The-F-Word.org

I stumbled across a now all-too-familiar story chronicling a young girl’s descent into an eating disorder. “Eat or Die: When Thin isn’t Beautiful,” proclaims the grave headline.

Psychiatrist Harvey Widroe, who’s authored classic textbooks on psychiatry amongst other journal articles, offers his first commentary for The American Reporter as a regular Wednesday columnist on mental health topics.

He writes about poor 17-year-old Debbie, whose weight has dropped from 125 to 93 pounds in less than a year. Debbie displayed all the characteristic eating disordered behaviors: eating past the point of fullness followed by purging, excessive exercising, diet pill consumption, laxative usage, obsessing about being fat despite being underweight, falling grades etc…

Dr. Widroe explains Debbie’s motives:

She wanted to be thin and beautiful, and at 120, 115, 105, and even at 100 pounds, she felt that she looked like a whale. When she looked in the mirror, she literally saw a fat blob. If she could just lose another 10 or 15 pounds, she insisted, she might look good - even beautiful just like a friend of hers, or like Paris Hilton, or her favorite screen star, or any number of professional models.

And so on. Debbie’s case could very well be the experience of many women, young and old, who are caught in the grips of an eating disorder. It is all so terribly sad and tragic, and makes for incredibly captivating reading in the hands of a marketing-savvy writer.

At the end of the article, Widroe is credited as being the co-author of the book The Smart Dieter’s Guide to Cheating: Eat and Watch Pounds Melt Away. Yes, a diet book. After writing about one girl’s diet gone horribly and near-fatally wrong, Widroe has the gall to plug his own dieting book.

In Widroe’s book, fat is viewed as the both the literal and figurative enemy. He advocates for daily weigh-ins and places the blame for diets squarely on the shoulders of the dieter. The problem is not the diet, he writes:

“The problem was almost always the minds of the dieters, how they cheated, lied to themselves, looked the other way while they cheated, and finally gave up with a sense of remorse and self recrimination.”

And all dieters will be cheaters, Widroe concludes, an assumption which forms the basis for his book on how to “cheat smartly.”

I am so incensed, I can hardly type.

Hating your body. Promoting the body as the enemy, something to be tamed and whittled into submission. Daily weigh-ins. Having your mood and attitudes dependent on the number of the scale.

Keeping track of everything you eat. Not eating in response to body cues. Developing rigid categories of “safe” and “bad” foods.

All are classic eating disorder symptoms and all are issues I have been struggling to overcome since I was diagnosed with an eating disorder. Why does Widroe prescribe for fat people what is diagnosed as eating disordered in thin people?

I wonder if poor Debbie didn’t read Widroe’s book first before she embarked on her own “smart cheater’s dieting guide.”