Eating Disorders Are Not (And Have Never Been) About The Food

Recent blog posts reflected on the receding body positive movement, the collective idealization of thinness and the promised land of medications that will fix all our problems. As too many of us flock like moths to the fire, we forget there is no magic cure to our food and body woes. The myriad reasons weight loss, food obsession and eating disorder behaviors run so rampant in our society won’t change with one miracle.

The most common and powerful adage in eating disorder treatment is that it’s not about the food. The onset and diagnosis of eating disorders start with behaviors, weight and health. Long after these symptoms normalize, the underlying cause for the eating disorder emerges.

There is no question that normalizing eating and nourishing one’s body consistently is a foundation of treatment; however, eating disorders stem from emotional, existential and psychological struggles. Pretending otherwise only ensures lifelong discomfort and unhappiness.

We are all susceptible to the cultural pressures for thinness, but not everyone develops an eating disorder. Some people have a genetic predisposition. The large majority have psychological and emotional underpinnings—elucidated at length in this blog—that transform disordered eating into an eating disorder.

The marketing of magic drugs to turn off food noise conveniently avoids and ignores the emotional needs for people with eating disorders. Since regulating food and weight through recovery never leads to truly getting well, medications won’t be any more effective. The cynical conclusion is that eating disorders and disordered eating are just about the weight and food. Feelings will be ignored at our own peril.

The result is likely to be a strong and prolonged backlash of weight gain and compensatory eating after the medication-induced food restriction. As more people need to go off medications due to side effects, rapid weight gain and the flooding with old feelings are going to affect many more people in severe ways.

The solution is not to lose track of emotional needs or allow the thinness obsession to obscure deeper meaning in life. No drugs will really affect our need to be human and attend to our emotional selves.