 23 I gained a bit more, crossed over into BMI 25 territory and became Anorexic.
I still am, so that's six plus years of Anorexia plys seven years of SED = thirteen out of 29 years of having an eating disorder.
And I am a loooong way from even wanting to get a BMI of over 18, let alone start working on getting rid of the Anorexia.

My current autism psychologist says ED's are different in ASDs, but I don't think she really knows.
She has no real experience and is very narrow minded, for instance completely ignoring my PTSD because another psychologist is willing to work with me on that.

Her colleague psychiatrist is quite worried and me and her will have a talk soon with the psychologist about the Anorexia.
Funny thing this topic came up now, as I just yesterday told the psychiatrist that I was willing to change the diagnosis from EDNOS to Anorexia on paper.
Over the past 5 years of threatment it went like this: 1) There is no problem with my weight. 2) They (therapists) have a problem with my "eating" 3) "The eating problem" 4) Sigh, well okay, I guess I do meet all the criteria for Anorexia... Let's just be honest and call it that.

Those 4 steps took me five full years, just admitting the term does apply to me.
I see it as a first, small step, at looking into what sort of treatment might be in order, next to the PTSD and autism meetings/help I am getting now.
Something must be done, as I really am starting to have a VERY hard time maintaining weight over the "Bag 'em and pump 'em full of food"-limit.
I asked for -and got- a referral for a DEXA scan yesterday. Should be done every two years, but since it was "EDNOS" they never thought about it.

And let me tell you something, if forced feeding is attempted me and the doctors are going to be at war. And I fight a dirty, mean guerrilla battle.
I'm almost 30 and know how to play the system. I just don't want to have to put energy into that...

Sorry if this turned out to be a rant!

Right now I'm simply restricting. Well, more like calorie counting... I'm actually FORCING myself to snack on candy I like, to not fall below the weight agreed to in a stupid contract the psychiatrist set up.
It used to be I could just snack and it was nice. Now even that is annoying me. Sigh, I SO wish I was allowed to loose 3 KG.
I'd look so lean and awesome!

I think this is my problem too.

Actually, recent research has shown -ED's aside- that obese people can only EVER get healthy by eating less. Exercising doesn't work, nothing does, except less calorie-intake.
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/07July/Page ... erers.aspx

So what you did wasn't the easy way, but pretty much the ONLY way to loose weight.
And indeed it works, as you, me and all my Anorexic friends can attest to.

My psychiatrist said that when Anorexics restrict their eating the same areas of the brain light up in an MRI when drug/alcohol addicts get what they crave, suggesting it is in fact as real an addiction as meth-amphetamines and the like.

What I do know is that you NEVER truly recover, and you must be vigilant of relapsing forever... At least that's what everyone says that I trust on this.

That's what happens when the brain supposedly cannot get enough calories to function normally. It get's into a different power-saving mode, where emotions lessen.
You should read up on that if you haven't.
Problem is; stay there too long and the changes become permanent (or at least impossible for you to WANT to go back) and then within a year or so you die from starvation...

I know the science of it, and the problem is that I kind of want that again but can't because the bingeing/purging is too useful for short term management and while I'm doing that, my weight goes up (no idea why since I vomit but the dietician said it's probably because I've been restricting for so long that my body takes every calorie it can as quickly as it can and I put on weight really easily). I've have an ED since I was 13 (I'm 25 now) and have been an inpatient three times although not in the last five years, really want to stop the bingeing coz I hate it but it gets rid of the guilty/nauseous feeling I don't like.