Eating Disorders
Eating Disorders: Welcome to the new plague.
This year I wrote a 129 page ebook called ‘Get in Good Shape’, aimed at the weight loss market.
There would be, I reasoned, plenty of people with a minor weight problem who could benefit from what I knew about the subject. Layman I may be, but like anyone who’s been around long enough, I’ve picked up some useful stuff .
And I was about to find out more than I’d bargained for. As part of the research for the book I hung around online discussion groups and joined a couple of weight loss forums. I started to get an insight into the modern psyche that I hadn’t expected.
An online weight loss forum was where I first realized there might be a problem, when I read questions from girls who were obviously anorexic. Layman indeed, but when someone who weighs 97 pounds says they’re looking for ways to lose weight, you don’t need a medical degree to guess that something’s not right. Someone answered one girl’s question and recommended an emetic to help her get down below her target weight of 90 pounds. That’s not the sort of advice that’s going to do her any good.
A football player asked if he should interrupt his strict diet during the rigorous training session that was coming up. It wasn’t just girls with unhealthy eating patterns. I recommended he eat more and cut back on a training regime that would have taxed an Olympic athlete.
A couple of one-offs, then. Or not. Last week I checked back into the forum for the first time in a while, and immediately found at least another half dozen questions in a similar vein. People who probably didn’t need to lose weight asking how they could lose weight; weirdly detached from the notion of food as fuel, wired into some strange notions about fat as the enemy, and lost to reason. Welcome to the new plague.
Eating like an idiot is a kind of subconscious meme, perhaps. What I can’t figure out is where it’s coming from. It seems to be in the air, like a pestilence, like summer flu, like the rash of suicides in Bridgend a couple of years ago. Otherwise reasonable people take it into their heads that they’re fat and decide that the best way to deal with it is by slow suicide.
As someone who built a website that tells people how to lose weight, I have to wonder if I am in some part responsible. Perhaps my efforts have tipped otherwise happy, healthy teenagers over the edge into a dangerous questioning of their body shape and eating habits. Perhaps they were looking for a reason to starve themselves, and I unwittingly provided it. Except that I’ve never promoted weight loss as an end in itself, but merely as a by-product of good health. The website claim holds good: healthy weight loss through eating well and working out.
Where do the notions come from, that any body fat at all is the enemy, and that over eating is a sin?What is happening? Why are otherwise sensible, rational people eating in a way that’s guaranteed to harm them?
Maybe the culprits are the images all around us. Women’s magazines show pictures of beautiful, slender girls. Men’s magazine covers show bare chested men with alarming abdominal muscles. What nobody tells you is that in each case the model was hand picked from a pretty non-standard group of people chosen for their looks, helped into the best shape of their lives by a personal trainer, shot by the best photographers on the planet, and the pictures retouched until every flaw was airbrushed away. As far from the norm as you can get. And yet, these images are seen as a model we should aspire to. We are persuaded to feel the kind of guilt that was once reserved for people who had committed terrible crimes, if we fail to live up to this standard of bodily beauty. It is no coincidence that anorexia mostly affects young women who are negotiating puberty, a time of their life when they are most affected by bodily changes and the pressure to conform that comes from their peer group and the media messages by which they’re surrounded.
Forget morality, forget behaving decently. We are judged by how we look. One of the most infuriating things I saw on TV recently was a program about plastic surgery in which some nervous, pretty teenager was so ashamed of her perfectly normal breasts that she was prepared to have them surgically enhanced. How did that ever come to seem like a good idea?
Here is my best advice. People come in all shapes and sizes. Life is short. Accept the shape and size you are and make the best of it. Avoid people who think appearances are everything. Be happy being you. Because that’s who you’re stuck with. It is far more attractive to be a flawed, imperfect human being who is comfortable in their skin, than someone who can think of nothing beyond counting calories or their next exercise fix.
If you find yourself obsessing over your weight, seek help. Straight away. Eating disorders are hard to treat and they generally don’t end well. Death is one possible outcome. Trying to look your best is one thing. Counting every calorie and starving yourself is quite another, and a sign that things have gone badly wrong.
If you suspect that you, or someone close has an eating disorder, check out these links. Note, these are not affiliate links and there is no product for sale here.
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