Throughout history, both autism and eating differences have been pathologized. The traditional view labels them as “disorders” of which the “symptoms” must be “treated.” But what if the behaviors associated with autism and eating disorders – both separately and intertwined – were not problems to be fixed, but rather, powerful adaptations to feel safe? More specifically, what if eating disorders themselves are a form of autistic masking? In this post, you’ll learn how eating disorders manifest through three distinct types of masks, why neurodiversity-affirming approaches form the foundation of freedom, and how to discover your true self – without the masks of fear and limitation.

Autistic Masking is an Adaptation

Masking is putting on a version of yourself that you think the world will accept. It’s carefully studying how others act, how they speak, and then mimicking their behaviors, expressions, and even their emotions. You learn to smile when you’re supposed to, to laugh when others laugh, and to suppress stim urges – all in an effort to avoid being labeled as “weird.”

As I’m sure any neurodivergent person (diagnosed or not) can attest to, growing up in a neurotypical world is a frightening thing. On a deep soul-level, you know you’re different from everyone else, but you can’t quite pin down why. You know your interests are different, you know your nuanced and philosophical way of thinking is far beyond the comprehension of your peers, and everyone seems to have been born with the rulebook on how to have social interactions, except for you.

So what do you do? You adapt. You adapt by taking on external identities, camouflaging like a chameleon in the rainforest, and hiding in the shadows…all to protect yourself from being found out and preyed on. Because perhaps, there have been times where you did show your true self; but rather than the authentic version of you being respected and celebrated, you were made fun of. You were bullied and teased, which only proved how important it was for you to learn to conform.

Despite believing that conformity is the only way to survive in this threatening and unpredictable world, your unique self is acutely aware of the fact that you can’t truly conform. Conformity goes against your entire nature! Unfortunately, this masking isn’t a choice – it’s a survival strategy.

When you’ve masked for long enough, you begin to lose sight of where the mask ends and where your authentic self begins. Obviously, pretending to be someone else is exhausting, but it seems safer than the alternative. When it comes to autism and eating disorders, this is often where the confusion starts. You live in a constant state of tension between who you are and who you feel you “should” be. The pressure to fit in feels suffocating, and the gap between your masked self and your authentic self grows wider. It’s in this ever-growing void that the seeds of disordered eating behaviors don’t only take root, but thrive. 

TAES and the Three Masks

While autism is typically associated with anorexia and ARFID, the reality is that autistic masking can manifest through any type of disordered eating pattern – including bulimia, binge eating, orthorexia, and all the other points that exist along what I have termed The Adaptive Eating Spectrum (TAES). What makes this relationship particularly complex is that eating disorders serve a triple masking function: They create an external mask (which is how we interface with society), an identity mask (which is how we hide from ourselves), and a compensatory mask (if I do the eating disorder “right,” I don’t have to face the existential angst of being “wrong.”)

Let me start by sharing my personal experience with the external mask. This one showed up in how I adhered to diet culture’s rules – the ED wasn’t only a way to have clear boundaries in a boundless world, but it also offered a way to conform. After all, everyone else is on a diet too! This external masking through food and body gives us a socially acceptable way to blend in, to appear “normal” in a neurotypical world’s expectations.

But there was also a deeper layer at work. This layer formed the identity mask. Although my ED was never about the way I looked, starving myself made me feel like I could retreat into my own body (like plasmolysis in a plant cell) both physically and mentally. Physically, I was no longer stretching the human body costume I’ve always felt trapped in, and mentally, I was numbed from the ceaseless thoughts (my clients know I often describe my thoughts as going “balls to the walls”!) and constant state of fight-or-flight mode. The identity mask became a numbing method, a way to hide from my own vastness.

Even when I was really ill – even when I was acutely aware that my behaviors weren’t “normal” and that the way I looked was concerning in every way possible – there was always a sense of superiority. And I’m not just talking about the superiority that accompanies anorexia (you know, the feeling better than everyone else because you’re able to eat less and move more than them). I’m talking about the fact that I knew that when they thought whatever they thought about my gauntness or obsessive food and exercise behaviors, they weren’t actually judging me – they were judging the mask that I was hiding behind (or rather, retreating from). Gosh did I feel special because only I knew that! Only I knew that they thought they were judging me. While in reality, they were merely judging my costume. It was my little secret.

The Physical Body as a Mask

It’s worth noting that with or without an ED, my body has always felt like a mask – because let’s be real, no physical vessel can house the infinite autistic being that has creativity far beyond physical form. It’s similar to how words feel like a mask. As I write in my upcoming book on anorexia and autism: Words will always fail me. They will never say exactly what I want to say, they will never encompass the breadth and depth of the explosion of energy I have inside me. 

Perhaps this is why alexithymia – while typically considered an “inability to recognize emotions” – may not be an inability or difficulty with emotions at all. Maybe it’s that emotions themselves are labels, and thus they’re another way to push the complex human experience into a box that, once again, the infinite autistic being can never fit into. So when we say alexithymia is a common experience amongst autistic people, might we actually be saying that our emotional experiences are too vast and nuanced to be contained by simple labels? The complexity of our internal landscape defies these predetermined categories, just as our being defies the confines of physical form. But hey, that’s just my nuanced perspective!

Autistic Masking and Binge Eating

The concept of body-as-mask can manifest in a seemingly opposite way in those who struggle with binge eating. And no, I’m not talking about extreme hunger here. I’m talking about people who consistently overeat without compensating through restriction or over-exercise (I’ve done an entire 4-part series on autism and binge eating, so be sure to check that out if you haven’t already!). If you currently believe you’re developing binge eating disorder AFTER a restrictive eating disorder, please do yourself a huge favor and grab a copy of my book How to Beat Extreme Hunger! Now, let’s come back to discussing true binge eating.

Many of my coaching clients who lean more on the overconsumption side of The Adaptive Eating Spectrum tell me that intrinsically, they know their being is so infinite that any physical form feels like a trap. Yet they also tell me that they’ve always been “okay” in a larger body because it was an attempt to match their physical form with their internal vastness. In other words, the larger body had become the mask.

Of course, because your internal form can never be made tangible (as that would defy the nature of being), it becomes an endless chase. Just like restriction is an escape from emotions, sensory overwhelm, the fear of being healthy (and more reasons I explain in my autistic fear of weight gain series), binge eating is its own kind of escape. The sensory input paired with the hyperfocus of eating and eating and eating is all a way to numb. It’s a distraction from reality – the reality that no matter what your body looks like, you’re still trapped.

Larger Body as a Mask

One specific client is coming to mind right now. She was severely overweight and told me she hated being in her body because she couldn’t walk, everything hurt, she couldn’t dance, she could no longer do the things she loves. She wanted to lose weight but was terrified of settling at her natural body size because she was afraid that people would finally “see her.” This example perfectly illustrates how the binge eating – and the overweight body that comes with that – is a dual mask. The secretive eating is a respite from the external masking, while the overweight body can simultaneously act as a mask for your natural body size.

I want to be clear here – there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being in a larger body if that’s your natural set-point. The issue isn’t about size; it’s about intention. For this particular client, her relationship with food and body wasn’t coming from a place of self-acceptance or body neutrality. Rather, her behaviors were driven by fear and the need to hide. The larger body had become another mask, another way to avoid being seen.

Eating Disorders are an Escape

Speaking of escape, that’s the root of the entire spectrum of adaptive eating experiences. Arguably, the attempted escape is the adaptation itself! It goes without saying that this is exponentially important to understand in the context of autism. To give another personal example: My eating disorder (or rather, my eating adaptation) was an escape from sensory overwhelm, existential angst, and the constant pressure to perform like a neurotypical person – a person I knew I could never be, no matter how hard I tried. 

Perhaps this is why eating disorders involve so much secrecy, which we also see with bulimia. The secretive nature is the “respite” from the masking, the trap door that no one knows exists except for us. It’s behind this trap door, in the privacy of the behaviors, that we can finally stop performing.

ARFID as a Trauma Response to Autistic Masking

So far we’ve talked about anorexia, orthorexia, binge eating, and bulimia, but what about ARFID? Well in some regards, ARFID may be a response to masking in and of itself. For those whose ARFID is driven by a lack of appetite, this often stems from being in a constant state of fight-or-flight mode – a natural consequence of chronic masking in a neurotypical world.

The fear of consequences can also stem from a history of masking. For example, I had one client who deeply disliked certain food textures but grew up in a household where eating everything on their plate was strictly demanded. When they finally left home, they developed ARFID. This person also has PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance, or rather, Pervasive Drive for Autonomy), which meant their ARFID became an attempt to reclaim their autonomy – a rejection of years of forced compliance around food. It goes without saying that the “picky eating” stigma also fuels masking, which is perhaps why so many people with ARFID prefer to eat alone. They don’t want to be judged for their food choices, their eating pace, their texture preferences, or the countless other ways that neurotypical society has deemed their natural eating patterns as “wrong” or “childish.”

The Compensatory Mask and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

Speaking of fearing judgment, let’s talk about the compensatory mask. For many, just as it was for me, being “good” at the eating disorder is a way to compensate for feeling “broken” and “wrong” in this world. If you’ve read my book Rainbow Girl (and I talk about this much more in my book How to Get Out of Quasi Recovery), you know my ED started as an innocent mission to be the perfect healthy eater. This mission became my neurodivergent hyperfocus and more than that, it became my existential purpose. 

While I personally never struggled with body image or feared fatness, I do have many clients that say they do. In my podcast on Unnecessary Calories, the specific client whose conversation I based that episode on told me that her ED is a way to make her presence more “tolerable” and a way to avoid giving others “a reason to hate me.” This connects deeply with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, where masking itself becomes a response to RSD. Being thin, like following diet culture’s rules, offers that false sense of “fitting in” (i.e., conforming) – of compensating for feeling fundamentally “wrong” in this world. 

So is it any wonder that making the decision to “recover” is so damn hard? To let go of these masks – external, identity, and compensatory – would mean opening yourself up to the possibility of judgment, shame, and a level of vulnerability that feels dangerous. You’d be losing not just one protective layer, but three interwoven shields that have kept you safe in a world that feels anything but safe. 

Unmasking the Eating Disorder: Discovery over Recovery

This is precisely why I prefer the term “discovery” over recovery – because finding freedom from eating disorders isn’t actually about “recovering” from anything. In reality, it’s about discovering who you are without these masks of fear and limitation. It’s about discovering who you are when you embrace your neurodivergence.

Discovery means understanding and honoring your sensory needs. It means releasing judgment about when, where, and how you need to eat to feel safe. Sometimes that means eating alone – which tends to go against the traditional view of “needing to learn to eat in social settings.” The goal isn’t to force neurotypical eating patterns onto a neurodivergent nervous system. Instead, it’s about discovering your unique version of freedom, one that honors both the experience of being an autistic soul and the biological needs of the body that soul inhabits.

This journey of discovery also involves a willingness to confront the existential parts within yourself. It’s about learning to trust that people will see, respect, and love you for who you truly are – fully unmasked. And if they don’t? Well those were never your kind of people to begin with.

The Power of Community in Autistically ED-Free Recovery

A majority of people are living in their own self-created stories of fear and limitation. They’re hiding behind their own masks and believe that projecting labels and judgments onto others will make them feel better about themselves. But this is all an illusion. When you’re truly free, you have nothing to prove. When you’re truly free, you are your own foundation and will no longer need to compare yourself to others to feel whole.

Thus, the path forward isn’t about fixing what’s broken – because you were never broken to begin with. Discovering your true self starts with acknowledging that your masks were an adaptation to help you navigate a world that wasn’t built for the neurodivergent nervous system. When you understand that you are a highly adaptive being, one that is creative and abundant beyond physical form, you invite yourself to adapt the other way – to adapt into the vastness you were born to embody.

If you want personalized guidance on your autistically ED-free recovery journey, apply for 1-1 Coaching here. Or if you prefer to discover your unique version of freedom in a group setting, join us in the Autistically ED-Free Membership!