Ask ED: The Cycle of Eating Disorders
December 4, 2008 by angelique
Filed under Women's Health
We have another question for readers to answer!
In response to this post, “S” writes:
- How many anorexics, in the process of recovering, have cycled through the entire range of eating disorders?
Personally, I did not cycle through them all, thank goodness. However, I do think it’s common.
What’s your answer?
Absolutely have. If I didn’t know myself, I would think I’d been using the DSM as a wiki-how to become a completely disfunctional eater. Binge eating, went to EDNOS to AN restricting type, to AN purging type, to BN, to AN purging type to BN to binge eater to BN to AN purging type! On the way to ED-NOS as we speak. Thats a lot of ground to cover in 15 years.
The clever boffins at Oxford University call this eating disorder migration, and attribute it to their transdiagnositic model of eating disorders. Essentially their theory is that most eating disorders share some core psychopathology which help maintain the behavior. It would certainly make sense.
Lola x
i actually am the opposite…bulimic and now that i’ve attempted recovery i’ve morphed into anorexic. i have dealt with bulimia, anorexia, binge eating, compulsive over eating. maybe ednos when it all started.
I started out with anorexic tendencies, then went to binge eating, then to EDNOS, then struggled with bulimia for the longest amount of time.
Was bulimic for many many years before becoming AN restrictive, then AN purging, and now AN restrictive again.
Soon I will be just me