Hi! I’m Julia and I’m joining the Liv Label Free team! I’m an 18-year-old girl from the Netherlands and I absolutely love writing, reading, animals, and all things creative! I will be supporting Liv with content creation and posting, and helping the Liv Label Free vision come to life. I will also be posting blogs, and this is the first one! So, without further ado, let’s dive in:

“Am I faking my eating disorder?” was a question that went through my mind a lot during treatment. When I started Multi-Family Therapy (a program where multiple families with a child with an ED come together), I was terrified that the professionals would find out I wasn’t really “sick.” Somewhere deep inside, I knew that I didn’t fit the “typical picture” of someone with anorexia. I didn’t start restricting my intake because I thought I was fat, and I could never relate to looking in the mirror and seeing a fat version of myself staring back. For me, restricting my intake and losing weight was about numbing my feelings and creating rules in a chaotic world.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I’m autistic. So my fear of weight gain didn’t stem from a fear of getting fat, but from a fear of not being able to handle life. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve felt like an alien in this world. I like predictability and clear rules, and that was exactly what anorexia gave me. But because I didn’t develop an eating disorder due to body image issues or a desire to lose weight, the treatment didn’t help me. I thought this meant that I was faking my eating disorder, because why else wouldn’t highlighting the parts of my body I didn’t like on a piece of paper help me?

Looking back, I now realize that my fear of not having a “real” eating disorder was actually a fear of not receiving any help. I didn’t know where all my struggles and loneliness came from, and I found it very difficult to communicate about my feelings. So in my mind, the only way to receive any help was through my eating disorder.

Because of this, I (subconsciously) started copying the behavior of the girls around me in an attempt to have a “real” eating disorder (While writing this, I realize that this was actually a form of masking! I just didn’t know what that was at the time!). But I continued to feel like there was something wrong with me, because things didn’t get any better. I still struggled a lot with coping at school, making friends, and just handling life in general.

It wasn’t until I discovered that I’m autistic that I started to feel like I could leave my eating disorder behind. Before this discovery, I always felt like I needed my eating disorder to cope. I thought that if I could solve the underlying problems, such as feeling a lot of stress and pressure from school or struggling to make friends,  it would give me the space to let go of the eating disorder. But no matter the advice people gave me, these problems didn’t go away. And that’s because I’m autistic, so my brain simply works in a different way! I can now accommodate my needs much better and learn how to live a life that truly fits me. So even though it can still be really hard at times, I’m incredibly grateful that I discovered that I’m autistic.

Are you also a neurodivergent being who’s struggling to fully let go of the ED? Listen to the free audio training 3 Steps to Recovery From an Eating Disorder as an Autistic Person to discover how autism can be your greatest advantage in ED recovery!