I get it, I do. Before switching gears, I thought I wanted to work with rape survivors while I was in college and did a practicum working at a shelter. It turned out to be too emotionally fraught for me and I couldn't handle it. The story I heard from a lot of them is that they turned to eating to try to deform their bodies to make it sexless/unattractive, or if they were already fat, they wanted to further 'punish' the body that brought on the rape/assault.  I get it, I have empathy for it. But the end of that story can't be, "I was raped so now as an adult I weigh 300lbs and it's okay to weigh 300lbs.' The story needs to be, "I'm in therapy for it, I'm focusing on learning to love and cherish my body, and I am no longer eating myself into oblivion.' I also have empathy for drug addicts and alcoholics, and it's true that we don't say to them, 'Well, your life was hard, so you can just do a little heroin forever.' That isn't what recovery looks like for drug addicts and alcoholics, so why is that okay for 'recovered' or 'recovering' people who harm themselves with food? I understand it's slightly more complicated because you have to eat food every day, and it's probably harder to quit drinking or doing drugs if you were forced to do a little bit every day. But why do these people conflate 'hard' with 'impossible' and why do we tell them (as a society) that it's okay to just not work on this and continue to treat their body like garbage??