Myth: People With Anorexia Don’t Enjoy Food

By B, AKA The No Nonsense Guide guy

It’s easy to understand how this myth persists: people with anorexia nervosa are constantly skipping meals and declining snacks. So it’s reasonable to think they don’t enjoy food. But the reality is more complicated: many people with anorexia love food. But only certain kinds, at certain times, under certain circumstances. Other food they fear intensely.

A friend of mine — let’s call her Dani — is an excellent host and an incredible cook. When she throws a party, it’s sure to feature fantastic drinks and delicious food. But when I was ill I dreaded going to her events because attending meant I might have to skip my nightly snack of honey-flavoured breakfast cereal and corn tortilla chips.

Why prefer cheap junk food over gourmet cooking? There are a few reasons. One is that what Dani served was generally not on my illness’s Approved Foods List. People with anorexia often adopt rules that strictly limit the kinds of foods they can eat. These can sound virtuous (“I’m vegan”) or health-conscious (“I’m gluten free”), but they generally serve to limit intake: it’s easy to restrict calories at dinner if you’ve got an excuse to decline the main course.

Another reason has to do with timing. Lots of people with anorexia feel more comfortable eating at night, and I was no exception. My internal explanation was this: eating as late as possible means less opportunity to overindulge. You can’t go over your daily calorie budget if you’re sleeping, right? I categorically refused to eat dinner before 6pm, and if I could have my way, I’d push it to 8. This made going on dates a logistical nightmare: should we go to the very early movie screening and eat dinner after? Or go to the later screening and be out past bedtime?

A third reason was that, like many others with anorexia, I greatly preferred eating alone to eating in groups. Having food in front of other people felt shameful, like being caught with a hand in the cookie jar. I didn’t have a satisfying internal explanation for this preference, but it was strong enough to make me avoid birthday parties with friends, lunches with coworkers, dinners with family… As you can imagine, this also complicated my dating life.

When people with anorexia do let themselves eat, they often follow elaborate rituals. They wait until the exact right time, they ensure that they’re not going to be interrupted, they prepare their ‘safe’ foods in a particular way. I didn’t do anything too strange (unless eating breakfast cereal and tortilla chips with coffee at night counts), but some people use special silverware, eat a certain number of bites per minute, or drag the experience out for hours.

This ritualised eating is sometimes the only thing somebody with anorexia has to look forward to. When you’re ill, you can spend your whole day feeling nervous about whether you’ve eaten too much or exercised too little. So those moments when things loosen up and you can relax seem extremely important. And for many people they are: without them they’d never get enough calories.

On the occasions when I broke down and ate something Dani was serving, I did enjoy the food: my taste buds still worked, after all. But I didn’t enjoy the experience: I felt guilty for liking the food, that whatever amount I’d eaten was too much, that I’d become undisciplined. Whatever pleasure I got from eating was overwhelmed by the scolding I got from the Voice of Anorexia in my head.

To summarise, it’s not really that people with anorexia don’t enjoy food; it’s that they don’t enjoy eating under less than ideal conditions. This all got better for me with recovery: within a few weeks, my junky snack foods started to seem really unappealing. I stopped feeling guilty about eating good food. I look forward to Dani’s parties instead of dreading them. And my dates (with my now-wife) are a lot easier to navigate now.