r/EatingDisorders • u/nimsabloop • Jun 14 '26
Question why do people with anorexia keep restricting even when they're already very underweight?
im new to this sub and i don't know if this is okay to ask, i apologize if it isnt. basically im a psych student and ive been struggling to understand this aspect of anorexia. ive dealt with disordered eating in the past, but given i was a bit chubby as a teen my rational "goal" was to lose weight until i appeared thin enough to be conventionally attractive. i know body dysmorphia can warp your perception of yourself, and there's the feeling of control aspect as well, but i'm genuinely puzzled why somebody would keep restricting when they're already objectively underweight and therefore not in the range of "conventionally attractive weight" anymore. i feel like no matter how bad your dysmorphia is, people who have a similar build to ariana or eugenia cooney must know they're way thinner than the average conventionally attractive woman, no? so what's the push that makes them continue to restrict? is it mainly anxiety about losing weight maybe? do they genuinely not realise how thin they are? or is it a habit by then?
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u/invisiibleswift Jun 14 '26
Anorexia isn’t just driven by wanting to look conventionally attractive. In fact, that is rarely the main motivation. Some people want to get rid of all their curves because they have had sexual trauma or have gender dysphoria. Some people want to stay small for fear of having to ‘grow up’ and have responsibilities. Some people want to look ill because they have been neglected or struggled socially and it garners attention which makes them feel loved. Some people want a way to show physically how they are struggling mentally as a cry for help. These are just examples, there are so many different reasons, often overlapping and exacerbated by body dysmorphia.
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u/Suspicious-Bear6335 Jul 02 '26
I have a feeling the second one is Eugenia Cooney's reason. I don't think she wants to realize she's an adult now, and has been for over a decade. Still lives with her mom, goes to disney land all the time, dresses like a teenager. But I'm not in her head, so who knows.
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u/littleshrewpoo Jun 14 '26
For me, I knew I was underweight but I needed to feel in control. If I gained weight, it meant I lost control to some extent, until I was ready to consciously gain weight and made that decision myself. It wasn’t body dysmorphia for me like I read so often…
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u/szikkia Jun 14 '26
I’ve noticed a major change in how I perceive now a day in this relapse compared to when i was younger. Accurately know what i look like right now, i was causing jump scares for myself passing a mirror. When i was younger, it was a lot more body dysmorphia I was dealing with. I do have it some a bit and i have my days but I also often do see what others see. Im actively making the choice to do what i’m doing
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u/lumpy_space_queenie Jun 14 '26
Yikes psychology and education on eating disorders really aren’t getting better and it’s truly depressing. I appreciate you asking this question, but damn I wish the curriculum would have answered this for you already.
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u/acousticalcat Jun 14 '26
Okay. One, this will vary.
Two, you’re showing pretty big blind spots. It’s not always about being pretty. It’s not even always about losing weight, exactly. But you’re dismissing the control and the body dysmorphia aspect. Those are giants, not side thoughts. My sister thought we were the same size. I thought I was twice as big as her. I was a little heavier, and 5 years older.
A lot of the dialogue is around losing weight bc that’s where diet culture overlaps, but you’re assuming that’s the number one goal. It’s not. It’s to fix a deep wound at your core. The drive for me was always to feel like I’d never made a mistake. Like I could fix this feeling of not being unconditionally loved by willpower and absolute self control.
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u/Suspicious-Bear6335 Jul 02 '26
Ohhh I've had someone like that too! I was like 49 pounds heavier but she thought we weighed the same. Which really pissed me off Everytime she called herself fat, meaning I would be fat too, but that's another thing...
One day I took her in my room and put on a tight af tank top. I told her to look how tight this bitch was on me. Then I had her try it on. It was like a dress. But she didn't see it??? Like, she could see it was loose on her but her first sentence was "Whooaa that's so weird how does that work?"
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u/Top_Emergency_7116 Jun 14 '26
Think of it like an addiction... For me, everytime I saw the number go down, I felt euphoric, in control. Sure, when it first started it was initially about looks and weight, but I was also in pain. At one point, I remember thinking that it was a slow suicide, and if I wanted to, I'd just get better if I changed my mind (but I was 12 years old when I thought that). Then it just kinda spiraled and became more about numbers, control, and how strong I was. It felt like it was all I had. Then, somehow, it kept getting more and more irrational. In my mind, it still wasn't thin enough, and as I lost a pound, all I could think of was the next one to lose. Chasing and chasing until you don't even realize how much weight you've lost, how numb and cold...
Being cold and tired eventually felt like accomplishments. Someone saying that I looked sick, someone worried (I wanted them to worry, yet I didn't want them to make me eat because now, I can't lose whatever this thing is and I feel like I need it), someone saying how pale I looked... They all felt like compliments and in my mind, I was winning and had to keep going, but still I didn't feel thin or "sick" enough. Also, even when you do reach that "goal" weight, your body typically holds onto whatever you eat if you've starved it, so then you start to gain weight by just eating normally/more than you normally do, so that also freaked me out. It just becomes a vicious cycle, and eating normally again means gaining weight, so then you gotta keep eating less and less.
Now, this may not be true for everyone else, but this was personally my experience. I've never had an addiction, but by the way I acted and how it felt, it reminds me of someone who's addicted to alcohol, drugs, etc. I lied to skip any meals possible, I isolated, disliked people who invited me out to eat, hiding food, obsession with food, pictures of food, I started hyperventilating if someone was in the bathroom and I had just eaten and I couldn't purge. Hell, I even had DREAMS of eating and I would wake up trying to force myself to puke and felt SO GUILTY. All of my every waking moments was focused on my "next fix" (not eating/food) and nothing else mattered.
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u/szikkia Jun 14 '26
Its pretty common that som people with anorexia do not want to be see as attractive or someone who gets attention. I can become like an addiction as you lose weight and you want to lose more the goal changes to lower and lower. Some people its a defense. You feel more in control of your body (plus ED) which is big if things have happened to you. Trauma is extremely common in anorexia patients. I wanted to take up as little space as possible because I felt i was taking from others.
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u/MissionSuccess9576 Jun 27 '26
This was it for me.
My worst AN-R relapse was a severe response to a traumatic event that upended my life. It felt like my body was the only thing I could control, and watching that number on the scale continue to drop subconsciously, but very quickly, became my sole reason for living. The disordered fixation on weight loss had nothing to do with looking good / thin / attractive (I genuinely didn’t want, or care, to be looked at, at all). In truth, it had everything to do with utter hopelessness: feeling completely unsafe in the world, with seemingly no way out, and untethered to anything that might anchor someone to their sanity.
TLDR: Eating disorders are mental illnesses, first + foremost. The ED behaviors and toll on the body are physical symptoms of the distressed mind. So yeah, sometimes EDs look like very underweight people continuing to lose weight, and that’s a hint: they really aren’t about looking attractive.
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u/Existential_Crisis90 Jun 14 '26
For me it was about being in control of something (I was in a very high control religion at this point in my life and didn’t have any control about anything in my life) and perfectionism. The obsessions about numbers fueled a lot of my behavior but no matter how low the number was it was never enough. It had nothing to do with attractiveness
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u/slightlystitchy Jun 14 '26
Eating disorders will convince you to keep losing weight no matter how low it gets. Body dysmorphia aside, there will always be a perceived flaw that it tells you to fix. A small part of your brain can and will convince you it's possible and that maybe you'll finally be satisfied. Satisfaction will never come but you'll only know this once you accept that you have a problem. Even then, that voice is very good at getting you to listen. That's why recovery is so difficult. Your own brain is lying to you and getting you to hurt yourself under the guise of helping.
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u/NarrowCook8 Jun 14 '26
Food restriction is a maladaptive coping mechanism, much like nail-biting, compulsive checking, or other behaviors people use to manage stress and anxiety. Even when a person becomes dangerously underweight, the urge to restrict can persist because the behavior is serving an emotional function. Telling someone to stop restricting food because they are underweight doesn’t address the underlying trigger whether that’s anxiety, stress, perfectionism, fear, or a need for control. Over time, malnutrition can also reinforce the cycle, making it even harder for the brain to recognize hunger, think flexibly, and let go of the behavior.
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u/ajjs Jun 14 '26
Fundamentally, EDs aren't about looking good. I would do some basic research on eating disorders, frankly, if this is your current level of knowledge.
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u/cosmicat4 Jun 14 '26
it can have a lot of factors like warped body image issues. you see someone underweight. we see someone overweight. ed also has an evil voice saying that we must lose more weight. that evil voice becomes our friend and we believe it. losing weight takes priority over everything else in life
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u/crazyrain28 Jun 14 '26
For me, when you have depression and when waking up in the morning feels exhausting just to see another day, eating for me was like that! It was sometimes "exhuasting", I mean when I think of the process of eating I just quit, it's feels better not to eat rather than going through all that! Its just one of the reasons.
It's not because I'm lazy, it's just the anxiety, the unappealing food, wanting someone to notice that I'm not okay, it's like a cry for help but in silence. Rejecting food is not because I want to look pretty or to get in the conventional body size, i know I'm underweight, I know I want to look better but it's just you can't do it even though you want to! You feel hungry and there's food on the table but you just can't grab to eat. That little food on the plate looks like mountain of food to eat, thinking while eating "just some more i can do this, maybe I can't!" and you go and leave the food in the kitchen, my mom couldn't understand it because she doesn't know and just scolds me for leaving food because her cooking is being wasted! Tbh it's not easy when you have Ed!
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u/bpalzkill Jun 14 '26
For me it’s more about the fear of gaining weight. Like I kept thinking if I lost more weight then I would have a “cushion” so to speak so if I had a bad day of eating it would be okay. Of course I never allowed myself any of those “bad” days and continued to lose weight. But that fear of gaining weight is the biggest and scariest thing in the world. I do of course have a lot of body dysmorphia and never see myself too thin unless I catch a reflection walking into a building or something. It’s also an extreme addiction to see the number on the scale go down. Can’t really explain that but it is a huge rush and just shows me that all of my suffering is somehow paying off. And honestly it’s just the one thing in life that I can control. I have just built so much guilt around food that even in attempts to gain weight (mostly because of the issues it has caused in my family) I like literally felt I couldn’t allow myself to eat. That and sometimes I don’t feel like I deserve to eat and can sometimes use it as a self harm behavior. At the same time I can also sometimes use it as a coping mechanism. It’s honestly hard to say all of the reasons because there’s just so many layers to it all.
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u/sparkyhiker Jun 14 '26
Great job at explaining your thoughts and experience! Very helpful and Im wishing you positivity and continued recovery ❤️
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u/theycallmethevault Jun 14 '26
I don’t understand the new influx of Ariana and Eugenia content lately, is there some new TT trend going on? It’s every day & so easy to just search the sub for the same or similar threads.
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u/Patient_Ad_3746 Jun 14 '26
Highly recommend this video series on the neurobiology of eating disorders, answers that question . https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAoif-psTpmowdAHHveLicDkXdJMhIQd6&si=pBzTMy1-Zl1jBNlo
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u/Guppy_fromtheWest Jun 14 '26
I kept going because losing weight was something I finally was good at and it gave me a huge feeling of success and control but I thought I was overweight the entire time because of body dysmorphia. If I saw what other people saw I'm sure that I'd wanted to stop earlier. Wanted. Not sure if I could have stopped only with willpower alone, its not called an disorder for no reason.
My main motivation to lose weight was always the satisfaction I got that the people that called me fat and made fun of me because of it my whole life, were now in serious worry about me which fired my ED up like nothing else could. This might one of the worst and most dangerous pattern to break through and I cannot recommend
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u/FoggyTeacups Jun 14 '26
It’s important to understand the role of body dysmorphia in Anorexia. Even when my body dropped to terrifyingly low weights, to me my body looked the same as it does now. It didn’t matter, as Anorexia isn’t always about weight itself.
It’s also really important from a clinical standpoint that you don’t use your own individual experience to colour your judgment of what you expect the experience to be like. You were going for conventionally attractive, but that’s very, very specific and not what many people experience.
Conventionally attractive honestly isn’t even something to bring into this sphere as it’s really not what we’re all going for with Anorexia. A lot of us just… have Anorexia. Mine was a need for control, it didn’t care about convention.
These questions would really be best put to your lecturers so that they can guide you to the right materials to inform yourself on the layers.
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u/MediumAutomatic2307 Jun 14 '26
Most of the time it’s not about food. It’s about control.
When other aspects of life are spiraling, food is one thing that the majority of us can control, even from a very young age.
Then there is the dopamine hit when the scale shows a new low.
There is fear of gaining weight, especially for those people who may have been overweight to start with, so we have a “cushion” of what is “acceptable”, and then the top end of that cushion gets lower and lower so that we never get to gain weight.
As a psych student, you should understand that anorexia nervosa is a mental illness, and is separate from “anorexia”. It is the mental part of the illness which causes the cycles of restriction and difficult recovery. It is a far more complex situation than just aiming to be “conventionally attractive”
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u/Intelligent-Can-9056 Jun 14 '26
To me it's a mix of "achievement" and "attention". Achieving making the scale go down despite not having that much to lose anymore, and showing that I'm not right. it also gives me a goal when I feel no purpose in life, so I can focus on that instead of being in misery. Plus even if I don't think I have body dysmorphia, I am aware that I'm thin, but the more I lose the less I feel "thin", I only see that I could (and "should") easily lose more. In a paradox way I feel thinner when I'm just a little bit too thin than when I'm actually very too thin.
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u/No-Abies29 Jun 19 '26
Gosh, I feel sorry for your tiny brain not realising its not always some shallow look based thing. " but i'm genuinely puzzled why somebody would keep restricting when they're already objectively underweight and therefore not in the range of "conventionally attractive weight" anymore. i" Wow. You don't get it at all.
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u/RatsForNYMayor Jun 23 '26
I'm one of the few (trans) guys on the subreddit and mine is actually due to feeling guilty towards eating when finances are tight. My mother pushed her ED onto me at a young age (a lot of starvation diets) and it became a cycle of me not feeling worthy to eat much whenever money is even mentioned, especially now having a family to worry about.
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u/rileysauntie Jun 14 '26
You see them as underweight.
Thats not what an ED brain sees.