Hunger For Thinness 2: The Disease

Eating disorders are the number one most deadly psychiatric illness in the world. Anorexia nervosa, just one of the many different types of eating disorders, has a mortality rate of 20% (NEDA).

I have had many close friends go through eating disorders and so I have had some very up close and personal accounts with the horrors of the disease. And that's just it, most people don't even recognize it as a disease. Most people think the solution for the nearly 70 million people across the world with eating disorders is to just eat (NEDA).

If it were that easy, trust me, people would do it.

The problem is not that women measure their weight in pounds, it's that they measure their worth in pounds. Eating disorders are not about the food, or even really about being thin. They are about a need for control. If everything is spinning out beyond a woman's grasp and she has no control over it, at least she can control what she eats. She can punish those she loves by not eating, she can reward herself with losing weight, she can punish herself by not eating. It gives her a sense of empowerment and control. The irony is that in the end, the disease controls the woman. Not the other way around. That is often why the projected recovery time is five-ten years for an eating disorder victim. It's about giving up that control. 

At first it may just start out as the desire to drop a couple pounds, and before she knows it, that original goal was twenty-five pounds ago. 'At a certain point inside the cult of "beauty," dieting becomes anorexia or compulsive eating or bulimia' (Kilbourne 127). The hard part is that most people associate eating disorders with emaciated models who weigh under 100lbs. The truth is, only 30% of all eating disordered people are underweight. It is completely false for someone to think that a person "looks like they have an eating disorder." Therein lies the problem. Most women think that they are "too fat" to have an eating disorder, so they do not see a need to get help, or are embarrassed to do so. Thinness is just a symptom of the eating disorder, not the problem itself. The core issue is a sense that one is not "good enough" or "worth it." Worth love, care, affection, etc. 

People often think it's for attention. That the woman just wants to be told she's thin or that she's beautiful. Nothing could be farther from the truth. 'What has not been recognized is how it actually makes a woman feel slightly mad' (Kilbourne 123). It is an illness. Would you tell someone with diabetes that they are just doing it for attention? What about clinical depression? Eating disorders are the same. The person often wants to get out of the trap, but finds that the current of society's expectations for thinness are too strong to breakaway from.