 I remember when we were learning about eating disorders, when I was still really young kid in school, you know you have the classical stereotypical image of anorexia and then a very thin white female that looks like a skeleton looking in the mirror and she sees a really fat person staring back at her. This is like that belief of what anorexia is and something that is really, that I notice a lot in autism and neurodiversity is that there isn't body dysmorphia and there is not fear of waking and that was for me really personally why I never resonated with this label anorexia because I was like but I don't think I'm fat, I don't want to lose weight, I cannot have this illness right and that's why I believe the anorexia, I mean I even hesitate to call it that like the restrictive eating disorder is a term I prefer was really a manifestation of the autism because for me it was like all of my autistic traits like the difficulty with change, the need for ritual and routine, the sensory preferences like the control factor like the anxiety that I had around food and not trusting eating different foods or new foods or more foods because eating full felt really sensory and uncomfortable to me like yeah I mean that if you don't have any awareness or knowledge of autism or autistic traits like yeah I mean of course anyone would label that as an eating disorder and then when it's invalidated and you're not believed and you're accused for lying and being manipulative like it just causes you to cling to that control even more which of course worsens the disorder. So as a person when you're mentioning it like it's kind of like inherently assumed that if you have you know diagnosed anorexia that label that you also have body dysmorphia as well and you're kind of saying that you don't need to have body dysmorphia to be anorexial like you can see that you're very very you know skinny and you can be like okay right this is actually a problem I don't see myself as a really fat person in the mirror I know what I look like and I don't want to be like this and you kind of like splitting the I suppose like you know even in my mind to be honest like you know to me you know someone who hasn't really sort of delved into like the eating disorder literature and sort of the world as much as you have like it does kind of feel like body dysmorphia anorexia like one in the same but what are you saying that it's not it's like oh not at all I mean I have never had body dysmorphia I have never considered myself a fat person and even when I was very very ill and literally looked like a skeleton I knew better than anyone else that I looked like a skeleton but then of course people like but then why didn't you just eat more why didn't you change well it's because that was the autistic trait the difficulty with change that was almost overpowering this knowledge of how new I how how how sick I knew I was right like the the idea of changing my ways of changing my habits was more scary to me than than being like okay I just look this way and I could die any day right like that's how how scary the change was for me and I think this is really really common in in in eating disorders because in the end like an eating disorder is is an addiction just like smoking or sex addiction or alcoholism like the person suffering from the addiction often knows that what they're doing is not good for them like a smoker who sees their black lungs like they're not gonna they're not gonna say no like I'm not harming my body like I have no idea what you're just like I'm fine exactly like they know they know that what they're doing is not healthy but but changing is is the hardest thing humans have to do like the reason we are called creatures of habit is because we are wired to to do things over and over again because we designed our brains ability to form to form habits is the very thing that allows humans to survive like if we had to wake up every morning and think about how to turn on the shower how to use the bathroom like all of the energy that we would be using like on an evolutionary level to seek out food and survive and protect ourselves would be wasted at the beginning of the day it's kind of like bypass bypassing the need to like cognitively process everything that you're doing right like that if it's like a habit like that you just after the gym you just go in the shower you don't really think about it you just jump in the shower like this is why I do whereas like you know if you went in that sort of initial stage like you think it and go into the gym you're like okay I'm gonna go twice a week and do this or that and that those like first few weeks it's like the amount of energy and cognitive thought that goes into doing that is just so intense but if you're in a cycle just every week you go twice a week you don't think about it and you actually feel a bit weird if you don't go