06/14/2026
Is this controversial? I don’t know. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone who works with a variety of people with e@ting d!sorders thinks of them as solely “brain diseases,” but I know there are people who do.
And I know there are a small subset of people where it does seem to be a “brain disease.” I’ve worked with people where that seemed to be the case, but it’s not the case for the vast majority of people with Ed’s.
There is a difference between something being a “brain disease” and something that impacts the brain of people who have that particular issue.
And restriction definitely impacts the brain in a variety of ways. A lot of people get more obsessive, more rigid, more anxious, more focused or more distracted (often both depending on the subject). Word recall can be hard. Memory can be impacted.
To be clear, restriction is not the only reasons those things might happen and many people have brains that just work that way and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m talking specifically about people whose brains work differently because of not getting enough nourishment. It turns out that our brains (like the rest of our body) need food to function.
And while I was writing this post thinking about Ed’s, it’s important to remember that the brain doesn’t know why it’s not getting enough to eat- just that it’s not getting enough. So dieting can have a similar impact on the brain, as could any other reason someone isn’t getting enough to eat.
I know that when it comes to Ed’s, the “it’s a brain disease” was a response to the many years that the field said “it’s always the parents’ (mothers) fault.”
But being reactive to parents being blamed by swinging to “brain disease” doesn’t capture the lived experience of many people with Ed’s.
And that’s what we need to do- listen to people with lived experience. Let them tell us all of the contributing factors for their ed. Or let them tell us the one thing they think caused it.
We don’t need to write people’s stories for them.
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