My name is Amy Cunningham, and I am a person affected by an eating disorder. I developed anorexia at age 16 when in my first semester of university. Looking back, the early indicators of the illness began probably a year or two prior. I clearly recall beginning a ‘diet’ reading a book that encouraged fasting. I also remember feeling depressed and anxious, without really understanding why. While I failed at dieting in my last year of high school, I had great ‘success’ at anorexia within the first few months of university. I majored in music and spent most of my hours playing my French horn. As the anorexia developed and gained strength, I was unable to maintain social connections or enjoy normal college life. At the end of what outwardly looked to be an incredibly successful first year as a talented musician, I quit school and decided to stop playing my horn. The excuse I gave myself, my family and my musician colleagues was that I had a change of heart about being a musician. The reality was that there is NO room for ANY relationship when you have anorexia.
Back then I had no idea what was happening to me. I did know something was not right. I thought I was losing my mind frankly. I spent hours in the library reading about eating disorders and absorbed a good deal of completely incorrect information about the illnesses. The only available information in the 1980s and 1990s was based on small studies that incorrectly blamed eating disorders on the family, on trauma, on type A personalities. Of course, today we know that NONE of these are correct. We know that eating disorders are genetically linked brain disorders, and that there is a complex interplay between environment and genetics (Bulik, 2019). We are also learning that eating disorders have a metabolic link. A groundbreaking study by Dr. Cindy Bulik, Dr. Janet Treasure and others from King’s College London and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that there are metabolic differences in those with anorexia. (Bulik et al, 2019). Another study found connections between low levels of leptin (a hormone impacting several genes) and high levels of ‘starvation induced’ physical activity in those with anorexia (Hebebrand, 2012). These game changing findings offer even more hope for better and better treatments, and earliest intervention!.
