The treatment for BED? Stop Calorie Restriction Dieting and Stop Pathologising Your Body/Self

American Addiction Centre's page called "Compulsive Overeating". The question with binge eating disorder has always been what is it?

...absolutely no control around food. Since many binge eaters restrict food intake...

If you are restricting your intake, then that's,  by these people's notion "control".

The snake swallows its tail after first slithering toward something getting hold of it in its teeth. The intensity of pursuit narrows its peripheral vision until it ends up biting its own tail. The cycle is complete and is able to perpetuate itself.

With anorexia-restriction, circuitry around the response to hunger seems to weaken and /or the circuitry around blocking is activated and becomes powerful. An ever decreasing vortex of response ensues.

With binge/purge-restricting certain foods, increases appetite for them til that becomes irresistible creating panic leading to a salvaging action of purging stomach contents (aspire assist) this reduces/threatens to reduce energy intake, which increases hunger function to compensate for lack or prospect of it. A cycle is established.

Then you have binge eating disorder, 

...defined as consuming large amounts of food within a two-hour period at least twice a week without purging, accompanied by a sense of being out of control.

That's not a cycle. Also, the equivalent of "purging" is the restriction beforehand. It's a reversal of binge/purge, instead its restrict/restore. One step forward, one step back.

That this is not really an eating disorder like anorexia or binge/purge is confirmed by this startling piece of information: "...an issue that’s remarkably responsive to treatment.." EDs aren't remarkably responsive to what passes for "treatment", because that doesn't consist of any technique that does the job of restoring response to hunger.

Responsivity to "change the way they think about and consume food" is a voluntary action. The whole point of a disorder is it has become involuntary, that's why people ask for, or end up in hospital needing help.

I've usually struggled to grasp what BED advocates were getting at, the coinage contains different cross currents of hunger and other metabolic dysfunction. The addiction folk don't get it, for them-eating=thinking. They want to fit it into their model. "...they think of food in addictive terms."  "They’re obsessed with food..." Obsessed with food is those using the diet-weight hypothesis;

...unusual relationship with food. ...they think about food...they gorge on food... ...change the way they think about and consume food. ...a great deal of food.. ...hidden foods and/or food wrappers. ...unaware of the smell or the taste of the foods... 

That's the first 6-7 paragraphs, excluding all references to eat, eating and binge. 

Food. Food, food, food, food, food, food, ........................foooooood. Food. Dammit. Foooooood. Once you step back from all this and you really begin to feel the senseless obsessiveness of it all.

From BED advocates descriptions, I'd realised it's probably an effect of chronic calorie restriction dieting. As I said, there is no yo-yo dieting, dieting is the yo-yo. If it takes at all, this heightened hunger is one reason why it doesn't.  

I had to reserve judgement in case I was missing something. They also vigorously denied this link.

Since many binge eaters restrict food intake during the day and binge at night, the goal is to get them to eat three meals a day and a snack.

Those who treat eating disorders use duress and pressure to get some restoration of a person's hunger response. Getting someone to eat three meals a day is hardly that. It's more like someone who hasn't been eating properly.

Despite "diet culture" etc., people still cannot grasp that calorie restriction dieting is inherently unbalanced. Including if not especially people who should know better by now. This may come as a surprise given the insistence that "weight loss" is an absolute no-no due to continued conflation of that with cal res dieting. 

Seems (dieting induced) weight loss is totally bad, but dieting itself can be good, so much so, that this gets in the way of perceiving the unbalancing effects of dieting. "Good dieting" is when your body overcomes the assault, not the the nature of the assault itself.

If you smoked furiously for a few years, stopped and your body did not succumb to any related probs later. That's not "good smoking" that's your body's operations standing up to that pressure. As they are designed to do but cannot in every instance.

I've put it out there that the "obesity diagnosis" is not compatible with mental health, it is an assault on it, not the "drug addiction movement" [no such thing]. Freudian slippage on "fat acceptance movement" there. Addicts do not reverse their dependence, they go through withdrawal, that doesn't demand much transferable skill.

This sort of linking of fatness to various pathologies seeks to use your acceptance of terms supposedly embedded in our psyche. Usually to do with finessing professional failures as the way its supposed to be, up to an including letting people die -yes, what Michael Buerk said. 

Whether or not one can be fully cured of binge eating depends on one’s definition of “cured.” 

That'd be normal hunger function, which is of course not their aim because they're not charged with solving anything. What they've forgotten is the current targets of their theatre are. If something is "remarkably responsive to treatment.." treatment which consists of voluntary action of stopping cal res dieting and the pathologising of yourself and your body-should fully 'cure' it.

Treatment often begins with efforts to recognize distorted, all-or-nothing thinking .....

Like;

Normal people don’t consume 4,500 calories worth of food in one sitting, or order takeout for four when dining alone. 

Yeah they do, it's the function, not the person. See how journalist generalised from the specific, typical all or nothing thinking, like 'obesity', which because someone else feels some way about your size, the whole of you must be defined by that feeling.

Conscious Engagement is The Act

"...I have an eating disorder. Time to remove the stigma", the writer a self described middle aged person with anorexia and bulimia relays such a typical line in what anorexia/bulimia is that it could have been put together by committee. It's the same mindset that created and imposed the construct of 'obesity [slim-person-plus] on fat people;

1. Hype into assertion of disease/illness "Anorexia and bulimia are mental illnesses". Check AMA and check ABCD 

2. Concentration on how terrible this all is

"suffered from an eating problem," ".... I am hurting myself" Check sick fat and check poison fat, its bad

3. No interest in cure, only treatment 

"I’ve come to believe that eating disorders can never truly be cured" "The knowledge that disorders can flare up repeatedly throughout life,"
Check treatment no cure. 

This could be narrowed to a two-step; 1. Hype Phony disease/illness, 2. No resolution/cure.
The AMA traded in this act presuming it a universal- slim people set it and fat people have observed that. As usual its taken for granted fat people wish to emulate whatever slim people think or do. Slimming feels like aspiring to them and in their mind that becomes a global, want to be all like a slim person('s idea of themselves).

If you step back, its about; disease / [mental]illness validating the person's feelings. They're saying; "I suffer, recognise, acknowledge this" by deeming it disease/illness. Buuuut, don't take it away, completely.

I don't wish to be mean and imply, they want to suffer, they wish to be a martyr and complain about it. It's more invidious than that.

Eating disorders-and we all know that means anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Usually start with an intention-to reverse or preserve current size. They have a method which is to reduce your response to hunger signalling [eating is the response to hunger signalling] and possibly to increase output via voluntary movement. And/or to purge by vomiting etc., food from the body, before it can be properly digested.

Both [seek to] induce weight loss using the restriction of calories. That's a heck of a lot of conscious engagement. Intent, planning, action-repeatedly. It is this exposure that triggers this to become compulsive rather than merely voluntary-in those with such tendencies.

We all become a bit 'anorexic' if we diet hard enough-the fatsphere's "no diet talk" rule was an example of seeking to sidestep this funk. The difference between us and true anorexics was susceptible physiology-we didn't have it. Our bodies fought cal res and won, time and again.

This conscious engagement seems to be the root of the strange affection people with anorexia/bulimia have for their condition. They love and admire it and feel badly towards it at the same time. Rather like someone who rarely stops complaining about an abusive partner but won't leave them.

Such conscious engagement gives these conditions an oddly personal quality so many vocal anorexics/bulimics relay. It has been allowed to set the framing of what you're supposed to feel and say when you have an eating disorder. To the extent that people with other hunger/eating disorders attempt to mimic it.

In the case of hyper-functioning hunger [HFH] though, this conscious engagement is simply not there. HFH is physiological in operation. However you class it, it doesn't use the conscious mind. Heightened hunger is like heightened blood pressure in that way. That's not to say the brain or even the mind isn't involved, it is but as a part of the whole not a leading role.

Hence it has no narrative of the kind typical of anorexics, bulimics or even drug addicts and alcoholics. It's not impossible by any means, but it would be of a different type and quality, due to its differing nature.

The double whammy is fat people's inner stream of consciousness has also been heavily repressed, so there's also a missing narrative of engaging with experience over time. Almost like a kind of amnesia, except the memories weren't allowed to form in the first place.

In the best of cirumstance either would require a lot of focus and effort to overcome. But in the current climate it's virtually impossible. The collective (un)conscious aims to repress any thought, so it can impose its fictions in place of truth.

Hyperhunger doesn't require any intent; planning, or carrying out of action. It's a physical adjustment. And at the risk of re-enforcing stereotypes, that happens to be true for being fat too.

Now this is just stating facts to me though I'm sure this has another tinge. It'll seem [be made to seem] what people with anorexia/bulimia are trying to do. Claim a kind of innocence. Far from it. A fat person cannot be innocent anyway, such is the nature of the way we see weight.

I have to say this because its true and because it explains why I find anorexics and bulimics so utterly alien in their mannerisms. And have no interest in copying my idea of what they are doing.

Its of no use to me or fat people. I've mentioned that never at any point did I ever feel or think that hyperhunger [or anorexia/bulimia] was remotely unresolvable, even when I couldn't articulate my situation properly due to its non-appearance in ill-fitting barely relatable coinages like; binge eating disorder, compulsive eating disorder, food/eating addiction etc.,

I was also completely resolution-orientated, had zero time for 'illness' nor did I feel like I was "suffering from it" though I acknowledged that it caused me a lot of distress, frustration and at times outright despair. What I wanted most of all was to be heard, to be understood-that would have provided immense relief- the one thing that was and still is denied.

I didn't need nor want sympathy, I needed to find means to restore normal hunger function, the end. I really wish this could be enough to get across just how totally uninterested I am in the usual anorexia/bulimia pathos. Not zero, minus.

I don't see the use of it, I don't care for it, it has nothing to do with me,  it bores me, m'kay?

Now I do not claim to speak for fat people, I can say with confidence virtually all fat people felt/feel the same way about mere fatness. They're not interested in this faux disease/no resolution act, they wanted/want results.

May I remind people that the whole point of the fat phobic hatefest is [supposed] to 'motivate' people to escape fatness, as fast as humanly possible.

This moaning about it, but dragging it out is the momentum of conscious engagement and having no real need to move on. Whereas the shame fat people feel is not about what they're accused of doing, but that they aren't consciously directing matters, when they feel they should be. I'd say that's something for anorexic/bulimics to think about, in the sense that they assume if people saw them as less in control, they'd see them more favourably. When its precisely that much denied lack of control that is the basis of the contempt we are held in.

Except, the rules don't apply the same to slim and fat so pish.....

The Beautiful Truth

I've had cause lately to consider again the difficulty of truth if you are a fat person. Whereas for other people telling the truth is mainly a question of reporting the facts as honestly as possible, the big, perhaps the biggest challenge of honesty for a fat person is to have the mettle to avoid telling the false truth dictated to you by others.

And to not be shamed by the avoidance of that.

I recognize that I may come across as a bit shifty in overly careful talk about fatness, weight etc., But I have to tame my vanity enough to press on regardless. I'm trying to reach for an elusive narrative of consciousness that's not only not available, it rarely appears except in glimpses.

I'm not sure I know what it would look like as a consistent force, as I've never knowingly come across a fat person who can speak about fatness unadulterated by the lifesapping falsehood that is the 'obesity narrative'.

Shaunta Grimes's piece is lovely, honest and everyday act of bravery in its way, but I feel the typical failure of nerve when it comes to claiming to be drunk on that which simply cannot make you drunk. It's a tribute to her skill as a writer that this doesn't deliver her tale into the usual pit of boredom waiting for the same old same. It doesn't break new ground available to a writer of her talent.

We always allow ourselves to submit to and be interrupted by others who are unworthy of such and are not fighting the same fight no matter what they assume. There comes a point when we have to ask ourselves what is our duty to the truth. How can any of us really complain when we decline to push ourselves beyond the trite handed to us merely because it means we connect through meanings that don't fit? If others hadn't done better than us, what would we have to crib and plunder?

Fat people need to take up the space of our own truth and stop waiting for permisson for that. No one will give it to us, I'm not even sure anyone can. So what if haters think our reaching is "useless" who are they to say what is useful to us or anyone else? Their talk is so dead and they don't even feel it. How would they know? They know nothing. 

We understand clothes that don't fit, why do we settle for worthless ideas that don't fit? The title is "Here's how I got fat" and it delivers on its promise to tell the same old story expected and praise is given, moving, honest, well done in using your voice to tell our version of what honesty is for you etc.,

Having most of your stomach removed is no resolution of any things that shouldn't need to be said. What is so difficult about acknowledging that? Why do the need to pretend whatever this isn't a different pathology, a more acceptable one? What is blocking that, is it vanity? Is it the need to be seen as good or healthy? If you are prepared to state you did damage to yourself with food, why aren't you able to say you damaged yourself to try and escape the trap set for all of us?

You rightly said;

I wasn’t required to live forever with the physical consequences of what I did to survive those mean years.

But it is not political consciousness that's trying to keep you stuck in what you call "physical consequences" its those waging a phony crusade. That's their trap. It's reminiscent of those who complain to activists that they want to lose weight. Activists did not create dieting. They did not promote its failed strategy as the only, the must be, the be all and end all.

Why can't we screen out those who would give praise for repeat their tired talk? Who have been happy to lead us and leave us to our fate. Haters didn't pull us through or pull us out, they've no right to regard at our own expense. None at all.

If you wish to frame your situation as substance abuse, at least impersonate many of the more admirable amongst them and their capacity to state boldly, "These are my options, they're shit, but them's the breaks", rather than cowering under them-because they're my options, they are righteous, they aren't.

They are what is deemed worthy of you. Authorities have endeavoured to leave fat with nothing but brutality and mutilation. It's not the best they could do. It's not guided by healing, its guided by the opposite of that.

Binge Eating Disorder is not Hyperphagia Nervosa

It's finally clicked! *Binge eating disorder-BED is a bulimic cycle without the vomiting. Instead there's calorie restriction/starvation with or without exercise bulimia [that's exercise to induce weight loss] in response.

This cycle seems to run over days, at least, rather than the more condensed bulimic initiation and response of bingeing [consuming a high volume of intake/calories in a very short space of time] and more or less immediate purging.

Like all hunger/eating disorders, its mainly initiated by dieting. 

I've struggled in the past to grasp exactly what BED is. Not that it wasn't explained to me, the explanations just didn't add up to much in my mind.

I thought of it as a mild version of hyperphagia nervosa, which brings me what needs continual reiteration. BED is not hyperphagia nervosa. Hyperphagia nervosa does not fit into the convention anorexia model of 'eating disorder'. It is not an ED, it's a hunger disorder.

That is extremely important in this context. Hyperphagia nervosa is not 'food addiction' it is not 'eating addiction' it is hunger function that is hyperactive, hypersensitive, achieves high momentum that's takes longer to bring to a halt. It can be a combination of some or all of these things.

It is aggressive, invasive, unneeded hunger. Sometimes accompanied by other disturbing symptoms. It feels like your (nervous) system is under pressure. Not like you're trying to get drunk with food or whatever people with BED are supposed to feel (I'm not trying to go there anymore).

The difference is that with HN its usually a more constant fight, as in moment to moment. Rather than cyclical and seemingly initiated by the attempt to lose weight via dieting, as is likely with BED. For some its a moment to moment basis. The term binge eating appears to be modelled after binge drinking and applies the same assumptions about that to food.

HN is body led, and seems to be bound up with the functioning of the hypothalamic region of the brain/endocrine system. Often its trigger seems to be related to the endocrine systems efforts in regulating human growth. 3 years old keeps coming up. So I'm wondering what chemical milestone/s happen thereabouts.

7 give or take a year either way is another one. I think its safe to say this is the lead up to puberty. The process of triggering the hormonal change/increase/surge happening around then, can disrupt hunger functioning. It seems related in some way to hyperphagia/hyperhunger from lesion to hypothalamus but without any obvious sign of such injury.

I use nervosa as altering my nervous system's tension relieved it. So my guess is that although it may caused by a wonky hypothalamus it can be amenable to alteration through the nervosa system, hence nervosa which is a reference to that system.

I realise that's a case study of one, but that's what happens when people refuse to produce anything close to objective study. You're forced on to what you have. Any one wishing to conduct a genuine study is welcome to. I'll happily cite their efforts.

From what I've gleaned over time, BED yields more readily to manipulating your response to food. Like a lot of anorexia, it doesn't necessarily have to be gotten over or gotten over fully. You can work around it, as the guy described in his video. This may lessen hyperphagia but to really take a lump out of it, you have to alter the default way your body functions. Rather than chase it after the fact.

I know slimstream researchers are trying to shove hyperhunger into their little empire, as they feel they can puppet fat people and that we all think they're the wind beneath our wings etc., Theirs and the general fixation with eating is a product of an anorexic mindset and sensibility. Those who believe weight =calories in minus calories out tend to develop this compensatory fixation with food and eating.

They lack self awareness about how glaringly clunky it is. If your idea of weight is instead rooted more around metabolic function, this symptom is not invoked by this. So it just reads like a superficial, irrelevant imposition. An unwanted one.

It's key those experiencing excessive hunger make reducing that their focus rather than food which is what others want to focus on. Especially if they're seeking to involve others. If what I'm saying makes sense to you, keep their focus on what you need.

* Not recommending this video, it just happened to trigger realisation. 

One and All

There's no substitute for competence. A cold manner with a real grasp of a subject and ability to apply reason to practicalities, is above, the same old, same old + bags of charm any day. Way above. An article on anorexia gives an insight as to how well meaning is not much cop without useful intent.

It reports claims of an addition to "ground-breaking" treatment for anorexia;

Adults with anorexia often have distinctive traits that lock them into a destructive relationship with food. But those same traits could help them manage their illness

"Manage their illness"? Why would anyone want to manage anorexia? I thought Kenneth Tong, possibly inadvertently, summed up the 'obesity cure' pretty well. Anorexia isn't a choice though, its an unusual response to what can be an attempted choice- sustained calorie restriction.

Incidentally, can we have a discussion about the death of cure, as an aim? Since when did the aim of medical science become "management"? Management was something you did whilst you were looking for a cure. What falls short of management? Management as the endgame strikes me as a desire to make money off sickness and disorder. It's throwing in the towel, in some cases, before entering the ring.

Anorexia has no real treatment, instead anorexics are made to eat until they recover weight. Basically [coerced] gainerism, like those who force feed themselves to get fat or fatter. Those surrounding the person act as "encouragers" that is people who literally exhort/support this dieting up the scale. You'll note this is the same pattern as the 'obese cure'-countering pathology with a counter pathology=balance. It's not only that stupid, it requires the false creation of fatness as a pathology in order to press it into this brilliance.

The reason enforced eating is amazingly effective in reversing anorexia- given it is not really a treatment-is in the nature of metabolic function. Hunger and its response-eating-is our natural default, its instinctive, literally a no-brainer. Deciding not to respond can be a direct conscious act. Anorexia is triggered by calorie restriction, according to the article, it also has a potential hormonal trigger. Any period of calorie restriction- including illness, stress-if that shuts down the digestive system and reduces hunger- can set it off. Presumably what weight loss gastrectomy can partially mimic the this digestive stasis in anorexics when the stomach is removed.

This goes along with the added momentum of going from pathology to health. Whereas starving fat [or any] people goes from where they are, to derangement, disorder using pathology, whether they start at health or not. That some can manage to lose weight and feel better is an advert for finding the proper way to do it. 

Not that this extent of success is deemed good enough for those who care about anorexics though, they expect far better than to have to fight an ailment for life, well meaning doesn't surpass ideological concerns/vested interests.

Across the field, psychologists, psychiatrists and dietitians have noted that positive treatment outcomes for adults with anorexia remain abysmally low. Less than half recover fully, another third show some improvement, but the rest remain chronically ill.

Read that first line again, that is what well meaning looks like. And if fat people had those odds? They'd be few fat people, we've spent lifetime chasing statistical insignificance in the form of a pathology.

Also, notice, this isn't costed. Nothing is too much for these precious folk.

The actual experimental treatment featured is based on the family therapy model pioneered at the Maudsley hospital. This version gets anorexics to nominate several people they love to cede complete control of their eating too. More than encouraging, they become the person's hunger.

This gives them no control whatsoever, despite; "Responsibility for recovery would remain firmly in each client’s hands..." That is supposed to produce "abysmally low" results. A potential client inadvertently summed the equation up beautifully;

“I need this to work,” she said. “I have nothing else to try.”

The old "rock bottom" cretinism.That's how people take out loans to get their stomachs cut out. They leave you with nothing and call it "personal responsibility." When exhausted by the failure of this, you then submit to anything on offer. You are not directing their 'science' or their preferred treatment models. The power these people have is as awesome as the power you don't have.

Peer Review indeed.

A real cure for anorexia would be to reboot hunger functioning. That would not only be humane but cost-effective and individualised in a way that would quickly become collective. What truly works for many of those concerned, works for society as a whole.

It could also inform the bringing down of heightened hunger. The denial of progress in one area tends to stymie it elsewhere. There's an on-going discussion among techno-pioneers, whether we should be scared about intelligent technology becoming more powerful than us and making us its slaves.

I used to think they were away with the fairies. But now I wonder. A real fear is the refusal to deal with the way the body actually works, this refusal to resolve issues. The giving up. The costs imposed by these inefficient and/or ineffective treatments, is what threatens to "bankrupt" health care, whatever the system.

The people who produce the science are the people in control of this denial and by the time they've finished with us, I'm wondering if we'll have regressed to such an inferior state that we'll be fit to be directed by our microwaves and mobile phones. How can we refresh, re-boot and put them on standby, but not our own functions that have merely got out of hand?

Imagine if every time any feature went wrong with your computer, that you couldn't do a damn thing about it? FGS, mentally speaking we will suffer by comparison. We probably already are.

If your computer freezes, you can reboot it. If you don't and run around trying to borrow someone else's. You can be said to have declined "personal responsibility". Because you had an option that was within your individual power, that will suffice to unfreeze your screen more often than not.

You don't have to regress to childhood and cede control to your family. Nor to wait for society to rearrange itself around restrictions that will disadvantage those most in control, who often don't want them but pretend to.

Unless and until anorexics or anyone else has that, their so called "personal responsibility" relies on chance, between the operation of the body's organisation and individual response at any one time, neither of which are direct individual or any other CHOICE. This model of denying individual agency, dumping a pretence of responsibility without power on the individual, blaming them for any failure, whilst professionals get paid for this, is curdling health care.

The doctor within is the greatest doctor, but it needs direct and intelligent manipulation. That probably requires real ground to be broken by the looks of it. Spare the flummery dressed in a shower of sub-biochemical jargon.

Orthorexia Nervosa

I heard about Orthorexia Nervosa and swatted it away as some kind of excessive affectation. I couldn't get to the bottom of what it meant. And anyway, how many narrow declensions of eating/hunger disorders do you need? It seemed infinitely self-absorbed.

This feeling went on for years until I happened to land on Steven Bratman's own site [the guy who coined the term]. I couldn't believe it, such a precise reading of what I'd experienced. I'm sure you've had quite wide ranging/long lasting experience that you notice, but somehow don't see clearly. The WHAM, you land on it.

I didn't think of myself as a dieter. My focus was sticking with the idea of what a healthy diet was then. Thinking what would make me healthy would make me slim and vice versa- many fat phobes don't appear to realise that we've thought all their main thoughts because we received the same mental conditioning about eating and weight as everyone else. 

Not only that, orthorexia for me became an atypical trigger that led to hyperphagia.

Okay, so what's Orthorexia Nervosa [ON]?

Basically, its when a conscious ideology of eating, in this case healthy/healthist unbalances the hunger/appetite mechanisms function. Basically healthy eating tips into compulsion.

People still have problems grasping the point about eating or hunger disorders. We seem to assume, they follow a behaviour. That someone has gone to an extreme. On the whole NO. What happens is- Same behaviour differing response.

A person is anorexic, bulimic, orthorexic because their system yields to behaviours others perform with nothing more than the demands of said acts. The reason why desisting from those behaviours may cure the problem totally, is that it removes pressure, not because those behaviours can cause that unbalancing in anyone.

Note I didn't say hyperphagic because I don't understand binge eating and I only know my own type of hyperphagia, which I know was a physiological imbalance, probably brought on by stressed nervous system.

The idea of a habit of "comfort eating" doesn't fit.

Looking through an i-net search the consensus description is-an obsession with healthy eating. This is typically facile and un-illuminating. 

With anorexia, the pressure is on hunger signalling. With orthorexia, the pressure on your hunger comes THROUGH the pressure you are putting on your APPETITE to conform to what you want it to be. Which ends up obscuring and distancing you from your body needs. Ironically, you do this because you believe your body needs your idea of "healthy foods."

Weird though it might seem, our idea that our bodies need  only food classed as "healthy", isn't backed up by experience.

An anorexic, reduces overall energy intake. This can be of any particular kind of diet-though that demand may skew the proportions and types of foods they will eat. Orthorexics get into trouble due to seeking to eat certain foods and exclude others, i.e. high protein, high intake of low calorie veg and fruit, low carb, low sugar, low-fat.

The body is threatened by this as it is energy reduction, just less so.  Whereas lack of energy threatens life, restriction of types of food threatens inadequate nutrition or balance of [for your requirements]. It could go as far to poisoning if one takes in too much of foods that have toxic substances. Like some leafy greens for example- caution; we're talking a probably unpalatably high amount.

The reason we don't tend to get to that level of intake is we have such an effective disgust reflex for certain foods because they contain small amounts of toxic substances. This, not greed or self destructiveness or "food addiction is why we don't tend to crave low density veg, like we do calorie dense foods.

Terms like that and "hyperpalatability" are mis-direction, calorie dense foods are just of more use to our bodies. We can sometimes feel we can eat any amount of so called "junk" calorie dense foods, because they do not contain such.

One of the ways ON slips beneath awareness, leading up to an anorexic or other conclusion is your focus is on eating, not starving yourself. Where it gets you is your focus becomes progressively narrower without you realising it. Again, you aren't "obsessed," you are seeking to eat totally healthily, which is what you're supposed to do. In my case, it was that I wasn't getting slim, so I kept trying harder. Isn't that supposed to be why we fat people fail to slim?

All this just happens to be enough to activate an unforeseen tendency.

You too may retain skeptism, I wouldn't blame you. Others have become incredibly anguished over the mere idea of ON, taking it as some kind of personal affront against healthist eating.

In order to grasp it and probably other ED's/neuroses, its best to consider more of the context for them.

Starting with our still crude notions of free will...............