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Eating disorders aren’t caused by just one thing. It’s a complicated combination of things that vary person to person. Some things that play a role in the onset of eating disorders:

Psychological:Eating disorders are a coping mechanism. There’s a predisposition to eating disorders (biochemical) that can be triggered a number of ways, sometimes by environmental factors. When there’s trauma or stress or pressure or whatever the trigger is, a person turns to food/body as a way of coping. This is not a conscious choice, but it is an unhealthy way of coping. 

Genetics/Biology:There are always studies going on about this but a lot of researchers have linked eating disorders to a genetic component (the predisposition) which when triggered, will usually be the onset of the disorder. I won’t go into all the specifics of the brain chemistry and the way our brains are wired differently BUT I personally think it’s interesting when looking at the “landscape” of our brains the parts where emotion, hunger, ect… are located close together.Having this doesn’t mean recovery isn’t possible. Our brains are EXTREMELY malleable. 

Environmental:This is the outside events. The stress, the trauma (which, in it’s own can also alter our brain chemistry), the pressure from society or individuals in a person’s life. It could be anything. General stress, pressure to be perfect, wanting to be loved, needing attention, wanting to be undesirable, low self esteem, the list could go on forever. This is not a conscious choice. 

So, there’s no exact cause of eating disorders and it can be a different combination of those factors and be triggered in different ways.

Another thing that I found interesting was looking back at a person’s childhood. I figured something out about myself when I was writing a paper for grad school. Kids are very impressionable. What happens to us as kids, what happens while we’re still developing, plays a HUGE role in our adult life… especially how we cope. What I figured out about myself is that when I was 6, I “learned” that restricting was a way to ease anxiety. At the time, the anxiety was from PTSD and it was about my teeth and my mouth. So when I has a loose tooth, I didn’t eat. I ended up having to go to the dentist to get my loose teeth pulled after my accident because I just wouldn’t eat. If I even thought a tooth was loose (which still happens to me now) I wouldn’t eat. If I thought my mouth was bleeding (which still happens to me now) I wouldn’t eat. So, I sort of conditioned myself unknowingly because of trauma to use avoid food as a way of coping and easing anxiety. But, looking back at my family tree, while there’s no diagnosed eating disorders as far as we know… there there are some clear signs of very unhealthy behaviors regarding food. So I may have has a small genetic predisposition before the trauma, which may have altered my brain chemistry even more to make that predisposition more significant. Then, by highschool (at the latest), there was a trigger that onset my disorder. AND, I also had a lot of self-hatred, even from a child. I hated my body, even as a child. That’s another thing that played a role. PLUS, I have bipolar disorder and a lot of times disorders can be linked together. Serotonin also happens to be a neurotransmitter that has been linked to both bipolar and eating disorders.