On eating a sandwich and other stories.
Way back there, there was a talk on anorexia and the causes thereof, and I heard two things that I often hear and used to agree with:
1. Eating disorders don't represent something that affects everyone;
2. The solution to diminishing eating disorders is to make girls feel personally comfortable with the way they are.
My two biggest responses were:
1. Public perception of the ideal body is getting to be an unattainable thing until the day we all wear skintight screens that project a photoshopped image of our faces, hair, and bodies;
2. Women with eating disorders are trying to control how others see them, so they can look more mature, less mature, less attractive, more attractive, depending on how others react. (I supported that one with a woman who said that in her adolescence, she'd been taught that it was only her modesty that prevented male lust, and she reacted by heading to anorexic ground and keeping her body neutrally childish in shape, and women who'd developed eating disorders after childhood abuse or rape.)
But I also think that all of these miss a bigger problem. I'm not sure that we should see ED as a separate problem. It's one end of an extreme on a spectrum that affects pretty much everyone.
I've known some women with ED triggered by various things. I also can think of women who've told me, personally, that they'll lose weight when they're comfortable with male attention again. None of them were terribly obese, just... overweight. And with that they moved out of a healthy shape they knew was attainable for them and right for their bodies, but put them, socially, out there, into a safer retreat zone where they received a different kind of attention and reaction and occupied a less healthy shape. But all the "you can look any way you like!" didn't count and the "but your heaaaalth!" didn't matter, because they literally could quit anytime they wanted.
Was it self-confidence? Hard to say. One told me she lost and gained weight depending on whether or not she wanted men to notice her, and it sounded like a lifelong pattern. Could her self-respect really wobble around that much? One did have a very bad event in her past, and from the way she talked her weight was part of her reaction to that, but she didn't seem to have self-esteem issues and her life was otherwise busy, happy, and full of progress. If her self-image was holding her back, I just couldn't tell. They might be seen as having self-esteem issues because they were overweight, but I think it's a harder tangle to sort out than that.
Is this an eating disorder? Um. Not really. It's probably a pretty average diet. Maybe heavier on snacks, but I've been in the homes of a couple of them, I know what they had for dinner and such... is it disordered eating? That's pretty hard to describe too. It's not like they were eating a cookie bite by bite and then skipping a meal to account for the calories, or trimming out all fat from their diets for three days before binging, or other unusual behavior. They were just intentionally gaining and keeping a certain amount of weight. They didn't seem to have a problem staying where they were, it didn't seem to escalate or, uh, feed itself.
But the motive for gaining thirty pounds from normal was the same as trying to drop thirty pounds from normal: pre-empting people's judgement and pre-selecting the kinds of reactions they would get from other people.
I don't know how many women prefer to go for an unremarkable increase rather than plunging right off into a life-threatening decrease. I really don't. I'd like to. I don't think there've been underlying studies looking for unhealthy social causes of slightly unhealthy personal behaviors, so all I've got is a mental list of women with eating disorders and a side-by-side list of women who hold at more weight after the same triggers. The second list is slightly longer. But that could easily be personal experience. I also don't know because of all the news saying we're in an obesity epidemic... and from that point of view, the women who opted to go up two jeans sizes have successfully attained the invisibility a girl who starves herself could be trying to reach.
But that's why I think anorexia and bulemia are not an isolated pair of problems, just an extreme symptom of something that everyone has brushed up against and everyone reacts to in different ways. And that's why I think all the self-esteem seminars in the world won't help.
1. Eating disorders don't represent something that affects everyone;
2. The solution to diminishing eating disorders is to make girls feel personally comfortable with the way they are.
My two biggest responses were:
1. Public perception of the ideal body is getting to be an unattainable thing until the day we all wear skintight screens that project a photoshopped image of our faces, hair, and bodies;
2. Women with eating disorders are trying to control how others see them, so they can look more mature, less mature, less attractive, more attractive, depending on how others react. (I supported that one with a woman who said that in her adolescence, she'd been taught that it was only her modesty that prevented male lust, and she reacted by heading to anorexic ground and keeping her body neutrally childish in shape, and women who'd developed eating disorders after childhood abuse or rape.)
But I also think that all of these miss a bigger problem. I'm not sure that we should see ED as a separate problem. It's one end of an extreme on a spectrum that affects pretty much everyone.
I've known some women with ED triggered by various things. I also can think of women who've told me, personally, that they'll lose weight when they're comfortable with male attention again. None of them were terribly obese, just... overweight. And with that they moved out of a healthy shape they knew was attainable for them and right for their bodies, but put them, socially, out there, into a safer retreat zone where they received a different kind of attention and reaction and occupied a less healthy shape. But all the "you can look any way you like!" didn't count and the "but your heaaaalth!" didn't matter, because they literally could quit anytime they wanted.
Was it self-confidence? Hard to say. One told me she lost and gained weight depending on whether or not she wanted men to notice her, and it sounded like a lifelong pattern. Could her self-respect really wobble around that much? One did have a very bad event in her past, and from the way she talked her weight was part of her reaction to that, but she didn't seem to have self-esteem issues and her life was otherwise busy, happy, and full of progress. If her self-image was holding her back, I just couldn't tell. They might be seen as having self-esteem issues because they were overweight, but I think it's a harder tangle to sort out than that.
Is this an eating disorder? Um. Not really. It's probably a pretty average diet. Maybe heavier on snacks, but I've been in the homes of a couple of them, I know what they had for dinner and such... is it disordered eating? That's pretty hard to describe too. It's not like they were eating a cookie bite by bite and then skipping a meal to account for the calories, or trimming out all fat from their diets for three days before binging, or other unusual behavior. They were just intentionally gaining and keeping a certain amount of weight. They didn't seem to have a problem staying where they were, it didn't seem to escalate or, uh, feed itself.
But the motive for gaining thirty pounds from normal was the same as trying to drop thirty pounds from normal: pre-empting people's judgement and pre-selecting the kinds of reactions they would get from other people.
I don't know how many women prefer to go for an unremarkable increase rather than plunging right off into a life-threatening decrease. I really don't. I'd like to. I don't think there've been underlying studies looking for unhealthy social causes of slightly unhealthy personal behaviors, so all I've got is a mental list of women with eating disorders and a side-by-side list of women who hold at more weight after the same triggers. The second list is slightly longer. But that could easily be personal experience. I also don't know because of all the news saying we're in an obesity epidemic... and from that point of view, the women who opted to go up two jeans sizes have successfully attained the invisibility a girl who starves herself could be trying to reach.
But that's why I think anorexia and bulemia are not an isolated pair of problems, just an extreme symptom of something that everyone has brushed up against and everyone reacts to in different ways. And that's why I think all the self-esteem seminars in the world won't help.