When Anorexia Nervosa pretends to help

When Anorexia Nervosa pretends to help

For many years, anorexia was my protector. For many years, from age 11, I did not know I had an illness called anorexia. I mean, I thought I was me. Period. Sure, I’d been feeling very anxious about things happening around me; things beyond my control. And then what seemed a reliable friend began supporting me and helping me through difficult times. I didn’t think it strange that this friend was not visible to anyone, including me.

This friend was in my thoughts and was available for comfort, 24/7.

I thought this friend gave me strength, control, and safety. Only much later, in my 20s, did I realise that what was offered as “positives” were illusions — coping strategies that kept me alive in the short-term but were slowly destroying me in the long-term.

In short, my friend was now revealing itself as a dominating bully. However, unlike a bully in the schoolyard, nobody could see this bully, including me. It was hiding within me, and I had no idea how to confront or escape its constant demands. Its rules were the only rules I knew to try to forge my way through each day. I tried. My diaries are a testimony to the repeated failed attempts to gain a hold. I didn’t know any other way.

I write about this not just from my own life, but for anyone who wonders why it is so difficult to let go of an eating disorder. The truth is: anorexia doesn’t just punish — this seemingly friendly yet insistent voice also pretends to help. Understanding this paradox is essential for recovery.

The “positives” that kept me bound

Looking back, I can see that anorexia seduced me with qualities that felt like solutions to an unbearable world:

• Control in chaos: Growing up in an environment where I often felt powerless, anorexia gave me a sense that I could at least control my food and body. It was a distorted kind of order amidst disorder.

• Numbing the pain: Restricting and focusing on rules dulled the grief, anger, and trauma I didn’t know how to face. It was easier to concentrate on numbers, routines, and rituals than on feelings that threatened to undo me.

• Endurance as pride: I began to see my ability to “go without” as proof of strength. If I could endure hunger, exhaustion, and deprivation, I convinced myself I was strong enough to meet the day’s challenges.

• Belonging through discipline: I believed that by meeting anorexia’s impossible standards, I was somehow rising above weakness. This illusion gave me identity — the disciplined one, the one who could resist.

These “positives” were coping mechanisms. They helped me survive when I had few other resources. But they came at a devastating cost.

The destruction behind the mask

For every so-called gift anorexia gave me, there was an equal and opposite destruction:

• The control was really a loss of freedom, where my every thought and action was dictated by fear of punishing consequences.

• The numbing was actually a silencing of my true self, leaving me emotionally frozen and disconnected.

• The unrelenting focus on endurance led to physical, mental and emotional collapse and years of pain.

• The belonging I felt was really isolation, because anorexia thrived on cutting me off from relationships, spontaneity, and joy.

What felt like armour was really a cage. What felt like discipline was really punishment. Anorexia is clever: the illness voice convinces you she is helping, when in fact she is keeping you small and silent.

Why this matters for recovery

When people ask, “Why didn’t you just eat?”, they cannot see the whole picture. To “just eat” meant letting go of the one system that seemed to keep me safe. For decades, anorexia was both my abuser and my protector. She was the enemy who pretended to be my friend.

Recovery meant untangling this paradox. I had to grieve not just the damage she caused, but also the false comfort she gave me. I had to find new ways to feel safe, new ways to soothe pain, and new ways to define strength.

Reframing strength

True strength, I eventually discovered, was not in saying “no” to food, but in saying “yes” to life. It was in:

• Allowing myself to rest without guilt.

• Accepting nourishment as a birthright, not a weakness.

• Letting people in, and daring to trust them, even when intimacy felt scary and dangerous.

• Choosing softness instead of rigid self-control.

These are qualities that anorexia calls “weak.” But they are, in truth, the deepest strengths I have ever known.

If you are reading this…

If you are living with an eating disorder, or caring for someone who is, please know: anorexia’s coping “positives” are understandable. They may have kept you safe once, but they are not sustainable. They do not lead to freedom.

The hard truth — and the hopeful truth — is that what anorexia pretends to give, recovery can offer in real form:

• Instead of false control, real freedom.

• Instead of numbing, genuine peace.

• Instead of destructive, false pride, sustainable strength.

• Instead of isolation, belonging that heals.

Decades of therapy and diary-writing eventually enabled me to see this clearly. I share my experience now so you know you are not alone, and so you may begin to imagine a life beyond anorexia’s grip. Always hold on to hope. Let hope be your lantern to find a way through.

Closing reflection

When I look back, I see a young girl who thought deprivation was her path to feeling okay within, and to feeling safe. I see a young woman who clung to the anorexia’s rules of endurance as her only way of coping and proof of worth. And I see a mature woman (a grandma!) who has learned, at last, that endurance is nowhere the same as living.

The paradox of anorexia — destructive yet deceptively helpful — is what makes recovery so daunting, but also so necessary. The life I have today is not built on control, but on connection. Not on punishment, but on compassion. Not on endurance, but on joy. Not on regimentation, but on spontaneity.

And this is a trade worth making.