What Causes Eating Disorders? Why You Were Already Vulnerable.

People often spend years trying to work out what caused their eating disorder, searching for the why, the trigger, the moment it all began.

I understand that. I hear some version of this in almost every first conversation I have, and often there’s a lot of blame attached to developing an eating disorder. A feeling that somehow you did this to yourself, or that you should have been able to stop it before it got this far.

But when we talk about what causes an eating disorder, there is very rarely one answer. Eating disorders usually develop through a combination of biological, psychological and life experiences, and often the story starts much earlier than people realise.

We tend to look for the one thing that happened, when we also need to understand the person it happened to. Why did a particular experience affect you so deeply? Why did something that started relatively small become so difficult to stop? Why you, when someone else might have gone through something similar and responded completely differently?

Perhaps the more helpful question isn’t simply what caused my eating disorder? but what made me vulnerable to developing one in the first place?

Because your eating disorder didn’t come out of nowhere. You were most likely vulnerable to one long before it ever started, and long before food was any part of the picture.

What Was Already There Before Food Became Part of It?

If we look further back, before food or your body became the focus, there were likely things about the way you experienced yourself and the world that made you more vulnerable.

Maybe you’ve always been someone who feels things deeply. The person who notices a slight change in someone’s tone, thinks about a comment long after everyone else has forgotten it, or finds uncertainty much harder than other people seem to.

Maybe you worried a lot, liked knowing what was going to happen, or felt safer when you could prepare, plan and get things right.

You may have been perfectionistic or incredibly hard on yourself. Perhaps being “good” at things mattered to you. You hated getting things wrong or disappointing people, and somewhere along the way your achievements became linked to your self-worth.

For some people other conditions such as anxiety, depression, OCD, or neurodivergence coexist and are part of this picture too.

For others, it’s harder to put into words. It might simply be a feeling of never quite being good enough, or of experiencing things more intensely than the people around you seemed to.

None of these things causes an eating disorder on its own. And you certainly don’t need to recognise yourself in all of them. It’s about seeing the whole picture.

Why Some People Are More Vulnerable Than Others

There is another part of this that has nothing to do with anything you did. Some people are simply more biologically vulnerable to developing an eating disorder than others.

We know that eating disorders can run in families and that genetics play a significant role. That doesn’t mean there’s one eating disorder gene waiting to be switched on, or that having a family history meant this was bound to happen. It means some of the vulnerability you were carrying was there from birth.

I think this matters if you’ve spent years looking at other people and wondering, why did this happen to me?

Part of the answer is that we’re not all starting from the same place. Your genes, temperament, personality, mental health and experiences are your own. The same thing can land very differently for two different people.

None of this means your eating disorder was inevitable. It simply helps us understand why you may have been more vulnerable to developing one.

What Can Trigger an Eating Disorder?

Sometimes people know exactly when things began to change. They can look back and think, it was when I started to become more aware of my body, it was a particular life event, or when everything else in my life started to feel out of control.

A trigger can be almost anything: puberty, dieting, stress, grief, trauma, illness, injury, academic pressure, relationship difficulties or a big life change. Sometimes it’s something that looks insignificant from the outside, like a comment someone else forgot almost immediately but you didn’t.

And sometimes the trigger has very little to do with food or body image at all. You might have been putting enormous pressure on yourself to get good grades, struggling with uncertainty, trying to keep everyone else happy, or feeling like you couldn’t control what was happening around you. Food can become the place where all of that gets channelled, even when food wasn’t really the problem to begin with.

For many people, there isn’t one trigger at all. It’s lots of smaller things accumulating until, somewhere along the way, the eating disorder begins to take hold.

That’s why I don’t think you need to find the thing that caused your eating disorder. I’m much more interested in the whole picture: who you were, what you were dealing with, and why the eating disorder made sense in the context of that.

Where the Shame Sits

Even when you understand why you may have been vulnerable to an eating disorder, there can still be a part of you that thinks: but surely I should have been able to stop it before it got this far.

I hear this a lot. You might have spent months or years telling yourself you’ll do things differently, only to find yourself pulled back into the same patterns again. And when you don’t fully understand why you keep doing something that is making you so unhappy, it’s very easy to make it mean something about you.

Why can’t I just stop? Why do I keep doing this when I know how much it’s affecting me? Why can’t I be like everyone else around food?

That gap between wanting things to be different and actually being able to do things differently can carry so much shame. But it isn’t proof that you don’t care enough, aren’t trying hard enough, or somehow want to stay stuck. It shows just how powerful an eating disorder can become.

Your Personality Isn’t the Problem

This is probably the part I most want you to take away from this article.

The sensitivity, determination, depth of feeling, the way you notice things, the way you care so much about other people. These aren’t parts of yourself you need to get rid of in order to recover.

Recovery isn’t about becoming a different person. A lot of the work I do is helping people recognise where these parts of themselves have become caught up in the eating disorder, and learn to use them differently.

The determination that once kept you in the eating disorder can become the determination that keeps you choosing recovery on the days it feels hardest.

The sensitivity that once left you overwhelmed can become the thing that helps you understand yourself more deeply. The care you’ve spent giving to everyone else can slowly begin to include you too.

Even perfectionism doesn’t have to disappear completely. You can learn when it’s useful, when it’s asking too much of you, and how to let good enough actually be good enough.

We’re not trying to take these parts of you away. We’re helping you have more choice over what you do with them.

You don’t have to become less you in order to get better.

If You’re Still Trying to Understand Why This Happened

You might never be able to point to one thing and say, that’s what caused my eating disorder. For most people, there isn’t one neat answer.

But understanding the bigger picture can change the way you see yourself in it. Instead of looking back at all the places you think you failed, you can begin to understand why you were vulnerable and why this took hold of you in the way it did.

You didn’t choose to have an eating disorder, and finding it difficult to get out of something that has become so deeply rooted doesn’t mean you’re choosing to stay unwell.

You don’t need to understand exactly why this happened before you’re allowed to get help. If your relationship with food, exercise or your body is taking up more of your life than you want it to, that’s enough reason to reach out.

If You’d Like Support

If you’d like help understanding your own eating disorder and what recovery needs to look like for you, you can learn more about our 1:1 eating disorder recovery programme.

---

Written by Sasha Paul
Eating Disorder Recovery Coach & Nutritional Therapist