eating disorder

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Can anyone else commiserate about having an eating disorder? Not "had" an eating disorder when you were younger that you recovered from and never went back, but an enduring eating disorder that just won't go away completely? It's been years and I'm still on this runaway train.

I have times, months, where I'm doing all right. The eating disordered thoughts are always there and I'm always unhappy with my body but add in the right amount of pressure and all of the sudden I'm not eating again.

I've gone around and around and around in this circle for years. I maintain a normal weight most of the time. Then I get smacked with the eating disorder and drop weight again, and then I find a way out of it and gain the weight back. Whenever I revert to the eating disorder it's sudden and complete. I don't gradually cut down my intake. I just stop eating.

The very first time it started it wasn't about weight, it was about control. Then it became about weight. Now it's a mishmash of control issues and weight and just plain being a maladaptive coping mechanism.

I know the hot thoughts. The familiar litany of "I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not pretty enough, I'm not talented enough." I have yet to come up with something strong enough to fight that battle and win for good.

Is anyone else stuck in such a hole?

ive never been diagnosed but i think i meat the criteria for binge eating disorder


edit: i mean meet sorry lol it makes it sound like i binge on meat lol i wish ,unfortunately i tend to binge on high carb foods

Having an eating disorder is something permanent.. it does not ever go away, you are always at risk for relapsing during stressful times. I have been battling mine for 17 years.

I've had severe periods of "binge eating disorder" and this behaviour tends to resurface whenever I am stressed or bad psychologically. I used to compensate these periods with diets. I have stopped but my eating behaviours are still unusual and probably bad.

I tend to control everything. I plan what I am going to eat in order to avoid binging AND gaining weight.

I always had a tendency to eat the same thing over and over again but I do not think it's an eating disorder in itself. However, I know control what I eat. It's "healthy" because I try to eat healthy food and avoid big restrictions by allowing myself to eat something unhealthy sometimes (and then try to compensate by drinking tea and walking in the street for 2 hours) but really, I'm pretty sure the way I behave is linked to my past and is still an "eating disorder" though I am not becoming unhealthily fat or skinny. It's invisible but the behaviour is here, everything is about control over the craving and the food to control my weight.

As TiaMaria says, stressful times are always the times when you see that you had this eating disorder. Interestinhly enough, I found that most people I know tend to have these strange behaviours when they were psychologically distressed, I do not know whether most people meet the criteria for eating disorder or not but it seems to me that most people (mostly females though) have a tendency to diet/have short periods of "anorexia" and then binge. It's probably more of an environmental eating disorder since it's linked to weight, I know an anorexic girl who has "grown out of it" for now and she says that "food was her enemy" because it was inside her body and she felt the need to purify herself, it was not the consequences of the society and of a bad body image, she felt impure when she felt that something was in her body. I think this kind of eating disorder is much more complicated than the ones that seems to be more and more common nowadays though every one should be helped really...

I do that too.. I repeatedly eat the same things day in and day out. How it starts getting bad is during periods where I obsess over being more "healthy" and restrict more and more things from my diet until there isn't much left for me to eat.. which of course is not healthy. I'll end up eating 400 calories a day. And I will walk for hours during these periods.. because I'm trying to be "in shape" and "healthy." And also pacing is how I stem.




Yes, I've done that too. Had obsessions with "purifying" myself during times when I felt my entire life was out of control, so I'd go on fasts. The probably being, the fasts would last a really long time and my stomach would shrink. Then it would be hard to start eating again.

Also, sometimes I feel like I don't deserve food. Or eating makes me remember how alone I am, because it can be such a social activity. I will not want to go to a restaurant by myself, shop for my self, or cook a meal for one. It hurts too much. So I just avoid eating altogether. And I will do this on a subconscious level, and not even notice that I have stopped eating.

I have learned that when I get stressed out or depressed, especially after a breakup or something, I need to be very AWARE and force myself to eat right. I have to repeat mantras to myself over and over again, mantras about deserving health and happiness, and having permission to enjoy food alone.

I do that too, I sometimes end up eating less than I should like you and walk too much (I can't do lots of sports so walking is my way of staying "healthy" but in the end, it's not).

However, unlike you, I feel like I don't deserve to be healthy and "in shape" because of my past (binging eating disorder) therefore there are times when I eat a lot and stop exercising because I feel like I have no choice, that I can only be fatter and die young (strange thoughts I know).
So, basically, the bad feeling I can have about myself makes me eat nonstop. But I control it now (and I try to control the way I control it, it's like a vicious circle).


Anyway, I know what you mean by the shrinking of the stomach, however, I've always wondered if the binging habbits could have the opposite effect on it. I've also wondered if being a premature child (they make us eat like we're fat geese) was a cause of all of my strange eating habbits (I have to admit it : I always had binging periods (even before the stressful life I had as a teenager), and when I started to think that I should stop, I only developped a bad eating habbit instead).



I hope this is not an inappropriate question but is there someone to help you with your eating disorder ? Because the obsession over purity and the way you feel about food must be terrible and I think that support is essential when one have an eating disorder (especially a complex one).
I know that being aware of it is a positive thing because it makes us want to improve and control it, that's what I'be been doing for a year, however, the solutions may not be the best.


And to everyone who would read this : eating too much (sometimes to the point of being sick) is truly an eating disorder, one does not have to starve themselves to have a problem with food. Controling your eating habits is also wrong, though it depends to what extent.

Sadly, no. My friends just kind of laugh it off, because they see me go through periods where I love food and eat more of it than they do. When I am not eating, they don't know, because those are the periods where I withdraw and stop socializing with anyone. When I tell friends I have an eating disorder and I've been starving myself and need to put a healthy amount of weight back on, they just kind of shake their heads and say I look great. They say they wish they were as skinny as me, or that I look the same as I always have & they can't see a drop in my weight.

It's very frustrating. I've gotten nothing but positive attention or denial from other people when it comes to my eating disorder.

I am, however, writing a memoir about my AS and the eating disorder, which I believe go hand-in-hand. I hope my story will help others out there.

I know that feeling- my ED wasn't diagnosed for 5 years because it was more about control than weight, then I went into hospital for 2 years and had outpatient treatment for 3. I can't seem to get rid of it . Ironically it was through treatment for that that discussion about Asperger's came up, and I think that for me the ED came from the same need for routine and control. Because it wasn't recognized when I was growing up, I couldn't figure out why I was 'weird' (other people's word) and why I seemed to annoy people without meaning to, or why I had strong fixations on things and no interests in common with other people at school, so for some reason I thought it was because of my weight. Now it's more of a routine/control issue- I'm at uni and need some structure.

I relapsed after I had a miscarriage and then it went away again when I found out I was pregnant.

Yes, they have found links between Asperger's and eating disorders, because of the fixations and need for routines. That is where mine came from. It was never about me thinking I was fat or wanting to look like a supermodel, which is all I ever read about when I read about eating disorders. It was really just about routines and control over my life. Other aspects of my life were beyond my control and I couldn't make it fit into routines, but when it came to what I did or did not eat I had power.

Mine disappeared with pregnancy because I was so obsessed with making sure the baby was healthy, and had this terrifying realization that the baby's development was reliant on my own health and eating habits.

It comes back whenever I am very stressed out or depressed, like when a serious relationship ends. I withdraw, spend a lot of time alone, and don't want to eat because that's such a social activity in a lot of ways.. or it certainly becomes one when you have a live-in lover. Eating just becomes a reminder of how alone I am and how abandoned I feel when they go away.

That's how it started for me- I still don't really think about how I look (don't even have a mirror, lol), but the routine side of ED seems to take over. I still seem to associate losing weight with people accepting me, even though rationally i know it doesn't make a difference :s.

It's quite the same thing for me.

As I said, I always had some binging periods and I do not know, and I always liked to eat the same think over and over again so when I started to starve myself or diet, it was about control because I had no real control over my eating habbits (living with my parents) or binging periods. It was not about weight, it's actually when I started to lose some weight because I had no longer any binging periods (funnily enough, they come back everytime I live with my parents and have to change my eating habbits) that I started to think about "eating healthily and maintaining my weigth" and I still do not know if it's the same as other people who starve themselves in order to lose weight and be beautiful.

Firstly : because I only feel that I do not deserve to be healthy (more healthy than thin) during my binging periods, so it's linked to something else but I cannot put my finger on it. When I have control, I feel very well, even when I eat unhealthy food (because it's part of my routine, there are days or hours when I am allowed to eat something else).

Secondly : I have become obsessed with "being healthy" so I have also stopped starving myself (because it's totally unhealthy) and tried to find another way to control everything (so, I seem normal but actually I plan everything, for example, today I am going to eat a small portion of rice with peppers, tomatoes and a banana, and tonigh I'll have a soup with a piece of bread and an apple, and I can visualize exactly the number of peppers, tomatoes and the quantity of rice I am going to cook) which is apparently wrong though it is not physically unhealthy.
I also do this with drinks. I will drink 3 to 5 cups of tea a day (because I am addicted to tea and to my "tea routine") : one in the morning, one after lunch and one before 8pm at least. I have hours for that too.
And I allow myself to drink soft drinks twice a week only.

But it's really more routine and health than about weitgh. Years ago, I would eat only mashed potatoes because it was my routine. My eating habbits have never been normal. I know that most people would think that it is not a problem, the way I eat, but actually, my doctor think it's not normal, apparently people should not plan what they eat, etc... I think, perhaps, my past eating disorders make him think that I still have a problem but when I talk with my friends I realize that no one else is trying to make a routine or to plan what they are going to eat and that the people who have to do that hate it.

The positive side of this is that I have less troubles with my IBS now. Physically, I'm fine. Psychologically, I know that there's something strange, especially in the fact that I replan everything when I accept to go out to eat something with my flatmates in order to be more social. Though I am psychologically fine compared to the times when I binge (and obviously, it still happens, you're never really healed from an eating disorder as someone said).

I do not know whether I have Asperger or not, but I think that AS are more likely to develop an eating disorder, not always the three major ones, because they enjoy routines most of the time.


EDIT : I've seen a documentary about eating disorder and a specialist was saying that most people who feel that they are out of it have started to control everything, that most eating disorder are about control and not only weight though the two causes are sometimes intertwined (especially among females). They said that we rarely take care of eating disorder when someone is not scarily skinny (and on the other hand, everyone who is naturally skinny will have the "eating disorder talk") or obese (though most obese people are believed to be only lazy) but there are a lot of healthy people who have abnormal eating habbits.

Yes I am stuck in that hole. It started a few years ago and it was never about me thinking I'm fat. It was all about achieving something (losing weight) when I was seemingly failing at everything else. As long as the number on the scale kept dropping and did not get any higher, none of my other failures mattered, because I still had this one success. I was living on 300 calories a day and taking laxatives by the dozen.
Fortunately it is not that bad anymore, however my weight fluctuates because it's still there. It nags at me every single day, and some days there's just that one thing that sets it off and that familiar feeling of hunger reminds me that it's the one thing that will always be by my side.
Yes I know that my thinking is distorted but there's not much I can do about it that I haven't already tried.

That's really similar to me- I've had binging periods too, but mainly when I'm at home and have to change my eating habits. Luckily most of the time my mum's fine with me having routines, it used to cause arguments when I was younger but now, especially after finding out more about AS, she's doesn't seem to mind as much.

I find it really hard with other people though, both eating and socializing, because it messes with my routines. I don't like going out at night because it means I'm too tired the next day (I get up at 7), but it's hard finding time during the day that doesn't clash with an 'eating time' because I don't like eating in front of people. Add that to the fact that I don't like groups and it kind of explains why I'm not particularly sociable! Strangely I'm OK at the school I work in, I think it's because of the timetable and routine or that I'm only every really with one teacher at a time, but I've never had problems with eating or talking to other teachers there :s. Maybe that's why I like it there so much- I hate school holidays!

I think AS can definitely make EDs more likely, especially when they're undiagnosed- I thought there was something I was doing wrong, and that I'd fit in better if I lost weight and was more 'organized', which fitted in well with routines.

I've struggled with eating disorders my whole life.


Well. Not technically.
According to the DSM, a woman has to be below 85% of your "ideal" body weight and miss three menstrual periods to be classified as anorexic.
So, even when I was `19 and ate not so much as a cracker for eight months,
I didn't technically have a specific diagnosable eating disorder because I was still chubby and menstruated.
A woman has to be dangerously thin for society to consider her to be sick, so I guess that's reflected in the psychiatric community.


I wish I could say that the struggle gets better. It does help to have people around you who TRULY love you
and who can and will stay on your case about your behavior and attitudes toward yourself.