Youtuber Heidi Powell has suffered through both anorexia and bulimia. She had a great childhood but because she did not love herself enough, she did not know what the ideal healthy weight was, and that she was beautiful no matter what. She felt worthless, ugly, and unwanted. She did not feel like she had a lot of control over life. To try and find this control, she began controlling her food. When she was around 95 pounds, a coach of hers started worrying about her, her dad force-fed her, and she went from throwing up her food to being addicted to food.
At least 28.8 million Americans suffer from a kind of eating disorder. Extreme weight loss and pale skin are typical results of eating disorders, but physical changes to the body are not the only problems. Eating disorders also affect the brain, as stated by Breaking Muscle and ANAD.
According to an article from Seeds of Hope Eating Disorder Treatment, eating disorders are first started by being self-conscious and wanting control. Cyclical thought patterns {negative thoughts that keep going on in your mind} tend to occur often in those with an eating disorder. For example, when food is displayed in front of a person with a binge eating disorder, they have thoughts about overeating. And then they feel ashamed about it. The person continues to overeat to hide the emotional pain.
“I think our relationship with food affects our brain from the very beginning, and I think it starts from when you’re a child. I think like anything, when you compare food with positive feelings, you have a positive relationship with food. If you compare food with negative feelings, you can develop a negative relationship with food. And I think it all depends on your pairing and what you’re associating your food and eating and all of the behaviors revolving around food with whether positive or negative experience you’re getting while you’re doing that,” psychologist Kelly O’Toole said.
According to Seeds of Hope Eating Disorder Treatment, anxiety, irritability, depression, anger, and sadness are other outcomes of eating disorders. The person wants to avoid food, any negative feelings, or triggers. When a person lacks nutrition in their diet, they’re more at risk for developing mental illnesses like depression. When food is restricted, the relationship they have with others is affected. Any comments related to their weight trigger sadness and anger.
“I think that when you have someone that gives you strict rules about eating, you have to finish everything on your plate, or you will have a consequence when things like that happen. You develop that negative relationship with food early on as a child. I think that can impact some of your later behavior. It can have some impact on whether or not you are going to develop an eating disorder. The more positive relationship you can develop with food from early on, the less likely you are to develop an eating disorder,” O’Toole said.
According to O’Toole, all parts of the brain can be affected by eating disorders. As someone goes deeper into an eating disorder, their brain can have physical detriments since it’s not nourished properly. Like the rest of the body, the brain can deteriorate. They can impair cognition, and cause IQ to drop.
Eating disorders affect the brain’s reward patterns, cause others to have trouble thinking, affect the brain’s emotional side, and decrease the size of the brain, as stated by Magnolia Creek.
When Powell moved to Utah, she realized she couldn’t keep doing this anymore. She kept her eating disorder in check and began to get decent grades again. She met her husband and never told him what happened, and she even lied to her therapist. When she was pregnant, she felt selfish, and because of her baby, she wanted to be selfless and put the baby before her eating disorder. And from there, she started to get better little by little.