Myth: People With Anorexia Enjoy Starving

By B, AKA The No Nonsense Guide guy

If you’d asked me when I was ill “Why are you skipping lunch?”, I could have truthfully answered “Because I’m afraid of starving”. People with anorexia nervosa torture themselves because they’re afraid of being tortured. This may seem like nonsense, but there’s a perverse sort of logic to the way anorexia operates.

Starvation isn’t without its pleasures. People who go on extended fasts often report a kind of euphoria setting in after a few dozen hours. I sometimes enjoyed the feeling of having a totally empty stomach and imagining that I could subsist solely on air and coffee. For the most part, however, going hungry was dreadful. I feared it more than anything and went to great lengths to avoid having to do it.

What do I mean by ‘having to do it’?

Anorexia is all about penalties. If I exceeded yesterday’s calorie limit by a certain amount, then today’s would be reduced. If I fell short of yesterday’s running quota, then today’s would increase. I organised my life to avoid triggering these punishments: I tried solely to eat foods whose nutrition labels I’d memorised, and my schedule had multiple backup slots for exercise every day.

What I feared most was feeling like I had to skip my evening snack. I think this was the only thing keeping my weight from spiralling downward. So when I couldn't have it, for example when I was travelling and there was no ‘safe’ food in my hotel room, I was miserable. I would be consumed by thoughts of food, unable to focus on anything else. I’d try to will myself to sleep in the hope that I’d wake up and feel okay eating breakfast. 

Having a mental illness means not being able to trust your own mind. I would wake up before dawn and run in the freezing cold, even if it was going to be warm and pleasant later in the day. This was because I worried that the version of myself that would exist in a few hours wouldn’t have enough discipline to run. I feared that he would do something stupid like skip a workout or eat a banana, which would mean having to miss this evening’s snack — and maybe tomorrow’s.

People with anorexia report trying to bargain with their disorder. I would try to curry favour with it, doing harder-than-usual workouts in the hope that maybe it would let me have some milk in my coffee. I eventually learned what sorts of things I could get away with — if I had to go to a family dinner, I knew what offsetting behaviour would be required of me. But the terms of the negotiations were usually unfavourable.

The self-starvation I did as part of my normal ‘don’t anger the eating disorder’ routine felt very different from the self-starvation I did when it was angry. The former felt virtuous, disciplined. The latter felt helpless, involuntary. So I would starve myself all morning to avoid having to starve all night.

‘Perfectionism’ is a trait often associated with anorexia. My perfectionism was driven by this fear of starvation. I felt that I had to cultivate discipline in order to avoid having to go hungry. This affected not only what I ate and how I exercised, but also the way I spoke, dressed and cut my hair. I took pride in my discipline, and felt like it let me live a high-functioning life in spite of my eating disorder. I thought: people with bad eyesight wear glasses, right? Similarly, people with eating disorders just need to follow a 127-point austerity plan with no room for error. Easy, right?

Those of us with anorexia can be compelled to carry out our routines even when they’re self-destructive or make no sense. For example, I would run in a marathon on Saturday and feel like I still needed to go out for a jog on Sunday — it felt wrong not to, like I might have to starve if I didn’t. This even though Saturday’s race should have given me some justification for rest on Sunday. Or suppose it was an evening where I couldn’t skip dinner — I was out on a date, say. When I got home, I’d want my evening snack even though I was objectively full. I’d trained myself that missing that snack meant a night of starvation, so I was scared of not having it.

People with anorexia can develop a sort of Stockholm syndrome, an affection for our condition. We are grateful to it for the moments when it lets up, and we give it credit for those little delights. Eating disorder specialist Emily Troscianko once wrote: it was less the fear of getting fat that kept me ill than the fear of losing the grand pleasure of lots of chocolate in the dead of night. Did she think she couldn’t have chocolate if she recovered?  And we often attribute our positive character traits to our illness — I credited mine with my perseverance and professional acumen.

‘Fear of being fat' or ‘fear of gaining weight’ are often cited as key features of anorexia, at least the modern version of it. But I wonder if ‘fear of starvation’ is really behind both of them. What’s bad about gaining weight? Having to lose it. Ask somebody without anorexia who has been on a diet! This is a conjecture based on my own experience, but I suspect it is true more broadly.