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The Autistic Experience of Extreme Hunger in ED Recovery

Jan 06, 2025
how to recognize and overcome extreme hunger

Extreme hunger is one of the most challenging aspects of anorexia recovery, and it can be especially confusing when you're recovering from an eating disorder as an autistic person. While extreme hunger is a crucial part of the healing process, traditional descriptions of this experience often don't match how it presents in neurodivergent individuals. In this post, we'll explore how extreme hunger manifests differently in autistic people and provide practical strategies for navigating this important phase of ED recovery.

Understanding Extreme Hunger in Autism

As an autistic person who is recovered from anorexia, I know that physical hunger is not something that always comes naturally to us neurodivergent individuals. This is rooted in both interoceptive difficulties and nervous system dysregulation, as covered in my post Autism and Hunger Cues: Redefining Intuitive Eating for Neurodivergent People.

Many autistic people lack interoceptive awareness, which means we often struggle to identify internal body signals. This includes physical sensations of hunger, such as a growling stomach or signs of low blood sugar. On top of this, our nervous systems tend to stay in fight-or-flight mode more often, which further dampens these hunger signals. When your body thinks you're in danger, it's not going to waste energy sending out hunger cues!

When my eating disorder started at the age of eleven, I simply didn’t feel hungry. Growing up as an undiagnosed autistic girl, all I wanted was to “fit in” and be “normal.” I didn’t know why I was so different from my peers, and why life seemed to be so much easier for them. This sense of alienation led me to be on high alert all the time, which meant my sympathetic nervous system was constantly in overdrive. I wanted an escape from reality, a place where the rules were clear and everything felt safe.

So when I started learning about health and nutrition in fifth grade, and my autistic brain took all the health recommendations literally, food and exercise became my special interest. All I had to do was follow the “perfect” food and movement plan, and my life would finally be easy! Of course, that’s not quite how the cookie crumbled. My “healthy” eating plan became more and more restrictive, causing me to enter an energy deficit. (If you want to read my full anorexia recovery story as an autistic person, grab a copy of my book Rainbow Girl!)

Energy Deficit and the Autistic Nervous System

When you don’t eat enough, your body starts believing resources are scarce. This perceived famine tells the body to conserve energy, because it has no clue when energy will be readily available again. Common symptoms of anorexia including slow heart rate, digestive issues, sensitivity to cold, and brittle hair and nails are all ways in which the body attempts to economize.

Of course, there’s only so much energy conservation your body can do before it must turn to internal sources for fuel. In order to support your daily activities – not to mention the excessive exercise most autistic people with anorexia engage in – your body will literally start eating itself up. Your organs shrink, your bone density decreases, and blood flow to the brain is reduced. As I wrote in my post on Interoception in Autism and Anorexia, this reduction in blood flow exacerbates an already lacking sense of interoceptive awareness.

Understanding Hunger Signals in Autism

It’s worth clarifying that a lack of interoceptive awareness does not automatically equate to a lack of physical hunger cues. You may still experience “typical” signs of physical hunger including awareness of an empty stomach or feeling lightheaded. The main difference for someone who struggles with interoception is that they have difficulty interpreting an appropriate response to these hunger cues.

This difficulty in responding to hunger cues is why many autistic people can often go for hours without food, which can lead to extreme hunger at night. When you've almost gone a whole day with very little food and then finally allow yourself to eat something later in the day, your body realizes "oh damn, I actually am really hungry!" and you may find yourself overeating. While eating large amounts of food in one sitting is often labeled as “binge eating,” this is actually your body's natural response to not getting enough food throughout the day.

Energy Debt in Eating Disorder Recovery

The example of eating at night after a day of restriction perfectly illustrates how limiting food intake leads to extreme hunger in the short-term. But what happens when you develop a full-blown eating disorder as an autistic individual and restrict calories for weeks, months, years, or even decades? Your energy deficit turns into energy debt. Energy debt is a lot like financial debt, in the sense that you need to eventually pay it back.

Say you take out a loan from the bank to buy a house. You buy the house and you're happy, but now you're also stuck with a mortgage. You have an agreement with the bank to fully pay back what they lent you, but you also have to pay extra each month for borrowing the money in the first place. That's of course how banks make money!

The same principle applies to full recovery from an eating disorder. Because your body has been taking energy from precious organs and has had to make trade-offs between proper bodily functioning and fueling your daily activities, your body is in energy debt. To "pay" your organs back and get your body functioning optimally again, you need to eat a LOT of food! Not only do you need to eat enough to support your current daily needs, but you have to eat EXTRA food to repay all the energy that was taken from places where it should have never been taken from in the first place.

How Anorexia Affects Hunger Signals

Another way your body conserves energy while in energy deficit is by shutting off physical hunger cues. When your body believes you're in a famine environment and doesn't trust that food is abundant, it's not going to waste precious energy on sending out stomach rumbles like it would in a person who is in energy balance. Every single action in the body costs energy, and your body will only send out physical hunger cues if it trusts that doing so will result in a return on investment. For people who already have difficulty recognizing internal cues, a complete absence of physical hunger cues can make it seem even more impossible to eat intuitively!

Recognizing Extreme Hunger as an Autistic Person

From here, you might be thinking: if autistic people often can't recognize physical hunger cues, how can autistic people even experience extreme hunger? Well, here's where things get interesting, because extreme hunger will often manifest in a way that is drastically different than you may think!

A common misconception about extreme hunger is that it's simply that "bottomless pit" feeling that many recovery YouTubers and Instagram accounts describe. While that overwhelming physical hunger CAN be a way in which someone experiences extreme hunger in eating disorder recovery, we've just learned that autistic people with anorexia aren't always aware of physical hunger cues!

So how DOES an autistic person in recovery recognize extreme hunger, or hunger at all? You recognize your need for food by observing your MENTAL HUNGER. A significant part of the work I do with my autistic clients is discovering ways to use autism traits as strengths in eating disorder recovery. I often get asked whether it's harder – or even possible – for an autistic person to recover from an eating disorder, since many autistic traits can contribute to disordered eating behaviors. While this may be true, how these traits impact your recovery depends on how you choose to use them.

Using Autistic Traits as Anorexia Recovery Tools

Your obsession with following certain food or exercise routines CAN be used as an excuse to stay stuck in your eating disorder, but this same obsessive trait can be used in recovery to commit to eating more food and following a rigid rest routine! It's this obsessive thinking around food and exercise that is actually a tell-tale sign of extreme mental hunger.

Our bodies are SO incredibly smart and are constantly finding ways to maximize our chances of survival. If your body is trying to conserve energy by shutting off physical hunger cues, it will prompt you to seek out food in other ways. And what's the most energy-efficient way to signal interest in food besides physical urges? Thinking about food! All of the planning, dreaming, and creating of potential meals and how they will "fit" into your day – that's all mental hunger. All of the obsessive exercise you're doing? That's also mental hunger. Your rigid exercise routine is a way you're trying to remain in control of your body's energy balance, and it acts as a justification for your precisely planned food.

Taking Action in Eating Disorder Recovery

So, if you're reading this and simultaneously speculating about what your next meal or workout is going to be, this is your sign to go into the kitchen and EAT! Use your autistic trait of needing routine to create a consistent eating plan. Use your autistic trait of preferring predictability to plan your fear foods. Use your autistic trait of being detail-oriented to visualize every detail of your fully recovered life. Because a fully recovered life is possible for you, my fellow autistic friend – but only if you're willing to work for it.

Want to dive deeper into the neurodivergent experience of extreme hunger and learn how to overcome it? Grab your copy of my book How to Beat Extreme Hunger!

Want to learn how to navigate ED recovery as an autistic person?

Listen to my FREE TRAINING teaching you how to use your autistic traits to your advantage in ED recovery đź’Ş

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