Table of Contents
Last updated on March 11th, 2025 at 12:53 am
Are you feeling lost and out of control with food and you don’t know what to do? Do you feel extreme guilt, shame or anxiety after a meal? These are all warning signs of an eating disorder. If you have an eating disorder, you MUST tell someone about your eating disorder in order to. keep yourself safe.
So how exactly do you tell someone else you have your eating disorder?
While it can feel scary to struggle with your relationship with food, telling another person can feel even scarier!
Telling someone about your eating disorder will involve:
- Deciding who to tell
- Deciding where and when to tell the person about your eating disorder
- Deciding how to tell someone about your eating disorder (in person, a letter, etc)
- Bracing yourself for difficult reactions
- Preparing for the next steps of eating disorder recovery
The reality is, you are as sick as your secrets when it comes to your eating disorder. Exposing your eating disorder secrets is the only sure path to lasting eating disorder recovery.
Your life could depend on getting the right support for your eating disorder recovery. So there is no time to waste.
This article will walk through who to tell about your eating disorder, how to tell them and how to cope with the very difficult emotions of telling someone about your eating disorder.
10 Reasons To Tell Someone About Your Eating Disorder
If you have an eating disorder, it will be difficult or even impossible to recover on your own. You should seek out support as soon as you know you are struggling with food and/or your body image. It is never too soon.
A few reasons you must tell someone about your eating disorder are:
- Your brain is starving. You wont be able to make safe decisions about food without help.
- You cannot trust your hunger/fullness cues. You need help deciding the right amount to eat!
- You will probably need an eating disorder recovery meal plan specifically designed by a haes dietitian for safety.
- Your eating disorder voice will constantly tell you that you’re “just fine” and play down the eating disorder
- You are likely to engage in eating disorder behavior without support for symptom interruption (for example puging, restricting, body checking). Engaging in these behaviors even once makes them more likely to occur.
- The right meal plan offers you a “prescription like” strategy for recovery
- A support team can help you feel like you have permission to recover
- You may require medical monitoring as your eating disorder might be life threatening
- Initial recovery stages will likely require mechanical eating and meal support
- You will need support coping with the emotional side and symptoms of eating disorder recovery.
Secrets keep you sick. Telling someone about your eating disorder takes the eating disorder voice out of your head fact checks it with reality.
Who Should I tell About My Eating Disorder
Who you tell about our eating disorder can be important to make sure you get the right support. This person might be a parent, teacher, healthcare provider, or peer.
The right person to tell about your eating disorder will be able to:
- Listen without judgment when you’ve discussed other difficult situations
- Offer weight neutral support or have a history of working with eating disorders (therapist, doctor, dietitian)
- Leave diet culture out of the equation
- Have access to professional recovery resources or the ability to seek them out
- Will ask you what the best way they can support you is
- Will not react to you telling about your eating disorder with urgency and panic
Feeling scared when you tell someone you have an eating disorder is completely normal. It also is completely normal to feel like you want to recover “with conditions” or feel like you want to keep many eating disorder behaviors alive.
Even if you are feeling this way, you should still tell someone about your eating disorder. It is normal for your eating disorder voice to compete with your desire to recover.
What To Expect When I Share About My ED
Eating disorders are scary for both the person who is experiencing them as well as for those who they seek support from. Unfortunately, you cannot always know how someone we tell about our eating disorder will react.
Brace yourself for the reaction of your support person causing a potential trigger for your eating disorder (this can happen even if your support person reacts positively)
THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU SHOULD STOP SEEKING SUPPORT!
If we tell someone we have an eating disorder, they could potentially respond with:
- Fear
- Urges to fix the problem quickly
- Misunderstanding that this is not simply a “food disorder”
- Suggestions for ways to “fix your body”
- Diet plans (not provided by a HAES practitioner)
- Shock
- Self-blame
Be prepared to ground yourself and have self care strategies scheduled for after you share you eating disorder. Even if a person initially responds in a way that triggers you, person may still be able to support you with the right guidance from an eating disorder treatment team.
Their reactions do not mean they don’t care about you or what you are going through. It simply might mean that they haven’t been educated on the ways to support someone with such a complex problem.
How To Tell Someone You Have An Eating Disorder
Not sure how to tell someone about your eating disorder? Here are some tips:
- Set up a safe place and time to talk about your feelings and behaviors around food
- Write your eating disorder thoughts and behaviors in a letter or email if it feels too scary to share in person
- Make a list of some of the ways you feel they could support you (for example sharing meals together, removing mirrors or scales from your home etc.)
- List out your fears in seeking support. This can help it feel a little less scary to be vulnerable.
- Be prepared for the person you are telling to have strong emotions
Listing out your fears can help your family or friends support you in the most appropriate, compassionate way
While the person you tell might be a great support, it might be necissary to seek additional professional support. Seeking professional help for your eating disorder can feel less scary with the support of a family member at your side.
Family and friends that support you can be your greatest ally through this difficult process of ed recovery. It’s important to include your family in your eating disorder recovery journey if you feel it’s safe to do so.
Telling Your Peers About Your Eating Disorder
It is not always necessary that you share your eating disorder with anyone who isn’t part of your treatment team. However, it may be helpful in your recovery journey to share certain aspects of your relationship with food with those who are around you frequently.
If you feel a co-worker or friend could be an ally in recovery, working through the same steps as we did with disclosing our eating disorder to family members is appropriate.
A friend or co-worker can be helpful in your recovery journey. You might seek out support for certain eating disorder behaviors behaviors even if we don’t want to fully disclose our eating disorder.
For example, we might say:
- Would you mind joining me for lunch, i’m trying to create positive experiences around food
- I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t discuss diets, weight, or food rules around me
- I’m healing my relationship with my body, would it be possible to refrain from making comments about my body size?
For many, a part of recovery may include following a meal plan or tracking food using an eating disorder app.
This can be difficult to do around friends and co-workers that are not aware we’re suffering from an eating disorder.
If you’re not ready to fully disclose your eating disorder recovery journey to them, you might just say you’re working on creating a more positive relationship with food. Most people won’t dig further into this and it will help them to accept the behavior without questions.
Self Care When Talking About Your Eating Disorder
It’s important to be fully prepared that getting support for your eating disorder will NOT feel comfortable. While there may be some relief in telling someone about your eating disorder, this goes hand in hand with discomfort.
Be ready for this. It’s important to take care of yourself even if you receive a positive response to disclosing your eating disorder.
Ways to take care of yourself after you tell someone about your eating disorder include:
- Taking a hot bath
- Take a walk in nature
- Journaling the thoughts and emotions that come up
- Sitting with hot tea
- Playing a video game or watching a movie
- Playing an insturment
- Reading a book
- Getting a message
- Meditation or breathing
You might feel vulnerability fatigue once you share our eating disorder with someone. You will also likely feel scared that the person you have share with will force you to do things we aren’t comfortable with.
Even if all of these things occur, you should push through the discomfort and continue on your recovery journey. You’re worthy of recovery and deserve a life of food freedom.
You’re not alone in this journey. If you are for experiences from others that have walked this path, check out my anorexia story and these eating disorder recovery book
- The Orthorexia Quiz: Created by A Dietitian - August 25, 2025
- Letting Go of The Fear of Wasting Food - August 18, 2025
- Bulimia and the Heart: Risks and Treatment - August 13, 2025