It’s Not About the Food, It’s About the Feeling: What Eating Disorders Are Really Trying to Tell Us

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, there are three broad areas of eating-disorder recovery: physical recovery, meaning treating the ways that the body may have suffered physically from disordered eating; behavioral recovery, meaning changing attitudes and behaviors around food and exercise; and psychological recovery, which is the most difficult to describe and, perhaps, to understand. We psychotherapists who work with people with eating disorders or body image issues acknowledge that these clients may obsess over calories, pounds, and clothing sizes, but that the root of the problem runs deeper than that. It’s not really about the food, but about the unconscious feelings that manifest as eating disorders.

 What is it, then, that eating disorders are really trying to tell us? From a psychodynamic point of view, eating disorders are a manifestation of emotions that may be too threatening to convey, or even feel. In working with many of his patients who struggled with anorexia, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud theorized that young women unconsciously expressed their fears of puberty and motherhood through anorexic behaviors. In modern psychodynamic theory, the unconscious feelings aren’t typically so gendered and role-based as this, but the idea remains the same: that the person struggling with the eating disorder isn’t really trying to lose weight, isn’t really trying to obtain some specific outcome, because that outcome ultimately never ends up being enough. No matter how much weight that person loses, no matter how many miles they run or how much they restrict, they always feel that there is more to lose, more to run, more to restrict. An unattainable goal is a clear indication that something else is behind eating disordered behaviors other than just being dissatisfied with one’s body.

 There isn’t any one feeling in particular that can manifest as an eating disorder. Feelings ranging from anger to grief to anxiety can all present as behaviors or beliefs around food, weight, and body image. In many ways, eating disordered behaviors are born of obsessive compulsive disorder, as there is a fixation on what is allowed, what isn’t allowed, and anxiety if certain rules are not adhered to.

Here’s an example: Picture a child who was told their whole life to stay quiet, stay out of the way, not to make trouble, to be good. When the child becomes an adult, they develop a belief that they are overweight (even if they aren’t) and make it their goal to lose weight, get smaller. This person, who internalized the belief that being seen and taking up space are bad, has now begun to make themselves smaller, to take up less space, to figuratively, if not literally, try to disappear from sight. This person may be expressing feelings of anger, guilt, and shame as an eating disorder.

The actress Portia de Rossi wrote an entire memoir, “Unbearable Lightness,” about her struggle with anorexia which stemmed from her deep-seated self-loathing (read: eating disorder as anger, self punishment) and an attempt to conceal her sexual orientation (read: eating disorder as shame, fear of rejection). De Rossi also acknowledges the immense pressures that the entertainment industry puts on performers to obtain a certain look, but it’s not the media that causes the eating disorder. The feelings often have always been there, long before the eating disordered behaviors began; it’s just that now the feelings have found something to glom onto, an outlet of expression without having to actually have to feel them.

Recovering from an eating disorder is one of the most challenging journeys that people with body-image issues may ever encounter. It takes dedication, jumping head-first into the unknown, and tackling some of your worst fears. If you or someone you know is struggling with eating disordered thoughts or behaviors, you can seek out professional help and support here. For the freedom of recovery, it’s worth it.