Eating Disorders
I had a colleague once who ate the same lunch every day for three years. A small container of plain rice. Exactly the same amount. She’d weigh it at home — I saw the scale once when I picked something up from her kitchen. I didn’t say anything. Nobody did. She was thin and functional and always smiling and I think every single person in that office knew something was wrong and not one of us had the words for it.
That’s the thing about eating disorders. They hide in plain sight. Behind meal plans and gym routines and “I already ate” and “I’m just not hungry.” Behind control that looks like discipline. Behind a body that the world might even compliment, not knowing that the person inside it is at war with every bite.
If you’re reading this and something in you just flinched — if you know what it’s like to stand in front of a fridge and feel afraid of it — then I want you to know two things. First: eating disorders are never really about food. They’re about control when everything else feels uncontrollable. And second: people have understood this particular kind of pain for a very, very long time.
We act like eating disorders are modern — a product of Instagram and diet culture and whatever magazine covers did to us in the nineties. And sure, those things didn’t help. But the struggle between body and mind, the impulse to control what you consume when you can’t control what’s consuming you — that’s ancient. Monks fasted until they hallucinated. Roman senators purged at banquets. Medieval mystics starved themselves and called it holiness. The packaging changes. The pain underneath stays remarkably the same.
You’re not the first to carry this
Voices Across Time
A 13th-century Persian poet who wrote about making peace with unwelcome feelings. A Roman emperor filling notebooks with reminders he kept forgetting to follow. A German nun who connected body and soul nine centuries before modern psychology got there. And a former slave who built an entire philosophy around the one thing nobody could take from him. None of them used the phrase “eating disorder.” All of them knew the territory.
“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.”
Rumi — 13th-century Persian poet
The Guest House
Rumi wrote The Guest House as an extended metaphor — your body is an inn, and every emotion that shows up is a guest you didn’t invite. Joy, shame, anger, the dark thought at 3am. His advice was to welcome all of them. Even the ones that trash the furniture.
If you’re dealing with eating disorders, that sounds insane. Welcome the shame? Welcome the voice that says you’re disgusting? But Rumi wasn’t saying those feelings are good. He was saying they’re visitors. They come and they go. The problem starts when you try to barricade the door — when you use food, or the absence of food, to keep certain feelings from getting in. He wasn’t asking for perfection. Just a truce. And some days, a truce with yourself is the bravest thing you can manage.
“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
Marcus Aurelius — Meditations, Book V
Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman Empire and couldn’t manage his own head. I find that oddly comforting. His private journal — the thing we call the Meditations — is basically page after page of a man telling himself the same things over and over. Be present. Don’t react. You have power over your mind. He wrote it like someone who kept forgetting, which he clearly did, because he wrote it again the next day.
Anyone who’s lived with eating disorder help books on their nightstand knows exactly what that feels like. You read the advice. You understand the advice. And then Tuesday happens and you’re back in the bathroom doing the thing you swore you wouldn’t do. Aurelius didn’t have eating disorders — but he had the loop. The knowing-better-and-doing-it-anyway loop. His answer wasn’t to beat himself up about it. It was to start again the next morning. Every morning. That’s not failure. That’s practice.
“The soul is the breath of living spirit, that with excellent sensitivity, permeates the entire body to give it life.”
Hildegard von Bingen — Causae et Curae
Hildegard von Bingen was a nun in 12th-century Germany, which already sounds like someone you might not take medical advice from. But here’s the thing: she was writing about the connection between body and spirit in 1150. She ran a monastery, composed music, described migraine auras with clinical precision, and insisted — at a time when the church wanted bodies and souls kept in separate boxes — that they were having the same conversation.
That matters for eating disorders because the whole trap is the split. The feeling that your body is separate from you — an enemy, a project, a thing to be managed. Hildegard would have found that idea bizarre. For her, the body wasn’t a container for the soul. It was the soul’s voice. What you do to one, you do to the other. Nine hundred years later, trauma therapists are saying essentially the same thing using different words.
Epictetus was born a slave. Let that actually land for a second. His body was literally not his own. Someone else decided when he ate, what he ate, whether he slept, where he went. When he finally gained his freedom — one account says his master broke his leg first — he didn’t build a philosophy about controlling the world. He built one about controlling the only thing that had ever been his: how he related to his own mind.
For anyone fighting recovery from eating disorders, Epictetus is uncomfortably relevant. Because the eating disorder tells you it’s about control — control over your body, your weight, your intake. And Epictetus gently points out that real control was never about any of those things. It was about whether you can sit with discomfort without reaching for the thing that makes it worse. He didn’t have the language for it. But he mapped the exact territory.
“It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
Epictetus — Greek Stoic philosopher, 50–135 AD
Discourses
What connects them all
What They All Understood
Rumi said welcome the feelings. Aurelius said start again tomorrow. Hildegard said your body and soul are the same conversation. Epictetus said real control is internal. Four people across twelve centuries, none of whom ever googled “eating disorder help,” and yet they all circled the same truth: the war with food is actually a war with yourself. And the only way to end it isn’t willpower or discipline or another meal plan. It’s deciding, slowly and imperfectly, to stop treating your body like the enemy.
I know that’s easier to type than to do. I know that some days the distance between understanding something and living it feels like a canyon. But these four voices keep saying the same thing from different centuries: you are not broken. The thing you’re doing to cope? It made sense once. It kept you safe once. And now you get to decide, one meal at a time, whether it still serves you. No rush. No deadline. Just a door that stays open.
Before you go
A Moment for You
If today is a hard day — if the mirror is being unkind or lunch feels like a negotiation — you don’t need to fix everything by dinner. A Persian poet, a Roman emperor, a medieval nun and a former slave all agree: the only thing required of you right now is to not go to war with yourself for the next hour. That’s enough. It really is.
If you’d like a quiet place to sit with any of this — InnerCalm+ is here. No judgment. Just room to breathe.
This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you’re struggling with mental health issues, please consult a qualified healthcare provider.
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