answer:I have a difficult relationship to food. My body never really prolaims hunger—or at least, I don’t recognize the feelings that are “hunger! you’re hungry! food!”—and so it’s easy for me to be paranoid about how much or how little I’m eating. If I go without eating I don’t get a cue, I just gradually become weak and fatigued, and so I won’t realize that I’ve been so lethargic until I’ve eaten something and feel the renewed energy. I have a difficult time knowing how much to eat. A few summers ago, in a fit of self-loathing, I ate between one to two dozen chocolate chip cookies a day. There was mutilated symbolic a reason it was cookies, but I won’t get into that. I had to fight myself to manage to eat so much… and now, after I gained 50 pounds in binging and dropped 40 of them when I stopped eating quite so much, I have an even harder time knowing how much to eat. An even harder time, too, of getting a realistic sense of my size. I obsess over food and don’t really enjoy it. Cookies make me feel sick, but if I go too long without chocolate chips I feel panicked and anxious. Etc… My relationship to food is pretty disgusting, actually. Even though aside from the too-many chocolate chips, and too-many cheerios, I avoid any packagaged food. And even though I present myself with a balanced diet when anyone is present (no one sees me eat the chocolate chips). And even though I love apples, love zucchini, etc… love all the ‘healthy’ food. And even though sugar makes my head feel like it’s humming. I eat pretty badly. I feel like I have to. Eating well would mean treating myself well, and that’s not something I like to do. So yes. Even though what you describe is different than me… I don’t mean to equate… Yes, I think someone can have an eating disorder and it not be anorexia, or bulemia, or binge-eating (although I did that for a summer), and it not be recognized as an eating disorder. (Still, does anorexia necessarily mean deathly-skinny? I’m not sure what the definition entails. I know with bulemia, if you don’t vomit soon enough after eating, you can gain weight still, and it can be even harder for an outside observer to diagnose… so I don’t see why not, under the correct conditions, un under-eater can’t also be clinically overweight.) Your metabolism will shut down if you starve yourself. It’s survival—no energy in, means using what energy you do have as efficiently as possible, or dying that much sooner. But I don’t know how true the ‘forever-shut-down metabolism’ is. Nor the ‘shut-down if no food within 5 hours metabolism.’ On and on. Given that by quitting smoking you can begin to reverse its effects on your health, or that altering your diet you can begin reverse the progress of diet-onset diabetes… I tend to think that most of what we do to our bodies is reverseable (at least up to the point we break something.) Given that just by excercising you boost your metabolism, I tend to think that metabollic rate must work similarly. Even if you trained your body to a certain level of metabollic activity and lipid storage, it’s then trainable. Probably it’s not easy to change the instilled training, (nor the practiced habits) but I have a hard time believing re-training of the body’s behavior is impossible. There was this bit on NPR a few months ago… I think closer to a year ago… about the epigentics involved in muscular activity. That just by being active, we are actively changing the way our body reads and implements our DNA (it makes different notations in the DNA strand, and begins to build muscle, and increase muscle effeciency, and increase the energy pre-stored in the muscles, all in response to the use. Didn’t matter who—age or previous activity level or anything.) Our bodies are always listening.