Julie's question seems a good place to start.  It's a big one, my understanding is a lot different now than it was a year, or even 6 months ago.  I'm just going to sit here and answer it like I would if chatting in person.  I know some of you are editors, so forgive rambling or bad grammar ;)

What prompted your eating disorder and how old were you when it began?

I was 10.  And this is why I'm not quite as upset about the media as some folks.  I didn't decide to go on a diet because of the media images around me.  Sure they had and still have triggering effects, but my inner need to starve myself started for other reasons.

A lot was going on when I was 10.  Stuff with my parent's marriage, my father's alcoholism, how we coped to get through, and what all that does to relationships in a family.  It was during Christmas break that I just didn't eat much for a few days, then didn't eat at all for a day or so.  Obviously there were feelings going on that I had no facility to deal with and depriving myself of food clicked in my mind and body as an excellent way to numb it all.  I don't completely understand it all yet.

If we hear about someone who started drinking at 10 to numb out, we freak out.  But by such a young age so many have already found other insidious ways of "coping" with the things that are too hard to understand.

In my experience the behaviors came and went.  But I was never a big eater and continued to have all sorts of different problems with food.  I had a phase in 6th grade where I kept choking on my food for no reason, I had stomach issues in my teens, I became a vegetarian for a while as a means of defining "safe food", and in recent years I was extremely vigilant about the politics and purity of the food I ate.  It manifested in all sorts of ways, each with it's own triggers and reasons.  All along, I regularly skipped at least one meal a day and never had a realistic notion of how much food my body needed to thrive.  Not eating enough was just the way of life for me.  I still have a hard time accepting just how much food I need.

I can better grasp the eating disorder by looking at the idea of negative vs. healthy core beliefs.  We all have beliefs about ourselves and the world.  The negative beliefs I have were in perfect alignment for an eating disorder.  Those beliefs were formed in a household with a single mom struggling to get through college while my father destroyed his life.  I also have a genetic background that predisposes me to anxiety problems, addiction, and depression.