eating disorders in young women on the spectrum

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I think it is possible that my desire to control my body (lowering calorie intake to suppress menstruation) had some relation to my generalized anxiety disorder (diagnosed as an adult) that can be a co-morbid symptom of being on the spectrum. Having control over myself and my environment seems to lessen the anxiety. In my later teens I manged to transition the harsh dieting and need to exert control into a preoccupation with just eating healthy food.

I am a yo yo dieter and a desperate dieter that is all

Several researchers and some studies (the Gillbergs and Billstedt from Sweden, recently Janet Treasure/Maudsley Hospital) speak of an Asperger type of anorexia, of Asperger underlying quite a number of cases of anorexia or of there being a clear link between anorexia and Asperger.

http://content.time.com/time/health/art ... 99,00.html
http://autism.about.com/b/2007/08/23/ar ... nected.htm
Do some cases of anorexia nervosa reflect underlying autistic-like conditions?
C Gillberg, M Råstam - Behavioural Neurology, 1992 - hindawi.com

There is a very strong link, and even for Aspergers most of the reasons why this must be so, should be very clear.

Evam, thank you for the links, they are very interesting.

I totally used to do this, too! I started taking birth control to suppress menstruation in order to recover from anorexia.

I've had bulimia and anorexia on and off from age 13-21. I do think that undiagnosed autism was a factor in my eating disorders because I had trouble adjusting to middle school, had trouble fitting in when social interactions became more complex, and because I was drawn to the numbers and the eating disorder obsession.

I've had an eating disorder (Anorexia Nervosa binge/purge subtype) since the age of 18. I'm 21 now and just starting to properly recover after years of on off binging, purging and restricting. I still have trouble choosing food that is healthy and having the correct portion sizes. My eating disorder developed at my first year of uni when years of bullying at school hit me and I developed many mental health problems. I suspected I had Aspergers since the age of 17 but wasn't diagnosed until I was 19. I was always thin as a child and teen and could eat what ever I wanted and not gain weight as I had a fast metabolism. I now gain weigh very easily as my body try's to store as much energy as possible in preparation for future starvation. However this is meant to reduce after around a year of non restricting or purging so at the moment I'm focusing on being healthy and not worrying about my weight gain. To all those that are struggling with weight restoration as part of recovery know that the self hatred thoughts do reduce over time as your brain is no longer starving. In my experience the lower weight I got the more I hated myself. I am now at a weight that used to seem huge to me but is in the normal range of the BMI and I now don't have as many distorted and negative thoughts about myself. So there is hope and it does get better. You deserve happiness and to love yourself and this is achievable even if it seems impossible at the moment.

With one of the two first links above (or with links relating to them) there were lots of interesting comments from people with eating disorders and relatives; as these comments are apparently not available anymore, here are the ones I had copied (I have made bold what I found most plausible) :

Aspie girl with ED friend: In short, people with Asperger’s usually are analytical and logical. Eating Disorders are in NO way logical.

(11) carmel says:
ln a way this does make the disorder both rational and logical – food can heighten the turmoil in the already sensitive stomach – but to remove this “source” of discomfort does require an obsessive mind…
Both are rampant, to varying degrees in my family…

(13) Cathy says:
The proposed link between anorexia nervosa and Asperger’s syndrome/high functioning autism makes a lot of sense to me. I have struggled with anorexia nervosa for many years and it has had little to do with desiring a ‘perfect body’. Rather, the motivation behind my anorexic behaviours have been to regulate my world and to cope with anxiety. The behaviours of my anorexia nervosa (food restriction, calorie counting ritualistic eating and ritualistic exercising) made life seem predictable and a means of introducing some conistency and regularity into a chaotic world.

(15) Robin M says:
... Eating disorders (in the females) and aspergers (in the males) also runs very heavily throughout my family (aunts/uncles/cousins), my cousin and son also have classic autism. I also have some schizophrenia in my family. I’m sure it’s all related.

(20) Churk says:
For me my Eating Disorder held different purposes, for example, everyday I knew what I was supposed to eat and drink and that made me feel better. At times it also seemed like I had an Eating Disorder to shut everyone out or to just be defiant.

(21)Lisa says:
All about numbers.
I can’t stand the feeling of water or sticky things on my hands and am very sensitive to noise and the feeling of clothing on my skin. If there is a small grain of dirt in my bedsheets, it has to be fixed. I must always line things up numerically, weather it be numbers of baskets on a shelf (they should be in odd numbers or I won’t stop rearranging them)
Having struggled with anorexia and bulemia for a good portion of my 32 years of life (not currently… I only have to mathematically line up food proportions) I have to say that I would not doubt a strong co-relation with eating disorders and aspergers.
When I saw a psychologist in my teens due to my eating disorder he asked me why I engaged in the eating disordered behaviours. I told him that it created personal space for me in the midst of chaos. It truly was the root of my ED. I suspect that I have been a long undiagnosed aspie.

(22) Me says:
If your eating behavior is not really “sick” and leading to problems, chances are that your metabolism is just protecting itself in an astounishing way. Aspies seem to have a tendency to eat a strangely narrow, carbohydrate based, proteine-rich and rather low fat diet with tons of stuff that support fatty acid digestion and forming of Omega-3 fatty acids as preferred material for cell construction.
Aspies seem to do that without ever having read anything about nutrition – their brain seems to be better connected to their stomach than the neurologic typical person, who has the same ability but apparently lost the connection to it. Probably all kids have the innard ability to select the food that’s best for their body, but Aspies often instinctively form strange habits, which resemble a strict diet and they want to stick to it. That only looks like malnutriton to normal people, in fact it’s a quite optimized basic diet for the task of keeping your direct wiring to this world under control and your metabolism healty. [...]