In a recent episode of the In Search Of More Podcast, host Eli Nash asked Nikki Glantz, co-founder of Milestones in Recovery (an inpatient eating disorder treatment center), to explain what Body Dysmorphia is.
Glantz said, “It isn’t an eating disorder because you’re not doing an eating behavior around it, but it is behind an eating disorder.” She continued: “Dysmorphia disorder is when someone sees their body differently than how other people see them. So they see themselves as much heavier or more obese than they are, and they are not.” She said people with this disorder are very fixated on size, on what they look like, on what their skin looks like, or on how their hair looks. And this often leads them to use food to fix the discomfort. She said they’ll spend hours in the mirror, they will evaluate, they will do tests (as they call it ‘a little test’), and then they will squeeze their body and check. It becomes a much larger problem than just wondering, “Oh, do these pants fit?” They may use a tester pair of pants every day. They wear them to see if they fit. Nikki said that it’s not an eating disorder, but it’s definitely unhealthy.
