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Anorexia blunts interoceptive awareness, meaning patients don't feel hunger, making eating a major challenge.

While GLP-1s eliminate "food noise," they may also blunt brain-body signals and mute other vital human cues.

True health means nourishing oneself even when internal signals are unavailable.

When working with teens who have eating disorders, we inevitably end up talking about "interoceptive awareness" within the first few therapy sessions. It sounds complicated, but it simply means the ability to feel and understand what is happening inside your own body, like hunger, exhaustion, or even a racing heartbeat. It’s what tells you if you are tired, cold, in pain, or hungry.

Interoceptive Awareness and Eating Disorders

Having poor or altered interoceptive awareness is incredibly common in eating disorders, particularly anorexia. It creates a fascinating and lethal paradox: It’s the exact trait that often allows these patients to push through discomfort and excel in school, sports, and work, but it’s also the very thing that causes them to fall deeper into their eating disorder.

Many patients with anorexia are also excellent students and star athletes, and it turns out that having muted body signals actually helps them excel in those areas. Patients have told me about their ability to study right through exhaustion; while their classmates are falling asleep, they can keep cramming........

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