General

I have had anorexia since I was 9 years old, now with 23 I can say that thanks to the fetish I have been freeing myself little by little. At the beginning when I liked watching videos of fat women, then I felt terrible because I didn't want to do that, I just liked it. The psychologist told me to keep experimenting with this part of me and to let myself go, she recommended me to see it as a game. I can't tell you how it went because it was very progressive, but at 19 years old I was already an expert in feederism and I stopped panicking about eating. It is a very hard healing process, but with this fetish you can cope a little better. I wish you lots of encouragement.

If you have a problem with alcohol then you can completely abstain in order not to trigger the problem. However if you have a problem with eating you cannot completely abstain. You must do a controlled amount of the thing you have a problem with.

Looking through the thread, the majority of people on here have restrictive eating disorders. Having a controlled amount is 100% the problem.

As a teen I was very slender, and I was very restrictive of my eating, especially in front of other people. I would sometime refuse to eat when I was with my family, but I would totally sneak junk food and eat alone in my room, and I would privately fantasize both about fattening up myself and others. It was a time in my life when I felt as though I had no control over anything, and I think that this behavior was a way for me to feel like I was taking control over something.

You’re very strong to have made it through that.

Proud of you for making it through. Hope that you're able to thrive.

I have an ED, though it isn't one that is related to body image.

I have wondered before about how feedism interacts with EDs, if perhaps there's elements of the fetish that form as a way to protect oneself against parts of ED, or form due to parts of ED.
And if feedism can assist in recovery, or if it can be harmful or encourage ED thought patterns.

That's a good point.
For me, if I wanted to explore if there was a correlation between my fetish and how it manifests and my eating disorder, I'd have to try and figure out what came first in a chicken-egg type investigation of my life. I remember manifestations of my fetish in my early childhood, but can't remember much regarding food until a bit later.
But my eating disorder doesn't involve body image, so that is a major factor in how it interacts with my fetish. Gaining weight doesn't trigger my ED, and my fetish is for being fat/gaining weight in a feedism dynamic.

It would be interesting to have studies in these, particularly like, does feedism have a higher percentage of people with EDs than a similar fetish community in terms of population, if ED was present before or after awareness of the fetish, community involvement vs ED expression, recovery vs fetish involvement.
Tons of variables to account for and a lot of it, if not most, would be self-reported evidence, but would be interesting to know if there's any trends or common experiences of say, an alleviation of body image based pressures in the feedism community, or if there's a developing/already developed standard that applies pressure inherently and if so, how that interacts with EDs.

It’s not what people traditionally think of when you say “eating disorder” since it hasn’t got anything to do with body image, but I have SED (selective eating disorder), which is an eating disorder based around basically hating food: the texture, the taste, the act of eating, etc. Probably about 90% of foods, I can’t tolerate, and when it was at its worst, that figure was more like 99%, and a lot of days I couldn’t handle any food at all. Even now, if I try to eat something that isn’t a safe food for me, or if my food doesn’t taste exactly like I expect it to, it gives me panic attacks and violent nausea that last for hours.

It’s actually the main reason I got into feederism in the first place. When I was in my late teens, I nearly starved to death, and I was told I’d be institutionalized if I didn’t gain weight very soon. I was searching online for anything related to weight gain, and found feederism. I honestly wasn’t that into it at first, but thought if I could get into it sexually that would give me pretty good push to gain some weight, so I sort of brute forced it. I was right, it has helped a lot. My diet is still very restricted and unbalanced but most days I can manage to eat enough to maintain my weight, and when I put the work in I can usually gain some. I’ve been in the healthy weight range for my height for at least a couple years now after being severely underweight my whole life before that! On occasion I can even enjoy eating, but it is usually still a chore for me.

Funny that I should find this so soon after joining, but I am also dealing with a restrictive eating disorder. It does feel kinda weird, but at the same time the more I think about it the more it makes sense. I guess both probably kinda came out of the shame I had when I was younger around being a bit overweight. Even now though I think they're almost complementary in a weird way. The stories I read are mostly first person from the pov of the person gaining, which obviously has its fetish appeal, but at the same time associating myself with what I'm reading kinda scares me a bit and triggers my eating disorder, while the fear kind of gives it a thrill which in turn enhances the fetish aspect.