The reality rarely shown
One of the primary objections both I and other eating disordered people raised over the recent Italian billboards featuring a naked, 68-pound Isabelle Caro is that most often, eating disorders do not look like this.
According to ANRED, anorexia affects about one percent of the female adolescent population, while bulimia affects about 4 percent of college-aged women. Fifty percent of people who have been anorexic develop bulimia or bulimia patterns. (Note: these are generalizations; because of the nature of the disease, there are no reliable statistics on eating disorders).
The face of an eating disorder isn’t necessarily that of the emaciated Caro’s, but most often girls and women you would least suspect – and maybe even your own.
Now a new study of teenagers reveals that an alarming number of girls who are labeled overweight engage in what researchers called “extreme weight control behaviors” like vomiting or taking diet pills or laxatives in attempts to lose weight.
(I say “labeled as overweight” because one’s classification as average, overweight, and obese continue to be measured by BMI, which has been shown consistently to be a faulty indicator of body fat).
The researchers looked at 2,516 adolescents, primarily from inner city schools, first in 1998 or 1999, and again five years later. About one quarter of the teens were considered to be overweight.
More than one-third of girls considered to be overweight used these compensatory behaviors, which are often the hallmarks in the diagnosis of an eating disorder like bulimia.
“We usually look for these behaviors in very thin girls, but here we see a very high prevalence in overweight girls,” said lead author Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, Ph.D., professor of public health at the University of Minnesota.
Why does she seem so surprised? Wouldn’t it stand to reason that, given our current state of anti-obesity hysteria, that young girls would resort to drastic measures to fit in? As this article shows, maybe the idea’s not so far fetched.
This study is problematic, the least of which generalizes risk factors for obesity to that of family teasing about weight, though I do think Neumark-Sztainer’s advice for parents at the conclusion of non-emphasis on weight and unconditional love at any weight to be sound, indeed. Regardless, the study raises an important point: Eating disorders affect women of all sizes equally, and all ought to be treated as the life-threatening diseases they truly are.
A 68-pound anorectic certainly faces more immediate health risks brought on by an extremely low body weight. But even a 200-pound woman who engages in purging behaviors is at risk for serious health risks (including malnutrition), and even death. Remember Terri Schiavo? By newspaper accounts, she weighed somewhere around 140 – 150 at the time of her 1990 collapse, which was caused by a potassium imbalance brought on by her eating disorder. For an exhaustive rundown of health risks for all disorders, see here.
Back to Caro and the billboards. Instead of showing visually stunning photographs (shot by professional photographer Oliviero Toscani) of a frail and emaciated anorectic, perhaps we ought to show the more raw, grainy photographs of a girl or woman – who may or may not be “thin” – hunched secretively over a toilet, wiping vomit from her mouth as she attempts to “atone” for whatever sins she consumed.
That’s the more common reality of eating disorders, yet its the vision that’s rarely shown.
posted on October 5th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
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posted on June 5th, 2008 at 10:39 am