Written By: Katie Schipper

Misconceptions of Eating Disorders

Written By: Katie Schipper

Like drug addiction and alcoholism, eating disorders are a vastly misunderstood disease. The mental, emotional, spiritual and physical anguish that accompanies active eating disorders is immense and nearly impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced similar suffering. Also like alcoholism, the obsessive thinking and pathological devotion to protecting the disease are such that outsiders often resort to blaming the individual – this makes it easier to understand and easier to swallow, as a parent, friend or partner who feels powerless to help. Over a series of articles we will look at common misconceptions of eating disorders – dismantling myths is a vital step in the future of eating disorder treatment and in common perception of the disease as a whole.

Misconception: Eating Disorders are a Choice

Perhaps the most dangerous of the myths about eating disorders is the insistence that the afflicted chose his or her condition. Again, the parallels to addiction are impossible to ignore; while initially there may have been behaviors that were chosen there comes a point in the life of anyone with the disease when the power of choice vanishes. The dieting and exercise were no longer about looking thinner. They became compulsions and addictions in and of themselves. They led to still worse and more dangerous habits like laxative abuse, purging, and often drugs, legal and elicit, which promised weight loss. The same can be said of those that suffer from binge eating and compulsive over eating – what initially began as a comfort soon took on dangerous proportions to the point that consumption was no longer a choice. Like an alcoholic with a bottle of booze, eventually all control, all choice, vanishes from the individual with an eating disorder.

 how can you recover from eating disorders?

Eating disorders can be deadly

Eating disorders are fatal if not treated. They carry a higher mortality rate than addiction and alcoholism; in fact, they are the most deadly of illnesses classified as mental. Again, like addiction, the paths that lead to such an illness are varied and usually a combination of both a person’s nature and the environment he or she lives in (nurture). There is never one single cause. For many young men and women, the first noticeable sign of an eating disorder is poor body image. The insistence that this is the end all and be all of an eating disorder, however, is what feeds into this first deadly misconception. Eating disorders are not about vanity. That can be a first step, a first warning sign and trigger, but in the end the disease has very little to do with how one looks.

How many people a year do eating disorders kill?

Eating disorders are not a choice

While eating disorders are not a choice and should not be viewed as such, recovery from eating disorders is a choice available to a suffering man or woman. Eating disorder treatment paired with ongoing aftercare can be successful in a willing individual. Long-term recovery is not possibly, however, by merely treating symptoms of the disease. Symptoms include those things that look like causes, i.e. the desire to be thin or dissatisfaction with one’s body. Causes have to be discovered and faced honestly for a hope of recovery. As with recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, recovery must be an ongoing, lifelong process and cannot be done alone. Making the first step in recovery is becoming clear about the true nature of the disease – that it is not a choice.

Where can I find eating disorder treatment?