bigfatscience:

heavyweightheart:

If someone has GI issues, the odds that they have disordered eating/ED are quite high, roughly 1 in 2 by some estimates (I’m inclined to think the odds might be even higher, but that’s plenty high). Of course this doesn’t tell us whether the GI distress came about as a result of the disorder or whether it’s the reverse, but automatically assuming that food or specific foods are to blame for GI issues and failing to explore the possibility that the issues originate in the disordered fear and avoidance of food keep a lot of people suffering. This is especially true with functional gut disorders, but even in the presence of a confirmed disease like celiac, the health of a person’s relationship with food should still be a central focus (while avoiding gluten, obviously). Decades of diet cultural indoctrination have warped most of our relationships with food, and allergies/intolerances are less common than disordered eating, and even where they do exist they can easily lead to disorder. Disorder around food is the most normal thing there could be in a disordered society; it’s not a “fake” condition and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Truer words never spoken. 

I don’t talk about my personal health much on here, but I have a functional GI (EDIT: Gastrointestinal – all the digestive guts) disorder that was caused by 25 years of restrictive dieting. Although I now know I lived with this disorder for decades with symptoms that were minor enough to ignore, everything came crashing to a halt one terrible day when the pain became acute and scary and impossible to ignore. 

I sought help from doctors for two years for this condition and the profound physical and psychological destruction it caused, and for the intense period of food aversion it triggered (it goes both ways, as @heavyweightheart​ said). My doctors ordered all the usual physical tests, but when they failed to find evidence of physical disease (which is the very definition of a functional GI disorder), they stopped. And not once in those two years did any doctor ever ask about my current or past eating behavior, other than the usual knee-jerk reaction to a suffering fat person: prescribing more restrictive eating. I only know what is wrong, now, because I educated myself and found online ED community and learned of this research that heavyweightheart alludes to. And I eventually connected with a fat positive dietitian who specializes in these things. Irony of ironies, and in precise opposition to the doctors’ negligent advice, wrestling my disorder(s) into remission required unrestricted eating, and rest, and weight gain.

I don’t know if I will ever get over the intense feeling of betrayal I harbour towards the medical community as a result of this harrowing experience. My GI condition is mostly stable now with medication and my daily commitment to adequate and regular nourishment. But my rage is a burning pit of fire in my belly, replacing the pain I used to experience from my damaged, limping digestive tract.