Pigeon, Little Light’s girlfriend, posted this incredible comparison between eating disorders and addiction on Little Light’s blog:
Any anorectic can tell you that, initially, starving creates an amazing high. As someone who’s also abused amphetamines and has a tendency toward hypomania, I can tell you they all feel pretty similar. I felt utterly invincible. I had so much energy, I was hyper-productive, I could go to school and dance and hang out with friends and do all my homework and whatever the hell else I wanted to do, on next to no food or sleep. The sense of power that comes with this is tremendous.
But, pretty quickly, the high starts to wear off. Fatigue and hunger set in, it becomes difficult to focus, difficult to do much of anything. I spent a long time feeling like I couldn’t do anything right, anything good enough, trying to get back the high that I’d had. I had to eat even less to get that euphoric, super human feeling, and even then the feeling was short lived. Like building up a drug tolerance, as an anorectic you have to continually do more– more fasting, more exercise, more rules, more discipline, more whatever.
I’m not Every Anorexic, but I can’t tell you how true this essay read to me. I’m not entirely sure why the addiction paradigm would not be the immediate parallel. Most survivors I’ve talked to have nodded right along with the idea, even if their individual histories have involved different causes and coping strategies. And as Pigeon says, it’s difficult to resolve an eating disorder without using at least some of the same tools to unpack disordered patterns.
The most obvious reason is that it’s probably counterintuitive for people who don’t have a tendency toward eating disorders. Addictive behaviors are supposed to be, you know, appealing in some way. That starvation can be really enjoyable and satisfying on a physical level, that fiercely physically inimical eating patterns can in fact become more pleasurable than eating normally, that there might be more at work than an adherence to deprivation in the face of misery, may be difficult to believe. And eating disorders have–justifiably–become so tied up with the idea of self-torment that any high or hook is inconceivable.
I think the second might have to do with ideology, with the need to reduce the constellation of factors down to one or two for easy analysis. (This is not, mind you, an assertion that strict cultural adherence to a bodily ideal is not a very important factor both in the prevalence of eating disorders and in the way people with eating disorders seek to shape and regulate their bodies.) Perhaps it’s difficult to see the problem as a complex one, a perspective skew that touches many parts of the sufferer’s psyche, because eating disorders are more common among people whose selfhood is denigrated: women, girls, minors. I’m not sure.