Are You a "Fat Anorexic"?

Are you a “Fat Anorexic”?


CRITERIA: (flexible, subject to revision, and acknowledges those “gray areas” between the black and white)

1. Do you engage in self starvation and other eating disordered behavior commonly associated with anorexia but you haven’t quite gotten down to the “qualifying” BMI of 17.5?

2. Did you become eating disordered when you were overweight or at a high weight and despite having lost significant amounts of weight in a very short time, you’re still in the “normal” weight range?

3. Does your eating disorder and your behaviors garner you more compliments and praise than concern?

4. Can you talk about having lost a lot of weight, eating starvation levels of calories per day, fasting, purging, over exercising, and other dangerous behaviors without anyone suspecting an eating disorder?

5. If you’ve ever fainted, has the first question been “are you pregnant?” as opposed to “did you eat/drink today? Are you eating enough?”

6. Are you one or two purges per month/week short of “earning” the diagnosis of bulimia?

7. Could you go to a doctor, get weighed, have your vitals taken, and have an honest discussion of your eating habits and practices without arousing suspicion?

8. Instead of making you all “perfect” and “thin” does your eating disorder accomplish the opposite and cause you to either yoyo up and down or gain weight?

9. Have you ever sought help or told a professional that you were concerned about your binging and purging, inability to eat, over exercising, and been dismissed, or worse, laughed at. Were you told to “just eat healthy”, “come back if you get worse” (meaning lose more weight), or that “well, you don’t look THAT skinny.”

10. If you were to complain about feeling/being fat, people have either agreed with you or told you that you were “perfect”?

11. Do you feel as if the course of your ED has run in a backward fashion, meaning that instead of losing weight and then losing your mind as a result (or having it happen concurrently), you seem to be losing your mind but your body is stubborn to follow, thus leading to even more mental anguish.

12. If your insides did indeed reflect your outsides, you wouldn’t be on this blog right now, let alone worrying about food, weight, and fat.

13. Do you meet the physical criteria for one of the “main” eating disorders (namely anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder) but still feel that you’re not “sick enough”.

14. I say ED-NOS, you say…”Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Special, Eating Disorder No Offers of Support, Eating Disorder Not Often Seen, or Eating Disorder Not Often Stereotypical.”

15. You deal with both the lived experience of “feeling fat” AND the feeling itself.

16. You eat a starvation diet, never eat in front of people, use diet pills, over exercise, feel ashamed of your body, and may have expressed your feelings of being “fat” out loud but no one suspects a problem.

17. Doctors and mental health professionals refuse to validate your concerns (or those of others) with regards to your eating habits and self perception because you don’t purge enough, don’t starve enough, can’t lose the weight to qualify for anorexia, or eat too much to merit concern.