The Rebuttal to “Why Can’t You Just Eat?”

People who don’t understand eating disorders always ask someone struggling with one a simple question: why can’t you just eat?

To people versed in these illnesses, let alone those who are struggling with one, the question is frustrating, upsetting and ignorant. Being asked the same question time and again becomes truly demoralizing.

However, the question comes from a simple and logical place. People without eating disorders just eat. Even if they worry about what they eat, when they eat or their body in general, the premise of whether or not to eat is never really relevant.

The biological imperative to eat is just too powerful.

Eating disorders, by definition, indicate a strong urge to eat or not eat by other factors then hunger and fullness. These behaviors become full-fledged eating disorders when disruptive enough to interfere greatly with daily functioning in life.

Many people think a lot about their food and body. Our culture continues to greatly magnify the importance of food and weight. Capitalism and the media prey on these communal fears, with Ozempic and the GLP-1 agonists being the latest corporate cash cow for our collective obsession with weight.

And the ever present drive towards thinness means no decrease in people developing eating disorders.

The answer to the question “why don’t you just eat” is both simple and complex.

The simple answer is that you have an eating disorder which means that you have other thoughts and urges that dictate when and how you eat. And so “just eating” isn’t possible.

The complex answer is connected to what treatment means. Recovery aims to regulate eating into a pattern based on hunger and fullness and less on the psychological and emotional drives of the eating disorder. The best step for most people is to eat according to a meal plan created by a professional and to relearn hunger and fullness cues. In time the goal is to “just eat” again but that comment isn’t helpful or kind with respect to eating disorders.

A more thoughtful and education about that overused question hopefully will lead to more understanding, and perhaps even more support, going forward.