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Lifestyle July 30, 2019
Thirty million people suffer from eating disorders in the United States, but what do we really know about them?
I received my diagnosis when I was 15 years old, sitting on a medical table disguised as a plastic elephant. Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS), now known as OSFED. This diagnosis encompasses people like me who don’t fit into the rigid criteria for Anorexia, and despite being known as a “catch-all” disorder, it is just as deadly.
If you’ve never heard of it, or of any of the other others, you’re not alone. I, like many of us, knew only one diagnosis: Anorexia. I was dying of a disorder I had never even heard of.
Had I known that eating disorders could affect chubby girls, I might have gotten help sooner. Had I known that there was more to them than the portrayal I’d seen on TV shows and in the news, I might not gotten so sick. But because I didn’t ‘look’ Anorexic, I was able to hide until it was almost too late.
I didn’t know. As a result, I landed in a hospital for treatment a quarter of the way through my sophomore year. I spent a month shivering under bright lights and shuffling my feet across linoleum floors. Each patient’s name was written on the whiteboard above the nurse’s station, each in different colors that signified our restrictions. Mine was red: no bathroom for one hour after mealtimes.
My unit was full of kids of all ages, races, sexualities, religions, and genders. Each of our struggles was unique.
Eating disorders are in no way limited to the thin, typically white girls we see in the media. They aren’t one-size-fits-all. In order to raise awareness, we have to push past the stereotypes we were given.
The only way to fight an enemy that comes in so many forms is to learn to see it. It’s time to clear the air on eating disorders.
Anorexia in the media is either the butt of someone’s joke, or seen in a stereotypical depiction in shows like Red Band Society (criticized for its glamorization) or movies like To The Bone and Feed. These three examples follow the trend of the Anorexia stereotype—easily identifiable, emaciated teen girls that just “don’t want to eat”.
Anorexia’s twisted representation isn’t only seen in fiction. Eugenia Cooney’s return to the internet after a mental health break had fans reeling. Most known for her beauty videos on YouTube, Cooney has been a controversial figure for years, with petitions circulating to remove her from the platform due to the fear that her emaciated body would incite others to partake in dangerous eating habits.
Cooney never admitted to having an eating disorder before, but controversy arose regardless as extreme thinness in society can have serious impacts on viewers—whether they are in recovery or not.
While Cooney’s bravery for getting help shouldn’t be forgotten, the negative impact she has portraying a skeletal body as healthy shouldn’t be either. Eating Disorders are competitive, and communities on the internet have formed around the disorder. Many post photos of themselves and their meals for ‘thinspiration’, a term coined by the community that describes someone who serves as a motivation to reach a dangerously low weight.
Representation hasn’t been all negative though. Celebrities such as Demi Lovato and Ke$ha often speak about their struggles with eating and strive to increase awareness. Both celebrities have been honest about the dark parts of their struggles and hope to serve as inspirations for their struggling fans. By giving a face to the recovery movement, especially such a well-known one, awareness and understanding surrounding eating disorders will increase.
Eating Disorders are a sickness that convinces its sufferers they’re well. It is already hard enough to get help when you don’t fit the specific criteria of one popular disorder; societal stereotypes only make it worse. As a result, many people with these lesser-known eating disorders go undiagnosed.
Despite the typical representation focusing solely on Anorexia, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual breaks down eating disorders into nine categories.
Though buried in big words, the overarching theme is a preoccupation with body image, weight, or eating to a point where it interferes with your happiness or functioning.
Traditionally, the image of a person with an eating disorder is a thin, young woman. However, eating disorders don’t have the same bias we humans do. Eating disorders don’t discriminate. They affect men, older people, and people of color. In fact, a recently released report cited men and boys as one of the groups with the fastest rise in eating disorders, along with 8-12-year-olds and ethnic minorities. If we don’t recognize that eating disorders affect everyone, they will continue to increase within groups we never even look at.
In order to tear down the stereotypes surrounding eating disorders, we have to be willing to speak out against them. There is no easy fix, but by raising awareness for all eating disorders and halting our support of outlets that skew the reality.
The hardest part of recovery, at least for me, was accepting I had a problem in the first place. Accepting that I deserved help was even harder. I believed I wasn’t ‘sick enough.’ The hardest thing to learn was that every single person struggling with eating deserves help. When it comes to eating disorders, there are two choices: life, or the disorder. We all deserve the chance to choose life.
In treatment, many patients move between levels, depending on needs. Recovery is individual for everyone, and a treatment plan can be created with your team.
I was able to hide behind the stereotype that people like me couldn’t get eating disorders. Many of the other patients in treatment with me did the same.
Eating disorders are the deadliest mental illness. While Anorexia specifically has the highest mortality rate, all have the power to kill. They are dangerous and deadly, and they are lurking in our society, preying on more than just the girls we’ve seen on TV.
There is no easy way to fix decades of stigmatizing. But there is more to eating disorders than we have been told, and awareness is the only way to change it. It’s time to look at the jokes we tell and the stereotypes we spread that pull back the curtain from a devastating disorder.
