"People with Eating Disorders are underweight, too thin, or emaciated."

​Many people who are battling serious, life-threatening eating disorders are somewhere within the range of a “normal” weight – you cannot tell by looking at them. In fact, normal weight individuals who have EDs often suffer more than those with an abnormally low body weight in this respect, because their symptoms are not validated by their appearance. This is especially important for healthcare professionals to understand, because if ED patients are not taken seriously due to their weight, they may plummet further into the illness, or feel undeserving of treatment. 

*Make no mistake - every day people with eating disorders die from complications of their illnesses, many of them at normal weights. There are numerous invisible dangers of ED behaviours such as low potassium, electrolyte imbalances, and heart problems that can take lives of sufferers at NORMAL WEIGHTS. 



"Eating Disorders are just a phase/attention seeking/vain. They aren't really that serious."

​Eating Disorders are life-threatening illnesses. Anorexia Nervosa has the higest mortality rate of all psychiatric illnesses. In fact, more people with Anorexia will commit suicide than people with Depression. 

Eating disorders are actually inherently attention-avoidant; if approached by a friend who is worried they may have an ED, the victim will often deny that he/she has a problem.

An ED in its' early stages may seem easy to brush off as "just a phase", but research continuously shows that left untreated, less severe eating disorders will almost certainly progress to severe, treatment-resistant illnesses.



"Eating Disorders are caused by media images of thinness, desire to be thin, etc."

Eating disorders are complex, multifactorial diseases. There is no one explanation or cause that addresses them across the board, causes and triggers will vary on a case-by-case basis. Weight and food are not the cause or even the root issue of EDs - they are surface issues/symptoms of a more complex underlying problem. The true issues behind what drives ED victims to restrict, purge, or binge lie far deeper, and just because they manifest themselves through food does not mean food is the primary issue. Among other things, some underlying issues of EDs involve control, fear, perfectionism, black-and-white thinking, anxiety, self-worth, etc.



"People choose to develop and eating disorder, and if they really wanted to they could 'snap out of it'"

Eating Disorders are brain-based illnesses with a genetic component, so some individuals are born with a genetic predisposition to have an ED at some point in their lives. Situational life events may or may not trigger this underlying predisposition, and if triggered, the ED that the person develops is certainly not easily "controllable". 



"Men don't get eating disorders."

​At least 1 out of every 10 people with an eating disorder is male. In fact, within certain diagnostic categories like Binge Eating Disorder, men represent as many as 40% of those affected. In a recently released report from the American Academy of Pediatrics, boys and men were cited as one of the groups seeing the fastest rise in eating disorders over the past 10 years along with 8-12 year olds and ethnic minorities.  It’s equally important to screen for eating disorders among females and males.



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“We have this myth, that neuroscience has helped us bust, that eating disorders are willful choices. Anorexia Nervosa is a brain-based illness. To think of somebody willfully having an anorexic illness is like saying to someone with schizophrenia ‘well stop willfully having that delusion about alien invasion – just stop it.’ Not a hugely effective therapeutic technique, and yet for years our treatment of anorexia is ‘just eat’. We don’t have willful schizophrenics; it makes no sense to think that we have willful patients with an eating disorder”. -Dr. Chris Thornton, 2012.