In the bottom right hand corner I've shown a couple of the biological functions we are all pre-programmed to perform in order to stay alive. They don't take up a lot of thought-space because they should be pretty straight-forward. We get tired, we need rest, we sleep. We get hungry, the brain shouts "hey, you with the face, make a sandwich or something," we eat the sandwich and we move on.

Something I think people don't often get is that eating disorders aren't really about losing weight or wanting to be thin. Yes, they are often defined by obsessive preoccupation with weight and food and very extreme, often dangerous behaviors around eating, but these are simply the physical mediums through which deep underlying psychological distress is expressed.

This is why it's inaccurate to call anorexia "a diet that spiralled out of control" or think of binge eating disorder and bulimia as problems attributable to laziness and lack of willpower around food. These are mental illnesses.

I was fourteen when I first developed an eating disorder. I won't go into what the exact causes of this were (that's a whole other very complicated kettle of calorie-counted fish), but anorexia took hold very suddenly and aggressively on both my body and mind. After a while I began to struggle with binge eating and bulimia too, and I continued to fluctuate between these for years; sometimes very physically ill, sometimes less so, but always in a pretty consistently disordered mental state.

Here's a picture of what my mind looked like in the throes of illness.