Why did I have an eating disorder? I got this question a lot from the people who knew about my eating disorder. I asked myself this question even more. The short answer is really "I don't know." But there's a long answer too, so we'll explore that here.
People who have no experience with eating disorders commonly think that people who have eating disorders just want to be skinny. In reality, for most people with eating disorders, that's more of a mask, or a small part of why the eating disorder exists. It's not a diet or weight-loss program. It's an obsession that can take over your life. Or take your life.
I also had a friend ask me if it had something to do with being a picky eater. Maybe I didn't want to eat anymore because I didn't like most food? Well, I became a much pickier eater when I had an eating disorder, but I don't think that was it either.
One of the most common theories is that eating disorders are about control. The idea is that a person feels like she (or he, but since I'm a girl, we'll use she) has lost control over just about everything in her life. One thing she can control, though, is what she consumes, and so she takes that to the extreme in one way or another. It gives her a sense of power and a sense of having control over something. This might have been part of it, for me. I don't think it was all of it.
There's also family history and beliefs that are taught to us. It seems like my parents were always on diets while I was growing up. Us kids didn't have to diet because we were skinny, so we were allowed to eat whole sticks of pepperoni and things like that. I also remember my mom telling me that people who had been molested would eat and eat and get really fat. That may be true in some cases, but the damaging message I got was that if I get fat, it means I was molested, and I didn't want anyone to think that about me! I also got confusing messages from others I interacted with. When I was pretty young, maybe about 8, a girl who was older than me asked if I was anorexic. I had no idea what that meant. Generally, people spent a lot of their interactions with me commenting on how thin I was. I didn't care when I was a kid. But as I got a bit older and stopped getting those comments, I started wondering if that meant I was fat, or something was wrong with me. When I was 13 I was at a routine physical and the doctor asked me what kind of milk I drank. I told her I drank 2%. She said I'd better switch for 1% or skin or I would surely get fat in the next few years. I told her I did dance and gymnastics and swim team and I didn't think I would. She argued that I would. I didn't think much of it at the time, but looking back, I can't believe she is allowed to be a doctor, telling teenage girls things like that.
Another theory is that it is societal pressure. I competed in dance, gymnastics, and swimming. I practically lived in a leotard/swimsuit. How could I walk away from all these activities unscathed? Especially when the media bombards us with images of "ideal beauty" being unnaturally thin, made-up, airbrushed women? I am sure some people could have done all that in a society like this and walked away without an eating disorder. Maybe. But it's probably a contributing factor.
A book I read, The Secret Language of Eating Disorders, has another theory, or maybe a few theories that tie together. The big idea is that people who are predisposed to developing eating disorders are people who care "too much." These are people who watch the news and can't stop thinking about how horrible it is, and want to fix it. These are children who try to take care of their parents, "the parentified child," if you will. These are people who can't stand seeing unkindness, injustice, or devastation. This does fit me pretty well. I desperately wanted to help those starving kids in poor countries as a child and begged my mom to let me sponsor a child somewhere. I sent money every month to a little girl in India for a while when I was about 6. I also took on a role as a parent in my home, creating chore charts and assigning homework to my siblings (we were all homeschooled) and feeling responsible to be sort of a second mother. My mom let me. I'm not sure if she could have stopped me if she tried. She probably enjoyed the help. I don't think she was bad for that.
But somehow I got the idea that I was bad. This is another part of the theory from that book. I developed what the book refers to as the negative mind. Basically, the negative mind is what tells you things like "you don't deserve a cookie, you don't deserve to ever eat any cookies," and justifies it to you with some false reason like because you are fat, or stupid, or a bad friend, or something else that isn't even true. But somehow you believe the lies and do what it says and start to believe the negative mind is actually you, rather than something sabotaging the real you - the actual mind.
So there are a few very plausible contributing factors to why I developed an eating disorder. But here's the most important thing to me: it doesn't actually matter if I can pin down all the reasons perfectly. Sometimes recognizing things, especially the negative mind thing I learned about, can help us to recover. But sometimes we just torture ourselves, demanding to know exactly why we are the way we are, and there isn't a simple answer, and maybe we'll never know the answer and don't have to. I've come to be at peace with not always having to have a reason why something bad - or something good - happened.
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