Eating disorders typically start in adolescence or early adulthood. Food manipulation and overvaluing weight are important to people at this stage of life but not nearly as all encompassing as they are for people with eating disorders.
Thinking too much about food and weight represents a way to feel calmer or more secure for a stage of life that is very uncertain. Looking a certain way of managing food appear to be superficial tools to find comfort.
For people with eating disorders, these tools become the sole important aspect of their lives. The thoughts are so dominant that all other parts of life become irrelevant. It is worth sacrificing anything and everything in order to achieve the goals the eating disorder sets forth.
The total obsession about food and weight has unforeseen repercussions in recovery. As someone begins to learn how to counter the eating disorder thoughts and make changes in behaviors around food, they start to realize that they are unsure what else to think about or focus on. The concept of other interests or goals has long since been ignored and replaced by food and weight.
This realization is often accompanied by a sense of emptiness and loneliness. Without guidance to know how to face this terrifying prospect, it often feels simpler to lean back into the eating disorder. The person may not even want to return to those thoughts and symptoms. The vast expanse of an open day of thoughts and feelings seems too overwhelming to have it any other way.
After successfully changing eating patterns, recovery needs to switch gears and focus on rebuilding an internal and external sense of what life means. Many recovery philosophies have an existential bent for this reason.
At any age, the person in recovery will need to look at themselves and their own lives and start a crash course in emotional and psychological development.
As hard as this step can be, it also will be very rewarding. Being willing to look at oneself opens the door to a full life. The desire to learn and grow, weathering the excitement and pain that comes along with it, does enable the person in recovery to fully find a way out.
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