In 1996, Mandometer suggested that eating disorders are maintained because patients are captured in the situations in which they were initially rewarded for dieting, the major cause of eating disorders (1). This is called cue-conditioning and the topic of a paper in this weeks’ issue of Nature, a world-leading science journal (2).
Thus, by engaging the brains’ hunger mechanisms experimentally in a manner mimicking normal hunger, cue-conditioning was disrupted (2). Similarly, the “cognitive” concomitants of cue-conditioning, incorrectly thought to maintain eating disorders, will very likely dissolve in patients properly treated by learning to eat normally, as Mandometer has demonstrated in hundreds of patients treated to remission (3).
There is nothing wrong in the brain that causes an eating disorder, normal brain function can be restored by teaching patients how to eat.

1. Bergh, C. & Södersten, P. Anorexia nervosa, self-starvation and the reward of stress. Nat. Med. 2, 21–22 (1996).
2. Livneh, Y. et al. Homeostatic circuits selectively gate food cue responses in insular cortex. Nature 546, 611–616 (2017).
3. Bergh, C. et al. Effective treatment of eating disorders: Results at multiple sites. Behav. Neurosci. 127, 878–889 (2013).