Surviving.....I can relate to what you are saying about when you start loosing the weight & just can't stop. The first time I dealt with anorexia was at the age of 43 after loosing my career as a firmware design engineer (15 years). My career was also my hiding place from a bad marriage that I hadn't bother to get out of for 19 years.

Stress or being physically sick had always caused me to loose excessive amounts of weight. In college, during finals, I could loose a huge amount of weight & then once the stress was gone, I would put the weight back on safely. Even when I was pregnant & the last month I found out I was going to have to have a c-section.....I lost 10 pounds from the stress of knowing I was going to have to have surgery. I had not gained much when I was pregnant in the first place because of all the exercise I was doing (mostly swimming).

I don't know really how I survived that period.....it could only have been God keeping me alive between the anorexia & all the su attempts. I managed to not only survive, but to gain back the weight that took me to the anorexia state & more......then asthma from a forest fire smoke & the trauma surrounding my mother's dying of cancer & the abuse by the home care person caused stress induced anorexia to hit me again. I didn't get as low as the first time, but was admitted to the medical hospital & had to have another central line & IV nutrition. The hospital pdoc (they didn't have a psych ward) tried to put me on a hold rather than allow me to leave the hospital so I could go to my mother's funeral.....but my medical Dr looked the other way & allowed me to go AMA (against medical authorization) with the promise that after the funeral I would come back to the hosptial & allow them to do the central line & IV nutrition. That hole period of my life is like a nightmare & I don't have a lot of memory except for what I remembered for the police report against the home care person.

Stress levels are definitely key to my weight loss & then when I start loosing, it feels like such an accomplishment.....that I can't even force myself to eat even to keep myself alive. It's definitely NOT all about body image because without the stress inducing the weight loss in the first place, it's not something that I would do otherwise. Medical Dr's Dx of anorexia is all about a certain level of weight loss no matter what the cause......where the Dx of anorexia nervosia by a pdoc has to fit the DSM requirements. The Pdoc I was seeing in California for many years before I left, initially was only treating me for anxiety & depression but knew about the anorexia treatment I had gone through with my previous pdoc.....so he kept an eye on how I was doing with my weight. What completely invalidated the horrible trauma that I went through with the home care person was that my pdoc blamed my not seeing things clearly on my weight loss & never recognized the horrible things I went through until the PTSD hit me from the trauma I went through & all the nightmares that kept me from sleeping.

I know I never wanted to be overweight like my mother & grandmother were. They weren't obese but they were overweight & I always thought....wow, you get married, catch the guy then let yourself go....I don't ever want to live like that.....so I always exercised & played hard games of racquettball with the GUYS at work....not the girls because they didn't play hard enough.....but any time I started to loose weight for any reason.....it wasn't easy to stop the weight loss & there wasn't the desire to stop it once I got it going because I always thought I looked that much better at the lower weight. Most of the time, my stress periods would end soon enough so that my eating would get more back to normal.....but when those stress periods extended unending.....so did the weight loss