Eating Disorders
I started to write about eating disorders because I had them. Some time during the late seventies a friend suggested that I was driving everyone crazy by always bringing the conversation back to food, weight, body size, etc. She said, "you're a writer, why don't you do everyone a favor and stop talking, and write a book instead?."
I did, I wrote one book, then another, and yet a third. As a result I have stopped talking about eating disorders but I have not yet stopped thinking about them. I feel another book waiting to emerge, a book I hope one day to write on-line in a collaborative effort with my readers. This new form of book, which I think of as a RoundBook, because of the way it goes round and comes round between writer and reader, would have the great advantage of including in the book the readers' responses to the book even before the book was published! Talk about relevance!
People frequently ask me what I have learned about eating disorders during these decades of studying them. At first, I thought it would be impossible to answer meaningfully in a few words about anything so complex and difficult. I have, however, found something to say that seems worth saying.
No matter how much information appears in the media about the epidemic nature of eating disorders, and how many millions of women suffer from them, every woman with an eating disorder feels a particular shame about it, and seems to believe that she alone suffers in this particular way. Because of this belief, she is likely to isolate herself and thus keep herself from seeking help at an early stages of the condition, when it could be more readily addressed and resolved.
It is very hard, almost impossible, to get the public at large, as well as parents, siblings, friends, to understand how much suffering is involved in an eating disorder. There is a tendency, on the one hand, to trivialize it ("Oh, it's just vanity, who could really be upset about gaining or losing a few pounds?) and on the other hand an inability to face the very real, deep, psychological anguish a woman with an eating disorder is experiencing.
The underlying, symbolic, deep meaning of an eating disorder remains elusive no matter how much has been written about it. This is something for the field in general to ponder, and something every woman with an eating disorder must face. There is, obviously, still more to be known, much more to be known about this mysterious condition. Two women, or a group of women talking together seriously about eating disorders--investigating, probing them, meditating on them--can truly regard themselves as pioneers.
Men too suffer from eating disorders, although not in the same epidemic numbers as women.
The age at which an eating disorder strikes is getting younger and younger. Important studies need to be done on girls as young as four, five, six years old, who are developing and have developed eating disorders.
Eating disorders show up in the lives of women of every class and ethnic and racial group. They are imperatively NOT a form of white, upper middle class, princess-like, self-indulgence.
Related Books
 The Hunger Song (Poems) |
 The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness |
 The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity |
 Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself |