I have news for you......ED's are not caused by body image issues....they always start because of some issues that exist in our life that causes us undo level of stress which turns into an eating issues (too little, too much) & soon, the weight reflects the eating. All my life every time I was stressed, my reaction to it was to stop eating because I would feel sick to my stomach & wouldn't eat when I felt that way.....even mid terms in college & music performances.....you name it....stress involved would reflect a noticeable weight loss. Most of the time in my younger years, those stressful times were short....but the older I got the longer the stress periods lasted & the more the weight loss as it was directly in proportion.

The first time anorexia hit was after I lost my career as an engineer (at the age of 42) & my bad marriage of almost 20 years at the time & a pdoc who gave me prozac which destroyed my appetite on top of all the stress & major anxiety & depression & suicide attempts I was going through.

Being small in the first place....I didn't have any reserve to loose before I was in a very dangerous place weightwise. I ended up in a treatment center....but I wasn't in a place where I cared or even wanted the help that everyone was trying to give me. I managed to survive & actually gained too much weight at the end of those 10 years & ended up in the middle of a trauma with the home care person when my mother was dying of cancer.....it was a very dangerous situation with that home care person as I had no idea what she would do to me or my mother to gain what she was wanting to gain along with many other stresses that had hit my life at that same time (continued bad marriage now 10 more years, asthma/bronchitis hospitalization from forest fire smoke, new foal who had injured her leg down to the bone that required me attention 2 times a day, 1 hour drive between my home & my mother being the only child).

I had lost every pound I had gained. I didn't get down to the horribly bad level I had been at before, but I was still so underweight I ended up in the medical hospital with IV nutrition with the hospital pdoc telling me that if I left the hospital to go to my mother's funeral I wouldn't be alive to come back for the IV nutrition.....(yes, he over-exaggerated & I knew it because I had weighed less in the past).

Your anxiety you are dealing with & the family issues are the cause of your eating issues & there is no reason to deny it. You need help....but you need help is dealing with your stressful issues & in doing that one learns how to deal with the eating issues that are a result of those issues.

I finally left my husband after this last time & it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to my life. I moved 2100 miles away to where I didn't know anyone & started my life over even with the PTSD issues I came here with.....found a wonderful psychologist who works with DBT.....& this is the best therapy for everything including ED's because it teaches skills to deal with distress, emotions & interpersonal effectiveness along with using one's wise mind to make decisions to solve the issues that are causing the problems in our life. It's important to be able to force ourselves to do the things we don't feel like or want to be because we know that our health depends on it. It's not easy & I continue to fight the not eating much as I now live alone with my 3 dogs.....but I'm so much better than when I was living in that very toxic marriage environment....yes, the things around us are definitely the reason for the eating issues at least at the beginning....at times I do get caught up in the weight loss which isn't good either.....but to not blame the weight loss on things in our life is to be in denial of what is really going on in our life that we really need to deal with.

Wishing you the best with this....I know how difficult it is....hope that soon your SSI will go through so you can get the therapy help you need so you can learn to deal with your life situations in a healthy way.