The life project account of eating disorders: agency in the pursuit of dietary goals

Recovery from eating disorders is known to be difficult. Individuals with eating disorders are generally poorly responsive to change: their eating behaviour is rigid, and they are often inflexible as regards their eating-related goals. This opens up questions about their agency in eating. Why do individuals with eating disorders not “just stop” performing problematic eating behaviour, despite the enormous burden this behaviour may inflict in their lives? In this article, we seek to answer this question by providing a clear view of individuals’ own role in the development of and recovery from their eating disorders. Specifically, we adopt a situated perspective on agency to explain the poor responsiveness to change characteristic of these conditions. We suggest that in the pursuit of eating-related goals, individuals with eating disorders develop a project-like relation to eating, which not only pervasively changes the arrangement and content of their lives, but also their lives’ meaning. On this basis, we argue that the goal-inflexibility and rigidity of eating behaviour often ascribed to them might not be grounded in disorders or impairments of agency, but can in fact be understood in terms of their agency in eating. This is what we call the “life project account” of eating disorders.