The Link Between OCD & My Eating Disorder
- Marek Muller
- 8 minutes ago
- 5 min read
The first thing most people learn about me is my résumé. As a professor with a decent public profile, I’m easy to Google. What most people don’t know is that I’m quite overwhelmed. It’s not the job that does it. It’s the mental health condition I’ve been living with since 1997: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Oh, and there’s also my eating disorder.
OCD brings unwanted, cycling thoughts that counter my values and invites compulsive mental/physical behaviours to–temporarily–dampen those thoughts. My OCD obsessions (or ‘themes’) have changed several times throughout my life, from unwanted sexual thoughts to contamination fears to needing symmetrical handwriting. But the theme that’s always stuck involves my body, and the need to look, and be, “just right.” As someone raised in the era of low-rise skinny jeans and America’s Next Top Model, this to me meant being the youngest, skinniest, prettiest person in the room.
Striving to Be ‘Just Right’
I remember the exact moment my eating disorder began. Around age 15, I had a little too much fun sampling cheesecakes, which were the dessert craze at the time. During an annual check-up, my doctor told me I’d gained weight. While I wasn’t overweight just yet, I felt that I should not gain any more weight. By medical standards, I was fine with a BMI of 23.5. However, I remember feeling crushed. I looked in the mirror and saw a monster. Later, I frantically asked my mom if the milkshake I was nursing was good for me. When she scoffed in response, I melted down in tears.
I understand that an existential crisis in response to a minor warning from a doctor was an extreme response. But my OCD made me very good at ‘fixing’ crises, so I was on a mission. Eating was my favourite hobby, and it transformed into a mortal sin. I was thinking about my basal metabolic rate well before the ‘thinspo’ influencers were. I repped the <1200 calories club by skipping breakfast. I drank coffee instead of having lunch. I remember doing a 12-hour marching band rehearsal in the hot summer sun with a single protein bar. Every morning, I’d sneak into my parents’ master bathroom to use their scale. I’d spend hours surveying the mirror and squeezing my thighs. No reflection went unchecked. Every time I got stomach pangs or vertigo during afternoon algebra, it was a sign that I was doing something right. A little voice told me so, the same one I’d later learn, that also runs my OCD.
I continued this trend into and beyond college. I think I only started eating real lunch in my late twenties. But even now, I instinctively track if I’ve had more than one big meal in a day, as the rule my OCD insists upon is: one big meal, several little snacks, lots of calorie-less liquid. I’ve been through treatment. I can break the rules. Give me a little bit of wine and I almost certainly will. But even in my mid-thirties, a little voice in the back of my head hisses at me when I have that extra handful of chips: “Bad. This is bad. Marek, listen to me: You’re bad.”
Two Sides of the Same Coin
People with OCD are quite familiar with this voice. It’s the OCD whisper that tells us we are responsible for every bad thing that happens to us and/or others, that we are ‘bad people’ at our core. But eating disorder survivors have heard the voice too: the inner critic equating our worth with our weight. Research suggests these voices may not be separate instantiations of different mental health disorders, but rather two sides of a similar cognitive coin. Mental health researchers have long proposed a link between obsessive-compulsive behaviours and disordered eating. Indeed, some have categorised Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) as a sort of psychiatric “sibling” to OCD. In BDD, as in OCD, people hyper-fixate on particular aspects of their bodies and categorise them as something wrong that needs to be fixed.
Teenage me experienced symptoms of BDD. I fixated on the “gap” between my thighs, constantly checking to make sure it was still there. I compared the size of every woman’s thighs to mine. I overanalysed pictures of myself, not looking at the whole scene but only at what my thighs were doing at that angle. If I liked the picture, maybe I could eat a little more that day. If not, back to the scale to check that the number was right. If it wasn’t, it meant further calorie cuts. Eventually the fixation outgrew my thighs and moved to my plate.
Eating With OCD
Sometimes disordered eating in OCD isn’t centered on weight. Instead, we become so fixated on eating the right foods in the right way. Contamination is a common OCD theme, and when applied to diet, some people obsessively avoid toxic or impure foods to an extreme degree, a restrictive eating disorder called orthorexia. An example of this might be compulsively needing to vomit after eating a bell pepper, learning that it was not organic and might contain traces of pesticide. While I don’t align with symptoms of orthorexia myself, I definitely experience compulsions if I come into physical contact with bad foods. I have an unexplainable aversion to cheese shreds, and even writing about them at this moment has me flicking my fingers to get the ‘feeling’ of them off of my hands.
Another one of OCD’s favourite obsessions is morality. Ethics-aligned diets such as veganism can also warp into hyperfixation. I have been an ethical vegan for ten years and consistently must watch out for moments when my OCD takes advantage of my environmentalism. It asks me, “but was that soup really vegan?!” or “are you vegan enough?!” or, most annoying, “do you really care about animals or is your OCD just making you go vegan and you’re faking?!” It is exhausting to live cross-examined by your own mind.
Recovery Means Uncertainty
I’m not fifteen years old anymore. I wish I could go back in time and tell little Marek that their thighs and weight were fine and that their mind was a big bully. I wish I could tell Marek that OCD lurks everywhere, including in their reflection. The image may not be an accurate reflection of what everyone else sees. Or, to use a “non-engagement response” from Exposure Response Prevention Therapy (ERP), maybe the mirror shows the truth, maybe not. But, troublingly, maybe adult Marek couldn’t tend to teenage Marek because the OCD is not gone; it’s just moved on to other obsessions. Maybe, at my core, I need to grapple with what everyone recovering from OCD and eating disorders eventually accepts: trying to transform my body into a vessel for that “just right” feeling is a fool’s errand.
OCD is nicknamed the “doubting disease” for a reason: it makes us doubt everything we like about ourselves and fear that we are unacceptable. However, fear and doubt are inevitable parts of life. I now understand that my desire to ruminate about my maybe-not-vegan-enough lunch is not about my diet. My caloric intake has never been the point. Beneath every calorie count, body check, and obsessive thought was the same impossible wish: to feel completely certain about my worth in an uncertain world.
Despite what my OCD may try to tell me, no mirror, scale, or ingredient can indisputably determine my value.