"Behind an eating disorder, there's more to it than just someone who wants to look thin. There's more to it."

BarcelonaWhen she was nine years old, Miriam focused entirely on competitive swimming. She trained six hours a day, attended competitions, and received medals and awards that made her life exemplary on the outside. Focused on sports and high performance, she had also found in her friends and clubmates all the emotional support and love she lacked at home. Until one day, her body began to change. From having a childlike body, she went on to experience all the physical and hormonal changes of adolescence. Her breasts grew, she began to develop curves, and she underwent all kinds of transformations that she neither recognized nor felt comfortable with. When she looked in the mirror, she saw a completely distorted image of herself, until the rejection became so great that she began to obsess over her body and her diet. Little by little, she entered a spiral of training and dietary restriction from which it was very difficult to escape. Outwardly, she was still a nearly perfect little girl, but what no one suspected was that, when left alone, she would binge on sweets and all kinds of food, which she would then end up vomiting. She has now made this whole hell public in her book. Dare to eat life (Grijalbo, 2025). "I wanted to show that behind a woman with an eating disorder, there isn't just someone who wants to look thin, but there are also many other layers of depth," explains the author, Miriam Salinas, who is now a psychologist specializing in food anxiety.

Swallowing emotions

In the pages of the book, she recounts how she suffered from what she calls "good girl syndrome." It's a form of behavior traditionally associated with girls and women, which causes them to feel obligated to please others at all times, trying to avoid conflict or causing problems. It's a pattern that seeks external approval from the family and society in general, and it often comes at the expense of their emotional and psychological well-being. "It's a syndrome in which anger is very neutered, with a lot of oppression to avoid conflict with others and also due to the fear of not being accepted," explains the expert. In other words, these are people who never say no and never complain, with the goal of avoiding rejection and feeling loved. Of course, this attitude has very negative consequences for personal identity: "Suppressing anger and saying yes to everyone is going against yourself, and often everything we don't say and keep inside we end up literally swallowing with food," she exemplifies.

For Salinas, anxiety is nothing more than a poorly expressed emotion. When all that emotional energy is triggered, many people manage it through food. "When we chew, we feel a release of that energy. We all do this at some point. The problem is when, in any circumstance, such as joy or sorrow, we always process it through food or its absence," explains the therapist. That is, when compulsive eating, or not eating, gives us a false sense of security and control.

Although there may be a genetic predisposition to suffering from eating disorders—it is one of the individual factors that researchers and scientists recognize as a cause, and which the Association Against Anorexia and Bulimia (ACAB) of Catalonia also recognizes—Salinas explains that there are many other factors that can lead a person to end up suffering from this problem. These could be comments at home that you hear from childhood about fat or thin people, or about the correct amount of food; it could be teasing or derogatory comments about your body from schoolmates. The prevailing beauty model seen in advertising, on television, and on social media, and all the pressure to have a normative body, don't help either. "There are more and more people with eating disorders," this expert laments. According to data from the Department of Health, the pandemic caused a sharp increase in cases of eating disorders in Catalonia, which skyrocketed after the lockdown. In 2021, the number of people treated for these disorders grew by 61% compared to 2018.

Given this, Salinas recommends seeking help as soon as possible and identifying the circumstances that caused the disorder. In her case, a lack of support at home, coupled with the demands of a high-level sport, where she was weighed twice a day, were some of the triggers that led her to enter this destructive spiral. "Each person must create their own map to identify its causes," she continues.

Once we know how to identify the root cause of this situation, it's important to reconnect with our bodies, according to the therapist. "When we don't know how to manage our emotions, we tend to disconnect from our bodies. That's where we dissociate and lose sight of everything else," she explains. Therefore, letting go of feeling guilt or shame about experiencing an eating disorder and returning to inhabiting our bodies and listening to ourselves is essential for moving toward recovery.