Strange Taboo

It's unacceptable to say that a fat person can eat little compared to saying a slim person can eat a lot. But one rarely referred to taboo is that one can have an irresistible compulsion to eat, but not enjoy eating.

Again, there's little problem with saying that one can have a sexual compulsion-that is an overwhelming desire for sex, or to keep getting sexual relief-orgasm. Seeing as some seem to doubt sexual compulsion.

This experience is far more prevalent than one might think.  For example those who say they "Hurt themselves with food." Seem at least in part to be relaying an irrepressible drive to eat without pleasure.

I had no idea this was so until I let it slip out. The reaction from one girl was so hysterical that I felt need to withdraw it so she'd calm down. Then much later on, I remember discussing this again, after preambling it with that very incident.

As if the word irony had no been invented, a similar thing happened and I was accused of not knowing what I was talking about. Because what I said didn't match the wrong descriptions of ignorant disinterested people, who call the ED shots.

The hot button seems to be food=pleasure. Anything else is somehow unacceptable. Yet my experience is that the pleasure of eating is generated by the correct workings of the mechanics used for eating and digestion.

If your body is out of song then it either isn't generated or felt.

What's even more intriguing is the issue of control.

It's presumed that ED's mirror each other. That they have the same issues and themes despite different context, behaviours and outcomes.

One thing that's most associated with anorexia is control. This is probably due to the worship and fetishization of anorexic behaviour as the only route to inducing deliberate weight loss. Hyperphagic disorder and anything associated with it, is seen as the opposite, out of control, though there are sometimes attempts to press it into the AN mould i.e. fatness is first defined as an ED, which it isn't, then described as trying to gain control by filling a void of despair, like anorexia.

But when it comes to genuinely having a hyperphagic disorder, I'd say the control bit is more likely to be showing through any insistence that one either eats purely out of elective conscious choice, for pleasure, or to "hurt" oneself.  

Ask yourself how many times you hear a hyperphagic say anything but.