Is an Eating Disorder an Addiction?

Can it just go away? Can you ever get over it?

Image licensed from Canva

I’ve always had a conflicting relationship with my body. Starting from the very first time when I was called fat by a classmate. I was 10, I wasn’t fat, and I didn’t really know what fat meant, it wasn’t a concept for me. At that minute I just learnt that fat means ugly and only skinny is beautiful.

I grew up in a time when the internet and social media weren’t around to distort the beauty standards that much as it can today. Eastern Europe in the eighties: we didn’t have Western culture, we didn’t have Western brands, people could only travel with travel leases issued every couple of years, mostly to the Soviet Union — to avoid the capitalist epidemic and all its negative effects. Good times.

My body image issues didn’t come from the media or teen magazines. It came from inside.

I started my first diet at 10. At the time a kid being on a diet wasn’t a horrible thing. I stopped eating bread, chocolate and meat altogether. I’m not sure what I was eating. But I know I hated it all. It was a downward spiral, causing me endless moments of frustration, with intermittent reinforcement of temporary success.