If you have been dealing with eating issues for a while, you may be asking yourself “Why do I have an eating disorder?” Where did it come from? What could you have done to cause it? How can you fix it? The question “why” can be helpful in determining the root causes of the issue, but please remember that self-blame is not what we’re after here. Asking “why” with the motivation of beating yourself up for your failings is not helpful in the recovery process.
So, here are some of the common factors that contribute to developing an eating disorder.
Living in Diet Culture
I hear clients wanting to blame themselves for their eating disorders. However, I find that it is a complex web of factors that contribute to developing issues around food. No one ever wakes up one morning and decides to have an eating disorder.
One big factor present in all eating disorder cases is the fact that we all live in diet culture. It’s inescapable. Even if you grew up in the most loving home in the world where your parents never talked about diets. Even if you never received negative messages about your weight or looks at home. You would still be negatively impacted by diet culture.
We are surrounded daily by messages about how dieting or “health” is the morally right thing to do, how we are bad if we gain weight or don’t fit the thin ideal, and how people who don’t live in thin bodies are “lazy” or unattractive. Attractive, thin, white, cisgender, and able bodied is the ideal that is pumped into our psyches every day.
We grow up with this messaging in movies and social media. One literally cannot walk outside their home or turn on their phone or computer without encountering these messages. And, yes, we are doing a better job of teaching children at a younger age about body image, the media, and how to be better consumers of advertising, but that doesn’t erase the enormous amount of this harmful messaging that gets into their brains and hearts.
Diet culture is just that, a deeply embedded part of our culture that you cannot escape. Every single person I have met that had an eating disorder has been deeply impacted by diet culture.
Dieting
It is hard to endure diet culture without becoming a dieter. Just like that old saying that if you sit around at the barber shop long enough you’re bound to get a haircut. If you endure diet culture long enough you’re bound to go on a diet at some point. Even people who I see that make it out of their teens and early twenties without dieting often succumb to it as they age or after they have children.
Dieting leads to eating disorders. Period. If you didn’t go on a diet to begin with–ever–then you would most likely not have an eating disorder. There are a few cases here and there for which this is not true, and those are usually brought on by childhood trauma.
The younger you begin dieting, the more likely you are to develop an eating disorder. The way of relating to yourself and food from dieting gets embedded from a young age and it becomes hard to kick.
Environment: Friends, Family, Peers, Sports Teams
Once you’re inevitably exposed to diet culture, the people around you can make your chances of getting an eating disorder worse. If you grow up in a family that values thinness, talks about dieting, compares bodies, is rigid around food or exercise, doesn’t allow sweets or other play food or exhibits other trappings of diet culture, then you’re doubly affected.
Additionally, if you’re involved in sports that focus on body shape, thinness, or appearances then you’re influenced by diet culture even more. Peer relationships can also have an impact. The more you’re surrounded by people who talk about body image, see themselves negatively, diet, exercise for weight loss or toning instead of joy, or are focused on thinness and weight, the more entrenched diet culture becomes for you.
Inability to Cope with or Express Emotions
Effectively coping with emotions is not a skill many of us learned in childhood. Especially if you grew up in any kind of dysfunction or trauma, talking about emotions was probably discouraged. Then when dieting is introduced into your life, it can be so easy to fall into the cycle of dieting or restriction as a means of coping with feelings of any kind.
You see, there is an emotional reward system in dieting. You start a new diet and feel hopeful. The promise of feeling thin, fitting in, and being admired is intoxicating. Usually, the first diet or two is “successful” in terms of weight loss, and you get lots of positive attention. Your body then goes into “starvation” mode without enough fuel, and you end up with intense cravings that are biologically trying to keep you alive (but you don’t see them that way because you’re focused on weight loss).
Add stress or difficult life transitions and these cravings are nearly impossible to ignore. All this translates to either binging, out-of-control eating, or weight gain. Feeling like a failure, you redouble your efforts at the diet and the process starts all over again.
Once you do this a few times, you find yourself going to food as a coping mechanism when you’re off the diet. Diving into sugar and binging feels great in the moment and temporarily squelches any kind of stress or life difficulties. If you’re in the diet phase of the cycle, you use the restriction, rules, and over-exercising to tamp down emotions and falsely build self-esteem. These patterns of coping with emotions become deeply engrained and challenging to unravel on your own.
Mental Health Difficulties
Having self-esteem issues, depression, anxiety, ADHD, a tendency to obsess or worry, or any other mental health issue can greatly contribute to having difficulties with food. As with any compulsive or self-destructive behavior, eating disorders do not just appear out of nowhere. They very often develop because there is some underlying issue. That is not to say that you are to blame if you have any of these mental health difficulties. It merely means that these predispose you to using food for comfort, falling prey to diets, or using food/exercise/dieting to cope.
Life Transitions
Many of the people I have worked with began their first diet or first eating disordered behaviors during a difficult life transition involving multiple factors in their lives. Like leaving home for college, or learning to live with the chronic illness of a loved one, or both at the same time. Not having the tools to cope with emotions, being exposed to diet culture in society and at home, can be the backdrop. Add a major life transition, and it’s a recipe for an eating disorder or unhealthy ways of relating to food.
Trauma History
Additionally, growing up in trauma such as a physically or verbally abusive household, or a home with a parent who is mentally ill or addicted to a substance can predispose you to eating disorders. Trauma sets up your brain to overdevelop in certain ways and under-develop in others. This is something that you can learn to have the utmost compassion with yourself for. You didn’t cause this to happen in your life. Now that you understand it better, you can get help from a professional (or a team of professionals), and fully recover from both the eating disorder and the trauma.
I have personally not seen people fully recover from an eating disorder permanently unless they also addressed their trauma. Does every person with an eating disorder have trauma? Perhaps not. Sometimes it is not the classic “Big T” traumas, but rather ongoing, smaller “little t” traumas that you may not think are impacting your life today. Whatever the case for you, addressing trauma with a therapist, body worker, or another therapeutic or body-based modality can be the key to lasting recovery.
So, the answer the the question “Why do I have an eating disorder” is complex and multi-faceted. I hope that your take away from this article is that no matter the reason you’re dealing with eating issues, it is definitely not because there is something inherently wrong with you or bad. The first step in addressing eating issues is finding compassion for yourself for having this in the first place. You are not to blame!
