You might not know it, but eating disorders are often treated in addiction recovery centers. That’s right. Eating disorders are now considered to be similar to addiction.

There are dozens of examples in popular culture: the harrowing tale of the woman on the show Intervention who had a stomach pump installed so that she didn’t have to swallow food (following a seriously traumatic sexual assault), or another woman’s story featured on the same show, where she’d “chew and spit,” or eat entire meals, and dropping the chewed food from her mouth into an empty cup, instead of swallowing (and no, it’s not easy to watch).

Those women (who are more commonly prone to the development of an eating disorder) illustrate a silent problem behind closed doors across the United States. This all-too-common compulsion of food avoidance, and/or indulgence, mimics patterns of addiction.

Why are eating disorders so similar to addiction? There’s a few reasons why.

Binge eating, the condition in which you eat to capacity, followed by a period of zero food consumption whatsover, does seem to mirror the behavior surrounding addiction. A complete lack of control over bingeing on food bears similarities to addiction, and it’s common to be diagnosed with both an eating disorder and substance use disorder problem, as “roughly one-third and one-quarter of people with bulimia and binge-eating disorder, respectively, will also have an alcohol or drug problem at some point in their lives.”

If you have a specific type of coping pattern, you are more likely to cope in a similar fashion (for example, if you feel better about yourself by not eating, you’re likely to feel better though self-medication, through the use of drugs or alcohol). The compulsive nature of both eating disorders and substance use disorder disorders do seem to mimic each other.