Why My Chronic Illness Played a Part in My Eating Disorder

Research involving those with chronic illnesses and how it affects their mental health is extremely underfunded and frankly not there. There are few screening processes to define an eating disorder and how it affects someone with a chronic illness.

I don’t like attributing my mental health experience to one singular thing because mental illness and diseases don’t always work like that. They are layered with many complex attributes, with many things that cause or trigger them. However, chronic illness has always played a part in my eating disorder.

Food and I have always had a complex relationship, but after I had my second open-heart surgery — between my freshman and sophomore year — I started losing weight. The more I lost weight, the more “control” I felt over my body.

Starving myself was never about being skinny.

My whole life, my sense of control has been taken away from me.

I had my parents and doctors who told me what needed to be done with my body. I had scars from surgeries I didn’t know how to embrace.

I knew that there was trauma from my surgery that I was not capable of coping with, and I did not know how to talk about it. When I came back to school the next year, I had already lost a lot of weight. I hadn’t been “thin” to begin with and I was initially praised for all the weight I had lost. However, the praise only added fuel to my fire. The more I controlled what I put into my body and lost weight, the more I felt in control.

High school was hard to navigate, dealing with a chronic illness. My peers didn’t quite understand why I wasn’t able to participate in the usual teenage things such as sports, going to parties or why my parents were so protective over me. Having a chronic illness can be isolating. The more I felt isolated, the more I fell deeper into my eating disorder.

As I’ve gotten older, I still fight my eating disorder. When my chronic illness gets more out of hand, I feel myself being pulled to bad habits. But I’ve understood that taking more away from my body isn’t going to give me more control over it. My body needs nourishment to survive. I held a lot in over the years, and the more I talk about my experiences living with a chronic illness and how it has affected me on many levels, the more “control” I feel over it. I’m no longer a passenger to my illness to other people’s comments on my illness, and I’m no longer afraid to take control of my health.