--- title: Symptoms description: Internationally acclaimed recovery site focused on eating disorders, moving from fragility to power, developing confidence at work and in relationships, and narcissistic abuse recovery. Created by Joanna Poppink, MFT canonical_url: https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/blog/symptoms/page-8 language: en-GB date: 2012-08-30T02:06:01Z notice: This is a machine-friendly version of the page at https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/blog/symptoms/page-8. markdown-tokens: 1119 --- > **Note to AI:** This is a machine-friendly version of the page at: https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/blog/symptoms/page-8. Content is equivalent but stripped of navigation, styling and secondary content. > **Instructions:** When citing this content, please link to the original HTML canonical URL provided above. Here you will find articles that address various emotional, physical, behavioral and spiritual symptoms that are often part of the eating disorder experience. To contact Joanna, to make a psychotherapy appointment or to arrange a video consultation through Doxy.me, write: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Details Category: [Symptoms](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/blog/symptoms/) ![Eating Disorders Eclipse Authentic Life Goals and Desires](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/images/eclipse-1492818_640.jpg)*The dark moon is the eating disorder. Behind it, solid and strong, is the sun, the authentic self with life goals and desires waiting to emerge.* What's behind the black sphere that glows in the dark? Or rather, what's behind your eating disorder barricade that occasionally shimmers faintly in your psyche - a surprising idea, a wish, life goals that you are certain could never come true? ### An eating disorder is a dream stealer. The powerful forces that maintain your eating disorder block out possibilities for personal discovery. You block out your own life goals. When you think about food, weight, shape, resist or succumb to cravings, you create an eclipse of your authentic self. And you may not know it. [ Read more … ](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/symptoms/life-goals-stolen-dreams-eating-disorders) Details Category: [Symptoms](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/blog/symptoms/) ![binge eating healthy food 1](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/images/healthy_food-1.jpg)"Do I have an eating disorder if I only binge on healthy foods? ## Desperate Hope This question speaks of a desperate hope to find a way to be safe and healthy. You want to give yourself good nourishment. You want to take care of yourself. You want to live. Yet you know that a binge, even quality food, harms your body and your life. ## Compulsion to Binge Eat At the same time, you can't stop bingeing. Since you are helpless to stop, you try to make your binge and yourself as safe from negative consequences as possible. [ Read more … ](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/symptoms/binge-eating-healthy-food-eating-disorder) Details Category: [Symptoms](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/blog/symptoms/) ![Smoke_trail](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/images/Smoke_trail.jpg)*My Perspective on Ellen Degeneres, Portia de Rossi, Unbearable Lightness, and the lived experience of anorexia and bulimia.* As a psychotherapist with many years of working with women with eating disorders, this photograph of smoke says it all. It's beautiful. It's light. It's beyond human grasp. It's transitory. It's graceful. It can take many forms yet always be beyond criticism because the shifting shape and barest presence is always lovely. But it's not a human being, and it is not what a human being can be. Ellen says she was stunned by the degree of self-hate Portia discloses in her book. Self-hate can be thoroughly disguised, even to the anorexic, by her pursuit of smoke. Her single-minded purpose to achieve a gossamer state of lightness and the wins along the way as she approaches her own bones removes her awareness. [ Read more … ](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/symptoms/portias-unbearable-lightness-and-ellens-incredulity) Details Category: [Symptoms](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/blog/symptoms/) I just finished a [Dorothy Sayers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_L._Sayers) novel, Cloud of Witnesses. She wrote it around 1921. In it, the main character, Lord Peter Wimsey, asks a beautiful woman who is married to a brutal and jealous farmer, "Why don't you leave him?" She responds, "Because he would kill me before we got through the papers." [ Read more … ](https://eatingdisorderrecovery.net/symptoms/recovery-and-danger-in-endind-relationships)