Why Touting EDs as "Lifestyles" Hurts Everyone

Girls who are reluctantly in recovery for or are confronted about an eating disorder have this one battlecry: "It's not a disease, it's my lifestyle!!" Even when you can acknowledge that your eating habits, your relationship with food and with your body is entirely screwed up and atypical, there's still this trend of seeing it as a matter of choice, of free will. I have met too many girls at various points on their recovery process who believe, honestly believe, that their eating disorder is not a disorder at all but a sustainable way of living.
Now, it should be acknowledged that there is pretty solid medical evidence that the symptoms of an eating disorder are perpetuated and intensified by starvation; the more we are self-starving, the more we are driven to self-starve and the more we obsess over our food and our bodies. So while this seems so hopelessly naive and stupid, you have to see it in its context.
But even if I can understand where it's coming from, I have serious concerns for this philosophy and not simply because it will eventually kill you. Within the (predominantly online) "pro-anorexic" community of mostly adolescent girls who "support" one another in their totally unattainable goals, this angry voice emerges, claiming that EDs are "lifestyles," and while sensible healthy people might see this as the voice of a skinny, starving, delusional demographic, it is nonetheless a message sent out into the abyss.
And on the other side of some confusing up-and-down void of sense and rationality, there are the girls who are ready to escape an eating disorder, who struggle to accept that it is not within their capacity alone to heal themselves. And for these girls, let me tell you, there is nothing more fucking frustrating than the people who cannot understand that it is a disorder, a disease, an addiction, and not just a changeable behavior.

It's funny: when we are caught in the throes of anorexia, we fervently reject hunger, normal eating patterns, and everything else that smacks of health and wellness. And then, when we finally recognize how utterly unsustainable this is, how dangerous it is to let this go unchecked, we have to relearn sense to fervently reject disorder and addiction to reinflate ourselves.