If you are underweight, it is not for lack of opportunity to eat. Even if you only managed to offset the overweight tendency enough to keep slim, people would envy your will-power; that you can defy the trend altogether and stay unnaturally thin indicates something much more powerful at work in your nature. So do not expect a simple solution to your problem.
If you were anorexic you would not be reading this, but you may wish to help someone who is. She thinks she is fat, and is avoiding food to make herself slimmer. She runs on her nerves, feeling full of energy and really high. She cannot accept that she is burning herself out, and will be entirely spent within a few months. She has lost the ability to conserve herself, and is spending the capital of her body.
This gives the clue. Her problem is a serious failure of personal immunity (see also Your Self), which would otherwise keep her whole. One common deficiency is easy to put right: she will not notice hidden doses of zinc supplement solution if she needs them. But she may require a wide range of other minerals, essential fatty acids and vitamins before she will come to her senses. Until then just let your loving care show; persuasion and worry are usually ineffective.
If you have always been underweight, your growth may have been delayed as a fetus in a way too subtle to produce an obvious birth defect, just at the stage when the cells of your metabolic organs were multiplying. If they failed to reach adequate numbers in the time available, the power rating or capacity of those organs is permanently reduced, limiting your growth and stamina to less than your original potential. If that seems likely you can only accept it, and cherish fully what you have. Be careful about pregnancy: good preparation is essential, well beforehand.
The commonest reason for being chronically underweight arises from the way you habitually react to stress. Most people are eventually subdued by it, with their nervous systems unbalanced into a submissive mood highly conducive to digestion; this helps to explain how their over-eating tendency begins. Difficulties in life evidently do not dishearten or slow you down. On the contrary, they arouse you to work harder at solving them. That puts your nervous system in a more anxious, active mood — geared up as if to run away from or fight an assailant, in a more primitive world. This mood is quite incompatible with digestion, so while it lasts you are disinclined to eat. Meanwhile you fret about finding things to do, spending much more energy than other people. So long as you act purposefully and get some respite occasionally you will get more done than they, and succeed better generally; but you may wish you could trade your worrying temperament for their care-free nature.
Prolonged challenges give you a difficult and dangerous time. You never feel free to relax and enjoy yourself, and may go on until you eventually collapse exhausted. Quite a number of students get into difficulties of this kind, faced for the first time with a sustained challenge to cope with on their own. Some young women who become anorexic probably start this way. In both these cases, exceptional circumstances expose a weakness in your otherwise successful and perfectly viable temperament.
Not only will pregnancy be a difficult time for you; it may prove quite difficult to conceive in the first place. Once fully mature, your system only settles into pregnancy when your mood is prosperously at ease. You have probably postponed your family until you are established in life, by which time this protective mechanism is fully operational. Technical investigations will not help you, and may increase your anxiety. Try a completely different approach for at least a year before going near a gynaecologist.
It requires that you act quite out of your usual character. Recognize your nature and the secure establishment you have achieved by it, and set about enjoying their fruits for a while. You may need to give up work, and actually learn to rest, relax, and re-create yourself. Get involved with your nieces and nephews, and other people’s babies. Take your talent for love-making as seriously as you used to take your work. Your emotional warmth will strengthen and come into balance with your highly developed physical and intellectual powers, enabling your reproductive organs to get a look in.
What to do for anorexia