My Autism and my Anorexia
I was diagnosed with Autism at the age of seven, and the doctor who diagnosed me warned my parents (rather ominously) that my teenage years would be hard on all of us. And as I developed both Generalised anxiety disorder and Anorexia in my teenage years, I’d say he was right.
Now you might be wondering what Autism and Anorexia have to do with each other. Well, autistic women are in fact more likely than allistic women to develop Anorexia Nervosa, with two in ten Anorexic women estimated to be autistic (https://www.autistica.org.uk/what-is-autism/signs-and-symptoms/anorexia-and-autism). It is also estimated that 15-20% of Anorexia sufferers of all genders have autism spectrum disorder (https://mirror-mirror.org/anorexia-and-autism-are-they-related).
But how did my Autism in particular affect my Anorexia?
I was always a rigid follower of rules and routines, a common characteristic in Autistic people. Rules made me feel safe, secure, right. My Anorexia fed that need by giving me rules upon rules to follow. And these rules, in turn, gave me routine. Rules about certain foods I could eat, certain calorie numbers I could injest per day, certain workouts scheduled on certain days. The rigidity of my eating disordered life was comforting to me.
In addition, autistic people are often predisposed to have special interests. These are interests or hobbies that bring us enjoyment or comfort in some way, so much that we become enraptured with them in a way that seems obsessive to a neurotypical person. Well, for me, the prelude to my eating disorder was the fact that “healthy eating” and fitness became my special interest. I spent my free time googling “healthy” recipes and extreme workouts and from there I spiralled into a black hole of disordered eating content. To me, these extreme low calorie meals and brutal exercise regimens were simply the products of people who loved my special interest as much as I did- and how could that be wrong? So a special interest in exercise and nutrition became an obsession with Anorexia.
But, for me, the biggest link between my Autism and my Anorexia was that my Autism made me insecure. From my diagnosis at seven, I developed extreme internalised ableism. I thought my autism made me a freak. Every time I messed something up with my coordination or my organisation, or I had a meltdown, or I messed up socially- it reinforced my belief that my autism made me lesser. As I got older and started to develop crushes, I convinced myself that my romantic interests would never like me because I was so inferior, so socially clueless. The only way to compensate for being autistic, in my mind, was to be perfect. That included aesthetic perfection, which to me (at that time) meant being thin. If I had the figure of a supermodel, maybe people wouldn’t care about my disability?
Now obviously I now know that this way of thinking was completely incorrect. I am now at a point where I have completely accepted my identity as an autistic woman. I don’t view my autism as evil, but as an essential part of myself that has made me the person I am today. My autism has both positives and negatives, it is nothing to be ashamed of. But it still terrifies me that the internalised ableism I developed as a result of the ableist society we live in contributed to me developing Anorexia. The internalised ableism that I had as a teenager could have quite literally killed me. And when I think about that, I feel a deep concern for the young Autistic people out there who still struggle with insecurities over their neurodivergence, and what the devastating effects of that might be.