Autism, Anorexia, and Eating Really Fast

The common anorexia stereotype is of a thin, white, cis, privileged female that eats barely anything, fasts for days, and when she does eat, it takes her hours to finish a mouse-sized meal. If you are engaging in restrictive eating behaviors and don’t match this stereotypical criteria, your struggles may feel “invalid” and you may deeply question whether or not you are even “sick enough” to have true anorexia.

I’ve spoken about this before on my podcast, but throughout my entire eating disorder, I ate well over 2,000 calories a day (yes, the “recommended” daily amount!). But because I personally have a VERY high metabolism (read the post here), 2,000 calories was a starvation diet for me. Yet another reason we need to STOP promoting “one-size-fits-all” calorie counts to a population that’s diverse beyond words.

I was never a slow eater, and would often wolf down my food in a matter of minutes. Interestingly, I didn’t start dragging out my meals until I entered ED treatment. To quote my book Rainbow Girl:

During my first dinner at the clinic, I had eaten my heaping pile of rice and chicken stir-fry in ten minutes flat, only to realize the rest of the group had practically their whole meal left. Since then, I had learned to pace myself, closely observing the others’ tactics. Small pieces, putting my utensils down between every bite, chewing slowly…all the way up until the last two minutes, in which everyone would run a consumption sprint to ensure completion by minute thirty.

Although it took me a while to re-learn my innate eating pace, I remember the relief I felt when no longer having to “match” my eating behaviors to that of the group. Upon reflection, I can clearly see this eating disorder behavior was a form of autistic masking.

Nowadays, I still eat VERY fast (we’re talking an entire pot of mac ‘n cheese in less than 5 minutes). Due to the whole “mindful eating” and “savoring your food” messages we’re bombarded by, I judged this as a “problem” that needed to be fixed. But the more I attempted to slow down, the more anxious I became and the more miserable the entire eating experience felt.

Considering the fact that I’ve always been a fast eater (read: before my ED started and after I recovered) paired with the fact that my dad, who’s also autistic, eats very fast as well, I started to wonder if eating fast was a common autistic trait. Turns out, it is!

Although not ALL autistic people will resonate with this, I believe eating really fast can be rooted in wanting to get the meal over as quickly as possible so you can get back to whatever you were doing sooner. Furthermore, eating is a very sensory-rich experience. For some, this can be so overstimulating that we want to get through it as fast as we can. On the other end of this, some autistic people may use food to stim, i.e. obtain lots of sensory input. This can be soothing and regulating. Eating really fast may be a way to heighten the sensory-rich experience of consuming food.

In conclusion, it’s important to remember that neither autism nor eating disorders has a “look.” Just because you’ve been conditioned to believe “autistic people are picky eaters” or “people with anorexia eat slowly,” doesn’t mean this is the case for everyone with either condition. If you’re struggling with food – whatever that looks like for you – those struggles are valid. And you are deserving of going on a journey to healing that relationship. If you want to learn how I healed my own relationship with food and learned to embrace my autistic self, grab your copy of my book Rainbow Girl!