Abstract overview:
Pregnancy is a special period in a woman's life and some difficulties or problems may arise. One of these may be the control of food intake. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are included in the eating disorders. The former is related to extremely reduced food intake, low body weight, intense fear of weight gain, and distorted body image. While the latter is related to repeated periods of uncontrolled food consumption followed by compensatory behaviors to prevent weight gain. Mothers with a history of eating disorders or existing eating disorders may experience difficulties with breastfeeding. These difficulties are also indirectly related to the existence of maternal anxiety and depression.

Aims and objectives:
To investigate women's eating disorders in relation to the intention, initiation and duration of breastfeeding.

Method:
To find articles relevant to the literature review, electronic databases such as PubMed and Scopus were searched using keywords from December to February 2025. All selected articles were screened for English language and full text accessibility.

Results:
The literature review search identified 564 studies. Fifty-eight studies were reviewed in full text. Eight studies were included. All participants were described as female before, during and after pregnancy. Also, some participants were women’s partners. The survey participants were mostly from hospitals, online or the local community. All studies examined the association of maternal history of eating disorders with breastfeeding practices. It appears that breastfeeding self-efficacy in women with a history of eating disorders or pre-existing disorders is somewhat complex. There were studies that had eating disorders as a predictive factor for the initiation or not as well as the duration of breastfeeding and other studies that did not correlate these two variables at all (eating disorders-breastfeeding), according to their results.

Conclusion:
In conclusion, it was observed that psychosocial factors, the role of the father or a pre- existing history of eating disorders are related to initiation and duration of breastfeeding. However, the conclusions of this review were based on a small number of studies, so it is important to consider any limitations. Further research is needed to find other factors that may influence women’s intention to breastfeed.