Eating Disorders: It's time to break the stigma

When it comes to mental health, there are conversations that feel uncomfortable, even impolite and violating. Eating disorders are one of them. They are pervasive, deeply stigmatized, and often invisible. They have the power to quietly shape the way people move through the world.
This month, I wanted to write about what I see as one of the most pressing and under-discussed struggles of our generation. Most of us, including myself, have either watched someone we love struggle with disordered eating, or have quietly struggled with it ourselves.
My first experience with eating disorders came from inside my childhood home. I do not remember the exact moment food shifted from something instinctive and joyful to something calculated, but I know that it did.
There was a time when food was simply nourishment. It was something to enjoy, to share, to experiment with, to be grateful for. It was not moral or earned, it was not a reflection of discipline or worth. Many of us, even with the healthiest relationships with food, can trace a similar shift.
I grew up in Los Angeles, California, a city with some of the most diverse and extraordinary food in the world. Restaurants in LA are creative, vibrant, and endlessly experimental. But they exist alongside something else: an industry built on optimization, aesthetic perfection, and perpetual self-improvement.
There are billboards advertising the newest weight loss injection. Juice cleanses marketed as “resets.” Gyms on every corner. Bodies on display, bodies curated, sculpted, filtered.
I never though about myself as someone who really struggled with eating, possibly because of the people who surrounded me. I think this speaks for nothing but its normalcy, which I hope speaks for its urgency. While writing this post with my friends and family in mind, I reflected deeply on my own relationship with food, and found that I too have a long way to go.
I began to think about myself as a little girl, embarrassed to eat her school lunch without fully understanding why. I thought about a daughter I could have one day, counting calories before she learns long division. I reminded myself of a photograph my parents took of me at eleven, sitting on the beach during a family vacation, and the shame I felt when I saw how my thighs looked.
Shame is a dictator. It teaches you to negotiate with yourself, to act against yourself. Food is nourishment, not a punishment and certainly not a reward.
To understand how this happens, how food shifts from nourishment to negotiation, it helps to understand the psychology behind eating disorders.
Eating disorders almost always co-occur with anxiety disorders. For many, controlling food intake becomes a way to exert order over an otherwise chaotic world. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) also co-occurs, and may be one in the same with anxiety, often predating the eating disorder itself. At their core, these struggles are often about reclaiming agency, creating rules, and finding certainty in numbers when emotions feel unmanageable. To hyper fixate on food, or to drown out the world with food is the ultimate distraction, the ultimate self-punishment. It is displaced anxiety.
When most people think of eating disorders, they think of Anorexia Nervosa, a condition characterized by restrictive eating, intense fear of weight gain, and a distorted relationship between body image and self-worth. Within anorexia, there are two primary subtypes: a restricting subtype and a binge-purge subtype.
But it’s important to remember that no two eating disorders are alike.
Binge Eating Disorder, for example, often occurs independently of restriction. Individuals may experience a profound sense of loss of control while eating, consuming large quantities of food rapidly and in isolation, often accompanied by intense distress.
This can escalate into a painful cycle of cognitive dissonance, where one’s behavior conflicts with one’s beliefs. When that tension becomes unbearable, the mind adapts. It is much easier to change the way we think than the way we behave.
Someone struggling may convince themselves that nothing is wrong, that they are simply stressed, disciplined, or trying to be healthy. Denial becomes a coping mechanism until it is indistinguishable from genuine belief.
Eating quickly, for instance, can become a way to outrun awareness, to silence the internal voice that might otherwise intervene.
Bulimia Nervosa follows another pattern. Individuals may cycle between episodes of binge eating and compensatory behaviors such as vomiting, misuse of laxatives, or excessive exercise. Unlike anorexia, bulimia does not always present with visible weight loss, making it even more difficult to detect.
I am disheartened to admit that I have failed to notice many people in my life struggling with disordered eating. While some mental illnesses manifest outwardly, eating disorders often hide in plain sight. They are concealed behind jokes about dieting, behind “wellness” trends, behind self-deprecating comments about body image.
Many go to great lengths to avoid confrontation, not only with friends and family, but with themselves.
There are many other forms of disordered eating that present in vastly different ways, motivated by vastly different struggles, such as trauma, perfectionism, identity, cultural pressure, comparison. Not all disordered eating meets clinical criteria for a formal diagnosis. But all of it deserves compassion. If you feel that you or someone you love is struggling, early intervention significantly increases the likelihood of recovery.
I am beyond proud to say that my relationship with food and with my body has never been more stable, more grounded, or more compassionate. Healing did not mean loving every part of myself every day, it meant eating without calculating. It meant going to dinner without strategizing. It meant understanding that my body is not a project to perfect, it is a home to protect, to nourish, to fuel so that I can have the energy to do the things I love, to be present with the people I love.
I have surrounded myself with people who see food as nourishment, as connection, and as pleasure. Slowly, I have found my way back to something resembling that child-like relationship with food, intuitive, curious, unburdened.
I hope that for anyone else struggling, they may know there is room to speak up and to seek help. And that most importantly, they are far from alone.
 
                                                                                                                         - Kate Albert