When I was growing up, I never thought much about eating in a specific way. I ate the food that I liked and my mum was a good chef, so I was fed well. In school, I liked most of the food that we received and I always looked forward to going to the dining room. I moved around quite a lot and was active, so I always liked physical education in school and I did some martial arts growing up. Me and my friends cycled around our small village so I did not just sit around doing nothing. As a result of this, I kept my body at a healthy body weight, even if I ate some candy here and there. Sometimes I ate big portions of food and so on.
When I was around 17 years old, things started to change. I became more aware of what was viewed as healthy food and started to go to the gym.The problem was that I got obsessed with eating clean and my Autism did not make it easier. It became a routine that I did not want to deviate from, no matter how my body felt. I took it way too far and it became unhealthy instead. I did not understand that my body needed fuel to be able to function and perform properly. I continued to train hard at the gym and took long walks, but instead of building up my body, I started to break it down. The building blocks that my body needed in the form of Protein, fats and carbs were just not there. I had heard somewhere that eating to much fat was not good for you, so I started to cut out almost all fat in my diet because I did not want to gain fat on my body. This irrational fear pushed me to neglect the fact that our body needs fat so that the body can build and repair cells and manufacture hormones. I read that carbs could make you gain weight, so I started to eat less and less of carbs too, even though carbs are a very good source of energy for the body. In the end, I just ate some protein and some salad, leaving me with maybe 1000 calories a day while still training hard.
Do I need to say that it was a recipe for disaster? I lost all visible fat on my body and then my body started to break down muscle when it did not have any other form of energy to take from. I was hungry as a wolf all day, but I had made up my mind that I was going to continue this diet no matter what. I was running around in the supermarkets looking for food that was low enough on calories so that I could eat them and reading on all tables of contents to find the optimal food. Most of the food in the store was off limits for me. I had to buy smaller and smaller clothes and in the end, I was so thin that even the smallest sizes were almost empty on my body. I had to use a belt without holes just so I could tighten my pants enough. I was skin and bone.
It is strange because I did not want to become so skinny but it just happened and I did not know how to get out of that hole. I thought about food 24/7 and what I wanted to eat, but deprived myself of everything I needed and wanted. Inside of me, I was sure that I would gain weight and look like a balloon in no time if I started to eat like normal people. In the end, I talked with a psychologist and started to go to a dietician on a regular basis to feel that I had someone that could watch over my progress and be there as a support. I went to the dietician almost every week to weigh myself and track the progress of how much I gained in the form of fat and muscle and adjust my calorie intake to keep the progress going. I did not want to know what I weighed, I just wanted to hear how much the change was every time, so I never looked at the scale.
Deep down I knew that I was unhealthy and anorectic and I did not want to know just how thin I had become. But after rain comes the sun as they say and with time, I was able to get rid of my eating disorder and got a very muscular body in the process. My body was screaming for nutrition so when I started to eat well and train like a mad man in the gym, the progress was not anything short of amazing. My dietician told me that she had never seen anything like it and she had been working with many high level athletes over the years. Of course, the change was not made over one night, it took time, but it was worth all the effort that I put in. It was a relief to finally be able to enjoy life again, to be able to eat without stressing and no longer be thinking about food all the time because I was so hungry. I also stopped caring so much about keeping the body fat extremely low and looked more for performance and muscle gain instead. When you are in the middle of a eating disorder it can feel that there is almost no way out, but the truth is that recovery is a shorter step away that we may think, the resistance and fear is just in our own head and it is not a real threat, we need to understand that it is a sickness and we need to be healthy again. It is not only women that are affected by the pressure to be perfect and end up with an eating disorder, men are affected as well. But it is not only about the picture from society of how we should look, for me a big part was about the feeling of being in control, but in reality I had actually lost it.
Daniel Antonsson is a 43 year old Autistic man living in Sweden with his Venezuelan girlfriend and four year old daughter. He has always enjoyed writing about different subjects and being able to publish for the Art of Autism make him feel truly blessed.
Hi there. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your experience. It is strikingly similar to mine, as someone who fell into anorexia out of this obsession with clean eating and perfectionism. This pipeline is especially insidious, as it is easily disguised as simply “making healthy choices,” only until the detriments grow obvious.
It is also incredibly harmful that we imagine anorexia to be a feminine thing. In reality, men tend to hide or play off their disordered behaviors, and choose not to seek help because of this stigma. Especially in my personal observations, male disordered eating is WAY more common than what statistics might capture.
At the core, Anorexia is not truly driven by vanity, but regulation and fear.
This link between disordered eating and autism is something else for me to consider as someone looking into a diagnosis.
Many regards, and take care.
– Dolores