When is the Right Time to Tell Someone That You Have an Eating Disorder?

I’m 59 and have never talked about it. Until now.

Terry L. Cooper
7 min readSep 26, 2022
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay (cropped by me)

What is an eating disorder?

According to Healthline, eating disorders are a range of psychological conditions that cause unhealthy eating habits to develop. They might start with an obsession with food, body weight, or body shape.

While doing research for this piece, depending upon which source I viewed, there are anywhere from 4–12 types of eating disorders. If the medical community can’t agree on the number then how do they treat patients? Rhetorical question but it did cross my mind.

Using the Mayo Clinic they list five (5) and they are:

Anorexia nervosa
Bulimia nervosa
Binge-eating disorder (more about this one in a minute)
Rumination disorder
Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder

You can read more about them using the Mayo Clinic link above. I want to zero in on binge eating because that’s what I’m dealing with.

When you have binge-eating disorder, you regularly eat too much food (binge) and feel a lack of control over your eating. You may eat quickly or eat…

--

--

Terry L. Cooper

Writer for this platform since June 2020. See my pinned post for links to locate me all over the WWW.