How To Cope With The Social Stigma Of a Eating Disorder

Obsessive thinking means having thoughts of food and eating, or your weight and body shape, on your mind for most of the time. Compulsive eating has a lot in common with bulimia. One way in which they are similar is the vicious cycle of avoiding food and losing control of your eating and feeling depressed and a failure. How they differ, is that compulsive over-eaters tend to eat a little food a lot of the time and do not try to get rid of it afterwards, while bulimia involves distinct periods of binge-eating and purging. Large amounts of food can be consumed throughout each day, however, and most compulsive over-eaters are overweight, and obese. The average age of compulsive over-eaters is older than anorexia and bulimia.

Why do people become compulsive about their eating? It reflects a particular kind of relationship with food. Food can become a substitute for other sources of pleasure and ways of valuing ourselves that may be lacking in the compulsive over eater's life. It can become an attempt to keep one's attention from painful experiences, thoughts or feelings one is unwilling or unable to face. Compulsion is about control and desperately wanting to be in control but feeling that one lacks control. This can be a lack of control over one's eating, one's body, one's behaviour, one's emotions, one's relationships, the things one fears. The compulsive eating holds in abeyance all those other things in which one fears not being able to have any control. Being out of control in other areas of your life. Overeating can become the smokescreen that conceals the real things one fears and avoiding it.

There are lots of theories about what causes eating disorders. Certain personality characteristics and family types have been suggested as risk factors. This is not to say these factors must always be present for an eating disorder to develop (or that they inevitability lead to eating disorders). It simply means that one may be more at risk if one has these personality characteristics or lived in one of these families. Also, these factors tend to be interconnected, and personality should be seen in the context of family background. Certain personality characteristics and life experiences show to increase the risk of someone developing an eating disorder. This produces a dependency on others, but also a fear of the effect others might have. Becoming socially isolated and withdrawing from people to the point of fearing social contact. Whether or not one is introverted or socially isolated before developing an eating disorder, it is virtually inevitable one will become so afterwards. This becomes a serious problem for many eating disorder sufferers. Once social contact is lost it can be exceedingly difficult to re-establish. Social isolation and loss of friends brings depression and a desperate sense of helplessness. Deprived of stimulating activities, your world can shrink around you, leaving only your eating and body-image to focus on. Becoming increasingly preoccupied, one sinks deeper into a self-perpetuating cycle of desperation and loss of self-control. A lot of anorexics have this characteristic, and it often reflects a rigid family background.

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