<p>When I was in treatment for my eating disorder, a shocking amount of the women I met were nutrition majors or nutritionists. Many had become nutrition majors as a way to enable their eating disorder, but many developed an eating disorder while studying.
Why do you think this is? Has anyone else noticed the rate of eating disorders among nutrition majors?</p>
<p>It’s just an obsession with food in every way. I think for nutrition majors most aspects are not a bad thing (like knowing a lot about vitamins and longevity) but eating disorders begin from trying to control too much, and developing obsessive or irrational patterns.</p>
<p>It could be because they are thinking too much about every detail and so get caught up in the numbers, “the facts”, and don’t see the big picture.</p>
<p>Some eating disordered people become nutrition majors because they have overcome a lot and sincerely want to help others like them now, or want to develop a good relationship with nutrition.
Or because they know something they think about all day long anyway is something they could do for a living.</p>
<p>I think it is amazing for someone to have a lot of knowledge about nutrition…eating disordered people know a lot about nutrition generally, having scrutinized it, but really don’t use it properly. If only they used such knowledge and “passion” properly, it would help the field. I think that’s where the connection is, at the point where they have to implement their knowledge in their own life.</p>
<p>You’ll also find that a lot of personal trainers, fitness models, and fitness gurus have a past eating disorder history.</p>
<p>In some cases, I think that their new hobby is a way to maintain many of the same habits maintained within their eating disorder (regimented eating, refusing ‘bad’ foods, monitoring the scale) but under a new label of “health” or “fitness”.</p>
<p>For nutrition majors specifically, I can’t say I’ve noticed a correlation between that major and eating disorders, but that area of study isn’t very popular here. It would be make an interesting study to be sure if you could get some hard numbers :)</p>