"Collateral Damage from our Culture of Thinness"??

There are so many things that I want to write about on here and I wasn't sure what I wanted to focus my first "real" post on, but when I stumbled across a tweet from Monte Nido this afternoon referring to eating disorders as "collateral damage from our culture of thinness" (and almost threw my laptop across the room) I decided that was where I needed to start.

I feel that one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding eating disorders is that they are rooted in poor body image or a desire to be thin and beautiful. There are millions of people in our society who aren't happy with their bodies, people who want to lose weight and go on diets etc., and while I do think that might be a result of "our culture of thinness", it is so completely different from the struggle of having an eating disorder that the two really can't be lumped together. Sure, most people with eating disorder don't like their bodies, but body dissatisfaction in and of itself is NOT an eating disorder. So many fingers are pointed at our society - for the airbrushed models in magazines, countless ads and commercials promoting weight loss and fitness - but those things (while I personally find them annoying) can't cause someone to develop a life-threatening illness. If they did, everyone in the United States would have an eating disorder! There is so, so much more to it than that.

And yet that's all anyone is talking about. About a month ago I wrote an article about my experience with the National Eating Disorder's Association (NEDA) and some research I had done on the organization, and I submitted it to the Huffington Post in hopes of having it published. It never was, which was kind of disappointing, but led me to start paying more attention to what was being posted.

These are some of the articles I came across:

"Does Girl's Focus on Thigh-Gaps Lead to Eating Disorders?" (I wish I was kidding, but that was actually a real article in the Columbia Tribune)
"The Thin Issue"
"J-Crew's New Size 000 Promotes Anorexia"
"I wore a Bikini and Nothing Happened!"
"Addressing the Beauty Madness"
"The Dangerous Pressure to be Thin"
"Colbie Calliat's New Music Video is a Great Recovery Inspiration!" (I watched the video. Basically she rips off her fake eyelashes and takes out her hair extensions/messes her hair up a bit, and talks about how 'you don't have to try so hard' to make people like you...yeah.)

...and that's only a small handful of them. Unfortunately, most of the articles were posted by well-known eating disorder treatment centers or professionals - which leads me to the conclusion that the majority of the people who claim to be treating eating disorders don't really understand what they are treating.  (a rather frightening concept) How can you help someone recover from something when you don't really know what it is they're struggling with?

And yet how can we expect anyone to understand eating disorders when this (the media, body dissatisfaction, body acceptance etc.) is all that is talked about? The organizations that are supposedly spreading "awareness" are talking about Miss America's BMI and how many inches the editors of Cosmopolitan electronically removed from Beyoncé's thighs. And I get that that's easier. Having lived with the reality of an eating disorder for over 12 years now, I can completely understand not wanting to talk about it. It's much easier to focus on the media and how J-Crew is promoting Anorexia than it is to talk about all of the people who will die each year because they are unable to access the treatment they need, or all of the families that are torn apart through years of struggle, or all of the sufferers who will eventually give up and turn to suicide because the disorder has made their lives so miserable that they're unable to keep going. But that's what's real.

Reality is that I almost died last year. That my doctors were advising my mother to look into hospice care, to see a grief counselor, that I wrapped everyone's presents early because I didn't think I'd be around at Christmas, that I slept with goodbye letters under my pillow every night "just incase" I didn't wake up, that I was terrified of dying and yet unable to bring myself to eat more than 300 calories a day, that I wouldn't leave my room for months because I thought I would "inhale" calories if I was anywhere near food.

I definitely wasn't thinking about how I would have looked in a bikini, or whether or not I had a thigh gap, or what size jeans I would wear at J-Crew. I was thinking about whether or not I could have breathed in calories from the meal my family had eaten downstairs/if the calories could "get in" from under my door. I was thinking about what people would say at my funeral/if my family would be sad. I was focused on trying make it through each day on my small allotment of plain oatmeal and applesauce. I really, truly could not have cared less about those other things. It wasn't about that. It never was.

My eating disorder definitely did not begin because I wanted a 'thigh gap' or a 'bikini body'. It wasn't "collateral damage from our culture of thinness". And to see the disorder that consumed over half of my life compared to false eyelashes and hair extensions is, quite honestly, infuriating. We don't need more awareness that our society places a strong emphasis on physical appearance, or that there is pressure to look a certain way. Not only is it completely unrelated to eating disorders, but I think everyone is already well aware of it. What we need are people who are willing to speak to the true experience of an eating disorder, even if it's painful and complicated. I think that if more people were able to recognize that eating disorders are serious, life-threatening psychological disorders, and not just quests for thinness and beauty, there would be much less shame around struggling, and more ability for those in the position of treating the sufferer to offer real help and support.