What Was Really Behind My Need for Control During My Eating Disorder

Control. A word thrown around far too easily.

Two images come to mind. First: forever stressed but overachieving women in my family. The Superwoman archetype: working full time at the office and at home, relentlessly trying to get everything right. The kind you don't ask "why not just leave the shirt un-ironed for this time?" because there's no winning that conversation.

The second: people with eating disorders, including an old version of myself. Someone I’d like to ask a few questions. That conversation, I might actually be able to win.

If I could sit old-me down:

Why do you need to hit a certain weight? Track every calorie? Pace the house until all five dots light up on your Fitbit? (R.I.P. pink, dirty Fitbit Flex 2. You will not be missed.)

"I need control to feel safe. It's just who I am," she’d reply.

A dead end… unless I look at it from a functional perspective.

‘‘What happens if you lose control?’’

She'd say:

‘‘Everything falls apart. I will stop being in charge. Things will just… happen to me.’’

Weighing yourself, tracking calories, measuring your body — these aren't random behaviours. They aren’t personality traits either. They are there because they have a perceived function: keeping things from falling apart. Keeping life from just happening to you. The fear I sense underneath is helplessness.

In other words, controlling my body seemingly helped me prevent the helplessness I felt when things happened without my say.

I'll hold my own imagined hand as I say this: as fragile human beings, we have very little control over what happens to us. Everything can be fine, and then suddenly it isn't. There's nothing we can do about it and it feels like a slap in the face. I still have difficulty coming to terms with this reality.

This isn't unique to me, or to people with disordered eating. It's an unbearable, inevitable truth. We all construct a sense of safety — automatically, quietly — so we don't fall apart. We make meaning. We tell ourselves things. Even when nothing is actually safe.

So if everyone does this, something in my old life must have made it especially hard. The real question becomes:

“Where in your life do you feel so out of control that you need strict control over food?”

What immediately comes to mind is high school: a turbulent world of overflowing hormones and barely-developed prefrontal cortexes, where we gave enormous importance to things that only mattered if you were a teenager (and we swore they were the end of the world).

In that environment, my boundaries were constantly crossed. People made each other’s lives their business. They gossiped, questioned, said whatever they wanted to your face as they pleased. Naturally, it upset me.

People can do that, you know. We actually have very little control over what others do.

But the worst part was that I didn’t feel able to respond, to push back, or protect myself.

My old self would vulnerably say something like:

“It feels like anyone can say or do anything to me, out of nowhere, and I have no say in it. I feel out of control of my own life. But I do have a say in what I eat and how I look.”

What looked like a need for control was really a response to not having a voice, not having agency, and feeling invaded. Control became a substitute — a way to briefly organize the chaos, almost like a shield.

It still angers me how much I let in by trying to control my body instead of getting angry. Instead of reacting.

Control wasn’t about food at all. It was about everything I couldn’t (and sometimes unconsciously chose not to) say with words.

If I could go back, find my old self weighing lettuce and preparing her low-carb meal for the next day, I wouldn’t tell her to fix her eating. I’d ask her:

Who is making you feel this small?

Where do you feel like you can't speak, can't reply, can't have a say?

What are you trying to fix with your body that actually belongs somewhere else?

Go focus on that instead of getting your calories right on MyFitnessPal!

Controlling numbers never actually made me more in charge of what happened to me or my life. It didn’t make me feel outspoken or heard. It certainly didn’t give me the agency I was desperately needing.

And the momentary relief it gave was so narrow, fragile, and temporary (lasting only until I got the calories wrong, or stepped on the scale and saw a number I didn’t like).

If anything, it completely drained my energy so much that there was little left to set limits anywhere else.

I was trying to free myself from being controlled by others and their comments, only to end up controlled by food and numbers.

Because the sense of agency I was looking for could only come from setting real boundaries — speaking up, saying no, allowing myself to feel anger instead of shrinking.

Expressing a boundary through your body is like talking Chinese to a Turkish person. You may feel like you’re saying something very clearly. You may feel like you’re protecting yourself.

But the other person doesn’t hear the message. They just see behaviour they don’t understand — or sometimes they don’t notice anything nothing at all. So the boundary never actually reaches them through the communication channels.

And even if it does, some will keep crossing your boundaries, if you let them.

So in this case, let them theory does not apply. DO NOT let them (theory?)

‘What if I set a boundary and they still do things?’ I can hear my old self ask.

Here is the thing: You can get it all right yet people can still say and do things. Situations can still shift. You might feel powerless in some situations. But you are never as powerless as you are when you are setting that boundary through controlling your body.

Real agency doesn’t come from the control you have over your body, but from what you decide to do when people cross a line.

Because you do actually have power, the power of your voice, even if it feels uncomfortable to use it.

This is where the real work comes in: finding ways to express yourself with words — not your body.

If I could say one last thing to my old self, it would be this:

‘‘What will help you isn’t shrinking — but becoming louder.’’

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This essay was first published on my newsletter. Read the original on Substack →