I think it’s common for people to assume that awareness is useless without action. This was evident over the summer with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. I heard people complaining daily saying, “Dumping ice on your head isn’t going to help anybody. This is pointless. I’m not doing it.” But I’m here to tell you that Eating Disorder Awareness is both necessary and it has its purpose in helping our society.
If you look up “eating disorder,” you can get a definition; however, I think it’s a rapidly evolving illness and far too complicated to properly define. A girl who is eighty pounds and eats only four hundred calories per day is anorexic. A girl who consumes mass quantities, thoughtlessly and quickly, and then purges in the bathroom, is bulimic. But a girl who is two hundred pounds and skips meals to punish her body—she has an eating disorder, too. As does the girl who has to eat her stress away, and the woman who can’t eat something without first playing with it, pushing it around her plate, avoiding putting it into her mouth.
We are far too discriminatory with how we define an eating disorder. We look for bones protruding out of flesh, and if we don’t see that, we say “oh, you’re okay.” But that’s wrong. When you tell someone who is plagued by food, by weight, by calories, that they do not have an eating disorder, you are telling them that they can continue their behavior. By saying “you’re okay,” you’re implying that they should continue the behavior, because maybe you’re indicating they wouldn’t be okay if they didn’t act that way. When I cut back from eighteen hundred to six hundred calories, people would look at me eating, and say “oh, she’s fine, she’s eating.” Yes I was eating. But it wasn’t enough.
Another reason for awareness is the blatant lack of appropriate behavior by our medical society. There are dozens of forums online where girls (and women) with eating disorders gather to complain about rude comments they received from doctors when they were asking for help! Tons of girls have been laughed at by doctors or told to just “deal with it” or “eat a candy bar.” Many others vent that their doctors simply changed the subject or suggested there wasn’t a problem. Yes, sometimes it’s easiest to ignore difficult topics. The answer cannot be to just hope that an anorexic person gets hungry enough and eats. Who’s to say how far she’ll go? Let’s not find out. After swearing to a nurse that I was eating dinner every night with my family, she turned to me and said, “You throw it up, don’t you?” I was just sixteen.
Somehow in four years of undergrad, four years in medical school, and a residency, we manage to avoid adequately teaching about eating disorders. 79% of health care providers surveyed by the Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness stated that they don’t feel they have the proper knowledge to diagnose an eating disorder. 86% of people with eating disorders develop the disorder before they hit age 20. These girls are young, scared, and sick, and yet their own doctors cannot help them. That’s why this is a problem. That’s why we need eating disorder education.
We can blame the media, but we have to acknowledge other factors, too. The media presents an ideal body that is unattainable for most girls. The body type of a supermodel is possessed by less than five percent of American women; yet, the ads, commercials, and movies we see make us feel like we must work to achieve it anyway, regardless of how it will hurt to compare ourselves to an impossible standard. But we also grow up watching our role models diet, our friends fat-shame, and our stress levels increase without end. 91% of women say they have dieted. As young girls, we see our mothers as the picture of beauty, and then we see them declaring themselves not good enough, and choosing to restrict food. We think that we should do the same, but we don’t know how to do it healthily—if our mothers even do. And you know that scene in the movie Mean Girls where the girls stand in front of the mirror and point out their flaws? Guess what? That happens and it is detrimental to your self-esteem, even if your best friend seems fine after bashing on her thighs. And when girls who are genetically predisposed to depression or generally high stress levels hit puberty, amidst worrying about school, friends, and boys, stress will get out of hand. Sometimes restricting food is a way to gain control. Sometimes food is a friend we turn to for stress management. We need education to see how to correct behavior that leads to eating disorders.
Right now, one in ten women with eating disorders receive treatment. I was lucky, but many are not. Many women go through this frightening process alone. They see their bodies change, their minds change to focus solely on food, and their self-worth become entangled with numerical values (calories in a meal, pounds on a scale, inches of a waistline). We need to spread the word that the stigma around eating disorders needs to be changed. The stereotypes that prevent people from getting help or prevent bystanders from realizing there is a problem need to disappear. And the only way to eliminate ignorant stereotypes is to eliminate ignorance. We do that through education. Yes, most of us claim to know what an eating disorder is, even at a young age. But do you really know what it feels like? Do you know what to say to someone suffering with one? Do you know how to recognize one? If you answered “no” to any of these, that’s okay, but it shouldn’t be okay moving forward. We need to educate ourselves and our society so that we can help one another.
Food is a necessary thing, a social thing, a tasty thing. Food for some people is a scary thing, a threatening thing, a deathly thing. Let me take the plank out of your eye that’s preventing you from understanding an eating disorder, and you can take the plank out of mine that prevents me from seeing food the way I used to.
*Because this piece was written for Her Campus, an online magazine targeted to female collegiates, I chose to solely use feminine pronouns. That is not to say that males do not suffer from eating disorders, or that those that do deserve any less attention.*
Image Credit: 1