* * *
Everyone knows that people who are anorexic have a fixation on losing weight. There is no other logical option for why someone would choose to starve themselves. So my friends who have a healthy self-esteem are not at risk. If they’re comfortable and happy with their weight, I don’t have to worry about them. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong!
I used to agree with the statements above. If anyone told me that anorexia could be stumbled into unintentionally, I would have looked at them like they had an elephant trunk for a nose. First off because I absolutely loved food, and second because it doesn’t make sense that you could starve yourself without realizing it.
But unfortunately you can, I can, and I did. (Please stop looking at me like that, I promise I don’t have any elephant features.) The same way you stumble into someone walking on a sidewalk, you can stumble into anorexia. It’s a matter of lost focus.
Maybe it’s the phone in your hand, the person you’re talking to, or the annoying person you’re desperately trying to avoid. Whatever the reason, you stumble into something you didn’t mean to because you weren’t focused on the right thing.
So if you’re in a situation where you have any sort of lose of appetite, you are just at risk of anorexia as someone who chooses not to eat. That is, of course, if you aren’t intentional about eating.
Let me explain my story a little:
Like I said, I loved food. A good meal could seriously make my day. Whether it was a cookie, sweet potatoes, or my favorite macaroni salad; food was the best cure.
It wasn't the easiest two weeks of my life; this suburban girl just started commuting into a major city, to a school I didn't know, and without a friend or roommate in the area at the time. Following a 24-hour bug and an anxiety attack that left me in the emergency room, my appetite dropped drastically. It’s not that I hated food, I simply just didn’t think about it. I was living on my own for a couple weeks and so I had no one to eat meals with, I was adapting to a new schedule, and eating just escaped my mind.
A few days later my stomach began to feel funny. Afraid I was getting nauseous and sick again, I ran to the store and grabbed some Tums. In retrospect, I was clearly hungry but at the time my brain no longer understood the feeling.
For the next week I continued eating Tums like candy, preventing any upset feeling in my stomach. Occasionally I would eat some food like a bored person to a bag of chips, but it never really was a conscious decision.
Somewhere along the way it finally came to my attention that I wasn’t consuming what I should be. My guess would be when I as preparing to go on a trip with a bunch of friends and recognizing I needed to plan money for food. Food? I haven’t had much food lately. Wait. Oops.
After bringing it up with my mother she recommended eating a meal bar. These contained the protein I needed, but in small amounts for my stomach. So my new diet: Tums and meal bars.
I was never one to care about weight number. I’ve been the same weight for the past 12 years with very little fluctuation even on and off sport seasons. But I happened to step on a scale one day and WHOA! I haven’t weighed this little since I began weighing myself in middle school. My first thought: this scale is broken. In my head there was no reason for me to have lost that much weight. But alas the scale was proven to be accurate.
The feeling that came over me at that moment were ones 95% of you, the readers, will not understand. You can try, but you won’t really understand. One of my friends, we’ll call her Alexa, had heard this story. Her immediate response to the unintentional weight loss:
“I wish I had your problem.”
She wasn’t alone. Many people I confided in were fruitless in any form of accountability as they proved to respond the same way as her.
Be careful what you wish for. Alexa got exactly what she said she wished for. Alexa had been on some new medication causing a loss of appetite. Knowing how shocked I was to see my weight loss, I eventually got Alexa on a scale.
She stood there staring at the number that appeared before quietly stepping aside, put on her shoes, and walked out of the nurse’s office. Once we got outside, refusing to look at me, she whispered that she can’t remember when her weight was so low. She knew her appetite had decreased a lot over the months, but she was floored to see exactly how much she lost.
After a good conversation she realized she was in the same place I was four months before. It was now that she looked at me and apologized for wanting my problem. She finally understood the gravity of it.
It’s a mix of excitement and guilt. Sure you’re glad you lost weight, but then it hits you that you lost it due to starvation. No, you’re stomach may not have wanted the food but your body needed it. Desperately!
We were now in it together to start eating healthy again. But it’s not so easy as a simple decision. Like going off of greasy foods for months, our bodies didn’t like the feeling of digesting anymore. Often we would eat a small snack and spend the next hour or two on the couch with an ache and pain in our stomachs.
Essentially we were given a slap on the wrist for being kind to a stranger, while given a reward for stealing from a friend. The less we ate, the seemingly happier our bodies were.
It was a long road. Admitting there was a problem wasn’t even half of it. Alexa and I, love food. We always have and we always will. But for a brief time in both our lives, out stomachs couldn’t handle consumption.
While anorexia is no longer an issue for me, continuing to eat healthy amounts of food always will be. From here on out it simply has to be intentional. Like a child learning to ride a bike, you can tuck away what you’ve learned for years but it only takes one ride until you’re back in the game.
Don’t worry, this story has a happy ending. My food consumption is healthy, and my love for food has not died. In fact, I now love cooking food just as much as eating it. And just like every other thing of the past, so long as you recognize how you got to where you were...it’s harder to ‘stumble’ back in that direction ever again.
Intentionality...that’s your strongest prevention tool.
Myths Exploited
1. Anorexia begins with the desperate desire to lose weight
2. Anorexia only effects those with low self-esteem
3. It’s always an intentional choice to not eat food
Thanks for posting this. I've been going through a very similar situation for awhile now. I've lost 20 lbs in 15 months for "no reason"... and I'm already pretty small. It's so hard to build stable eating habits when everything else is new and somewhat sporadic. I also felt like it sounded crazy to be "accidentally anorexic," but that's the only way i knew how to describe it; now i dont feel so crazy :) hope your work towards healthy balance is going well!
I am literally going through this now!! It started from a stressful week I had two months ago... stepped on the scales and bam!! 8kgs down in 3weeks. I'm 61kg atm and I'm 5'8. I haven't weighed so little since I was in high school. I usually eat alot of healthy small meals everyday and do pilates and workouts 3-4 days per week. I don't work out to be skinny, I do it because it makes me feel great and keeps my energy levels up. Now I'm too tired to work out, naturally, and I've lost muscle mass and body shape... I've been actively trying to eat more but feel exactly how you described after eating!!! I had had enough today and sat done and really thought about it and realized I had all the symptoms of an anorexic without the mentality of one and that's how I came across your blog... Thank you sooo much for posting it. Knowing other people have had similar experiences and got through it helps me feel hopeful and tbh less disgusted with my unintentional weight loss
I just stumbled upon this article too since I don't have any concerns about my weight and love food, just can no longer function at work due to lack of consumption, probably brought on by stress and a recent diagnosis of bi polar and living conditions were rocky. Now I'm just angry that I've been asking for help for months by expressing my concern for the weight loss and only getting "must be nice!" as a response. I'm 6ft. and 120 lbs now and I don't know what to do. I feel like i'm hitting a wall and I don't know how to get better.
Good post. As a female bodybuilder, I have been eating a healthy, high-protein, high veg diet for a few years now, but lately I worry that it has become a bit of fixation, to the point where a lot of food just doesn't sound good to me anymore. I've lost more weight than I meant to, which has had a somewhat negative impact on my training. I really am concerned about becoming an "accidental anorexic." The author talks about eating with intent, which is excellent advice and is what I try to do. Food is fuel, after all. Please please to anonymous from Oct. 7, if you have a way to get to a doctor, do go see one who can help you with an eating plan. Meanwhile try eating frequent small meals (6-8 a day!) of easily digestible, high quality food such as Greek yogurt, rice cereal (yep, baby food!) bananas, peanut butter etc...get some whey protein and use it to make fruit and veg smoothies. I often find that a smoothie will go down easily when I know I need to eat but just don't feel hungry. Strawberry or orange smoothies are particularly nice and you can cram a whole lot of good nutrients into one if you add some spinach (sounds gross, but it's not too bad, I promise!) Blessings to you all. Stay strong!
Well, this didn't help me much. I was looking for a word to describe someone who refuses to eat, but isn't anorexic. That's me right now. I just made the choice to stop eating because I'm seriously fucking sick of how my stomach reacts to food. It growls and begs for food, but as soon as I try to eat, it fights me like HELL. And there's no physical reason for it. I started having this problem around the beginning of May (for this bout, anyway), and after seeing a gastro specialist, found out my gallbladder didn't function at all. So it was removed, and I was told that would fix the problem. After about three or four weeks (which is how long it took for my body to recover enough to eat real food instead of jello and other fat free foods), it seemed to have been fixed, though I still had nausea (which I've attributed to my body trying to adjust to missing an organ). Then, around my periods, I kinda got the impossible to eat thing again (which is actually normal for me, some periods I can't or don't have a desire to eat, others I eat almost constantly), which again I passed off. But for the last few days (I think this started Sunday), I'm back to how I was before my gallbladder was taken. I've been suffering with almost chronic nausea for 7+ years, and I'm just sick of it. I'm not anorexic, because I do WANT to eat, I'm just physically incapable of eating so I'm giving up on trying. Nausea medication doesn't help (I'm taking two of them up to three times a day), neither does aromatherapy, acupressure, or even my go to cure that used to ALWAYS work, marijuana. That one may only be because I may not have gotten good stuff from the dispensary. Even the best dispensaries sometimes have duds.
Thank you for your post. I have been on a mood stabilizer since March and have lost a lot of weight due to a major loss of appetite. Now when I do eat I feel really sick for a few hours and trying to eat more everyday seems impossible. I'm down to 108 at 5'5 and I've never been so thin. Between stress and the medication it has been very hard to eat... I lost 7 pounds in one month and hate where in at. I don't recognize when I'm hungry anymore... I used to be very healthy, paleo lifestyle, eating three very healthy full meals per day and now I'm down to maybe 2 small meals which look more like a protein shake or protein bar instead vegetables fruit and protein. I'm just lost and have to figure out how to eat again and I can't be sick all the time, I have three children and a household to run. I dealt with bulimia when I was in high school and hated myself then. I haven't honestly hated myself in a long time. And I guess I do otherwise I would be taking care of myself better. Anyway, thank you again.
Uhh i've lost 10 pounds in a week (6 days) and im never hungry and when i try to eat i puke.
I looked up this subject because I recently got a job where I can't sit around and eat all day like I did during my homeschool years. I'm exhausted and don't have much time to eat, then when I do, I don't feel like it. I'm on an ADD med that I think is having that effect or at least contributing, but I've just recently realized maybe it isn't so great to walk the distance of a half marathon four days a week while skipping breakfast, having salad for lunch, and a light dinner (usually a value sized double cheeseburger). I've lost 30 lbs in the last six months (I'm overweight, but still), and that kinda makes me worry a little after hearing about how much trouble everyone else usually has trying to lose weight. I'll get halfway through a slice of pizza and I'm full, when I used to be able to eat three or four slices of a large by myself. I miss food, but I'm sick of it after a few bites. It sucks.
I don't want to see myself as an anorexic, however looking back at the last few months of my life I can't remember one day where I ate 3 meals that day. It's now gotten to the point this whole week (the only reason I'm looking at this article) I've eaten maybe half a burger, 1/3 box of wheat thins, water and Orange Juice. I don't understand my lack of eating but it is worry some.
i Was legit anorexic when I was 17, I went from 170 lbs to 110. I’m only 5 ft tall, so it was very noticeable that I’d lost weight. No one, with the exception of my best friend even noticed I had a problem. Now as an adult, I struggle with bouts of accidental anorexia. Between my son, working, and stress, I’m lucky if I end up having more than a few bites of dinner. I run a kitchen, the smell of food sometimes is enough to make me not hungry. I was also diagnosed as bipolar about 7 months ago and the meds also deter my appetite. My family thinks I’m either on drugs or have hyperthyroidism. I’ve tried to explain, but you know how people are when they get set on an idea. If anyone knows of a way to get this under control I’d really appreciate it...I’ve struggled with this for so long, but this is the worst. I’ve gone from a healthy 130 to 105, im starting to gross myself out.
Thanks for this, I had gone through a break up and stopped being hungry and then got busy with work. I didn't realize what my stomach pains were and once I finally said something to someone they indentiffied it for me. Glad to see I'm not the only one.
Thanks so much for sharing this. It just smacked me in my face yesterday that I am an ' accidental anorexic'. Since around October of last year I started a new medication for my ADHD. I weighed 164 and I'm 5 feet tall. The meds killed my appetite and I became that person that forgets to eat. I carry all my excess weight in my stomach. So now, at 128 pounds (yep)you can DEFINITELY TELL. I was excited about the weight lose s nice I've been around 190 lbs before and struggled with weight gain (too much of it). Now I constantly have a migraine and feel awful. Nothing seemed to help. Until this morning, at the insistence of my husband, I actually ate breakfast and took half a multivitamin-.- look at that the migraine stopped! Definitely now going to be working towards eating more often!! I'm glad I'm not alone!!
Thank you for posting this. I didn't realize until yesterday that I could be an "accidental anorexic". My hair has been getting thinner for months and nutrition can be a reason. I didn't put it all together until yesterday. I am glad I am not alone.