A little bit about being little (with Anorexia):
This was written in 1998:
I had an eating disorder for years. It nearly killed me, but that wasn't the worst part. The worst of it was that it left me alive in solitary confinement and destroyed me ability to actually live. The worst part was how long it took me to get over it. I hate the fact that so many other girls and women are going through this torment every day, and I am disgusted by the complacent way that our society, including women, not only accepts the objectification of women's bodies and the idea that our weight should be our most important concern in life, but also, that we promote it, by participating in it and by keeping silent.
There is a $40 billion diet industry in the U.S., 50% of American women are on a diet at any given time, and 90-95% of the people with Anorexia Nervosa are female.
Eating disorders are illnesses and they are addictions. But they also happen to be socially constructed. In other words, there are many psychiatric illnesses you may get solely because of genetics and bad brain chemistry. There are also many substances to which you can become addicted. Eating disorders fit into neither of these categories, because there is no physical reason why weight loss would make a person feel more in control of her life, motivated, successful, or free of guilt. There is no physical reason why weight loss would increase a person's self-esteem.
These ideas all come directly from the culture in which we live. Think about some of the commercials for diet products. What message are they sending? They equate thinness with self-control, motivation, success, freedom from guilt, and a reason for improved self-confidence. Women who go on diets do so because of those ideas. Women who get eating disorders die because of those ideas. Anyone who minimizes the cultural influence on eating disorders is doing a great disservice to the 8 million women who have them and to millions of girls who will get them next, and to all women for that matter.
The only way to fix a problem is to get to the root of it. There will be many reasons why any particular woman starts hating herself enough to become anorexic or bulimic. There will be only one reason why she becomes anorexic or bulimic. We do not live in a vaccuum. Marya Hornbacher writes in the book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia that she disagrees with many of the current ideas about eating disorders, because they do not describe her experience. Most of the books do not describe my experience either. They miss a lot of crucial points.
The fuel that feeds our epidemic of eating disorders and disordered eating is not in the brains of every woman who has one of these problems. It is the television where you never see anyone who looks like you. It is the magazines where you never see yourself represented, and the radio without female voices. It is the advertisements that make women into objects. It is books like The Best Little Girl in the World which glamorizes anorexia like a television movie-of-the-week, and brings its author lots of profits while leaving out details such as the physical and mental torment and lifelong after-effects of eating disorders. It is the teen magazines that teach girls their lives are to consist of putting on make-up, worrying about their weight, and buying the must-have fashions to make themselves acceptable. It is the one-page articles in Seventeen and Cosmopolitan and all the rest of them that print little snippets about eating disorders right after the articles on how to eat low-fat, and how to do the best new exercises to flatten your tummy. It is every ad by Calvin Klein that markets starvation and obsession as though it were beauty. It is the books on eating disorders written by psychiatrists who consider the planet that we live to be a tiny, possible connection to the problem, worthy of one paragraph about possible cultural influences. It is the T-Factor Fat Gram Book I memorized as a teenager and every one of the millions of diet books now being sold. It is Susan Powder and every other idiot who stands on television encouraging people to overcome their evil, tormenting fat by starving themselves. It is the idea that fat automatically means poor health and thin is always healthy. It is the idea that you can never be too rich or too thin, but you can be too smart. It is the diet industry in the United States which brings in $40 billion a year, and does not tell you that studies consistently prove that 98% of the people who lose weight on a diet not only gain it back, but gain more weight back with it. It is the mirror where you forget who you are.
Anorexia from the inside out is as anything but pretty. It is ugly, terrifying, lonely, and a torturous, slow form of suicide. The same can be said of Bulimia. Both of these disorders not only damage your psyche, they make you sick. You thow up every day, or you starve and throw up from the nausea of taking diet pills with no food. You throw up bile, when there is nothing else in your stomach. Then, you throw up blood. Or you die. Your heart beat and blood pressure become irregular. Your blood sugar is out of whack. Your hair can fall out. You can do permanent damage to many of your internal organs that you will not be able to reverse when you rid of your eating disorder, if you do get over it. Literally, your organs, including our brain, can shrink.
With anorexia you end up looking like a concentration camp victim, and the worst part of it is, nobody can rescue you. You have to break out of it yourself. And it will be one of the hardest things you will ever have to do. Some people are not able to overcome it, and yet do not die; they live their entire lives in that prison. Some fates are worse than death.
"A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience."
-Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
"The Obsession had always seemed so petty to me that I could not, at times, bear the idea that my whole life had already been swallowed up by this preoccupation."
-Kim Chernin, The Obsession
"The obsession with making your body look a certain way through diet, drugs, and exercise starts much younger now too. We've all heard about those studies showing girls who are seven years old and dieting. One report found that 55% of girls ages ten to thirteen think they're fat, even though only 13% are technically overweight."
-Jane Pratt, For Real: The Uncensored Truth About America's Teenagers
"A 1984 national poll of 33,000 women conducted by Glamour Magazine found that the majority of women surveyed were ashamed of their stomachs, hips, and thighs - parts of the body that contribute to female shapes. The pressure to diet that many girls face at a young age is an example of an assault aimed directly at the very parts of bodies that are decidedly female."
-Becky W. Thompson, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: American Women Speak Out on Eating Problems
