Woman Eating Food

Why does a person get anorexia?

I get this question often and usually it comes right before the person spills out all of the possible explanations they have been given in their life for the reason they have fallen prey to anorexia. They have a controlling mother. They are vain and need to be skinny. They are a product of diet culture. It is an offshoot of their OCD tendencies or perfectionism. Of course, then there are a group of people that have anorexia but do not think they have it at all. These are the people that think they are just dieting to be healthy. They have to control their diet, weight, and exercise or else they will be fat or unhealthy or get some illness such as cancer, diabetes, or a heart attack. I fell into this group for years. My children and husband were telling me I was dying and I, always responding out of fear and anger, was telling them I was just dieting and being healthy. After all, I finally found the golden ticket, the key to thinness, the thing all people in our culture wish they had. How could being thin be so wrong when it feels so right?

Anorexia has been around longer than diet culture. It has been around longer than controlling mothers. It has definitely been around longer than gyms and workout circuits. If anorexia has been around longer than these so-called ’causes’ then where does it come from? We have to look at where we come from, when our brains evolved this ‘anorexic’ skill, and what was happening in our environment back then. Now, I am not going to go into a massively scientific explanation because that is simply not how my brain works. When I was very sick and stuck in anorexia’s grip my brain wanted the simple abridged version. So that is what I offer here.

First and foremost, anorexia is a response to famine. It began showing up when humans were foragers. In short, during this time in our history humans would forage for food, the food sources would become scarce/non-existent, and this would result in a famine. This famine would cause all of the tribe/band of people to go into an energy deficit (the body not getting the needed amount of food required to function normally/optimally). This energy deficit would trigger an evolutionary adaptation in select individuals. This evolutionary adaptation is what we now call anorexia.

Secondly, anorexia is simply the body being called to migrate. This evolutionary adaptation gives us the hormonal and brain change shifts that we need to be able to migrate away from the famine and toward places where we can again find food stores. What we call anorexia today was our bodies preparing to migrate and then following through on this migration to hopefully save the band/tribe during these times of famine.

Anorexia at the time it evolved was not a bad thing. On the contrary, it was a life saving adaptation that could lead to saving the entire tribe/band from extinction due to starvation. Let’s think about anorexia not from today’s perspective, but from the time of our ancestors…

Your tribe/band has run out of resources and food. Their bodies are going into what we call energy deficit…they are beginning to starve. Because they are starving they are losing muscle mass, losing brain power and focus, and all they can think about is eating. In fact every time they see possible food, be it a few berries or a small ground animal, they expend more energy trying to catch/pick/eat it than their bodies would even gain from the little energy it would get them. But this is what a normal starving body does. It gravitates towards any food, it slows down to save its energy, it sees its own emaciated body and gets scared and still.

But then there are the few people in the tribe/band that have the evolutionary adaptation we call anorexia. These people are different. These people have shifts in their brain and hormones (I will go into these in future blogs) that create a much different outlook on their dire situation. These are the people that will migrate and look for better lands for their starving families. This evolutionary adaptation created the perfect group of skills to assist the person attempting such a difficult task.

The person with anorexia feels so very good and right when they do not eat. They feel wrong and shameful if they do. They have the ability to abstain from food for long periods of time at will.  They have the ability to not be sidelined by the few berries they may see, but instead keep moving in an attempt to find lands with plenty. The person with this adaptation for anorexia hallucinates fat on their bodies so that they have the confidence to make such a long journey as migration requires. They also feel a need to keep moving their bodies and they will feel energetic when a normal starving body would feel sluggish and lethargic. The person with the anorexia evolutionary adaptation will also feel focused and secure in their decision to withhold feeding and constantly move their bodies. they see it as the right thing to do. The only thing to do. The person will feel in control and more focused than ever. There are changes within the body of the anorexic that make them feel this way. The normal starving person (without anorexia) will not feel this way. These are the evolutionary adaptations that come with anorexia that make the person able to migrate. We are not the only animal that does this, but that is for another blog.

These skills possessed by the anorexic person would have saved their families in the past but today they will kill us. Evolutionary adaptations do not just disappear. Our environment has exploded in a way our brains could not keep up. This evolutionary adaptation is still with us and if a person has this genetic adaptation and goes into energy deficit it will be triggered and the person will begin the need to migrate. Of course today it looks much different than it did for our ancestors. Today we don’t take off migrating to another land because the famine is not real; it is self induced by dieting, loss of appetite; working out so much you can’t retain enough calories, or any other means of falling into an energy deficit. Today our evolutionary adaptation to migrate, anorexia, looks like a constant need to work out at the gym or run everyday without being able to stop. Today anorexia looks like controlling one’s diet until you are eating as little as possible. Anorexia is blurred with diet culture, thinness, and controlling mothers today because that is the world we live in. But anorexia did not evolve from today’s world. It evolved at a time when we needed to migrate.

It is important as a sufferer or family member of someone with anorexia to understand the evolutionary and genetic component of anorexia as well as all of the changes that occur in one’s body due to this evolutionary adaptation we call anorexia. People with anorexia are not looking to be thin, they aren’t angry at their families, they did not develop this as a way to control their environment. They have an evolutionary adaptation that once would have saved their families lives. At one point in our history anorexia was a positive, not a negative. To untangle oneself from this adaptation and stop the need to migrate one must first understand where it came from.

More in depth information can be found at www.adaptedtofamine.com.