I know for me, my anorexia had a stress foundation & it isn't body image.....stress makes me feel sick & so I quit eating because I can't stand to get sick because of the bad problems it's caused me in the past.

So the living conditions you were living in while you were purging could have been your stress trigger for that behavior & when the stress goes away, then so does the behavior. I know for me when I was in school, I would quit eating during mid terms & finals & any time I had a large project I was working on & that went for my career also....but those stresses were usually short term so the weight loss was minimum & didn't turn into something critical even though it did tend to trigger a desire to see the weight go down more as I saw it coming off on the scales.

The thing was around the age of 42, I ended up in a stress situation that didn't go away & weight loss was also triggered on top of that by a reaction to the antidepressants I was given....I had the weight loss happen instead of the gain as some have.....so I lost so much weight that it became dangerously low & I ended up having to be medically hospitalized on top of being sent to a treatment center.

Managed to survive that & 10 years later I ended up going through a long term trauma at the time my mother was dying of cancer & a lot of other things were happening at the same time in my life & stopped eating & all the weight came off again & again I ended up in the medical hospital.

Like you, I have moved & I am now out of the living situation that was causing me the horrible amount of stress & my mother died 10 years ago......it took me years to recover the weight but now I'm in a good place & now I am working on maintaining a healthy weight & that is not easy at times in either direction. I find that when there is weight gain, I start to restrict again to control it.....& when it starts to go down, it triggers my desire to loose more....almost like an addiction to seeing the weight drop on the scales.

So in your case it sounds like your ED for those years was based on the situation you were living in & not that changed it would be natural for that behavior to change also.

Going to therapy might help you get in touch with your emotional side & maybe understand your behavior a bit more & that could be a good help...but it sounds like a very normal action/reaction that you are experiencing.