Throwback Thursday: What We Thought We Knew About Eating Disorders

Greetings readers! In case you were not aware, this week up until March 1^st is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Here’s a link to the NEDA website, which has some extremely helpful links to information about eating disorders:

http://nedawareness.org/

While exploring the website I found some awesome links; They have information about what eating disorders are, how to help someone with an eating disorder, and they even have webinars and other types of support and information for families of individuals with eating disorders. It’s a great site!

We may be Gribbski’s Guide to the FAT galaxy, but as you know if you’ve been reading us for awhile, we are really a guide to body love in general, with a main focus on what it’s like to be fat in a fat shaming society. For these reasons, it’s really important for us to promote NEDA Week and their website in general. Eating disorders sometimes stem from a place of body hate rather than body love, and loving yourself is a step towards preventing an eating disorder.

We’ve had some requests from readers to discuss how to talk to young children about body love. I definitely want to cover that in full in a separate post, but I think it also relates to today’s post, NEDA’s mission, and the BB’s and WW’s interest in helping teens and young adults. If body love conversations started with younger children, could we prevent some of the trials that teens and young adults go through with their bodies? Maybe. But if you already know someone with an eating disorder, especially the teen and young adult population that suffers from it, NEDA’s website can help you help them.

Awareness is such a huge component of prevention, treatment, and acceptance that is often overlooked when it comes to many issues, eating disorders included. Additionally, those suffering from eating disorders and those who love them are sometimes the least informed on symptoms, treatment, causes, prevention, and more. 

This is what the BB thought she knew about eating disorders as a teen:

The amount of disinformation that I had about eating disorders when I was a teenager was shocking when I look back now. Although I myself did not have an eating disorder, I found myself trying to mimic the behaviors of close friends who did have them because I used to think that “eating disorder” was just a harsh label for someone who had a lot of self-control, strength, and discipline. This is obviously an extremely unhealthy way of thinking, but it makes me question how many other young adults have skewed ideas of eating disorders.

Of course I know now that the need to control oneself and body are key symptoms of eating disorders, but back then it was hard for me to argue with people I loved about eating disorders because I didn’t know how to explain that self-discipline was a bad thing. I saw a lot of my friends without eating disorders trying to display their self-discipline as well. They may not have had an eating disorder, but they threw up after eating at a buffet one time. They may not have had an eating disorder, but they bragged about how little they ate, how not-hungry they were, or they skipped lunch everyday. Maybe they bought a lot of food at lunch but only ate half or a quarter of it. Maybe they told their mom that they ate so that they wouldn't have to eat supper that night and they could brag to their friends. Maybe they even ate as much as they could at home so they could skip meals at school to make others think that they were in control of their appetites. Isolated behaviors such as this, that were not habitual or severe, were commonplace among the teens that I knew.  

So many teens take part in these types of unhealthy body shaming behaviors that aren’t really eating disorders. They aren’t as severe, consistent, or life-altering, but are at the same time detrimental. Many teens consider it a point of pride when they skip a meal, eat very little, or drop several clothing sizes. They see fat teens as people without self-control or self respect, and justify their behavior by the results: thinness. This kind of hateful, power hungry relationship over food and the body is not conducive to positive body image.

When I was a teen I tried to help friends with eating disorders because I knew that they were harmful, but as I said before that was difficult when I myself would shame my own body and participate in odd food rituals and habits here and there. When I was growing up thinness was the ultimate goal in the community of other teens I was surrounded with, and I struggled with criticizing the way that others became thin when I myself was fat.

Short note from the WW: I also had similar ideas about eating disorders, but what I didn't realize until much later is that I had one of my own.  I would often binge-eat after school because I either didn't eat while I was there or I was so nervous about eating that I didn't enjoy it.  Sneaking that food at home was an unhealthy way for me to enjoy eating.  Thankfully, this is something I've learned to deal with.  Not a lot of teens have the strong support system that I did, and some will do a lot of damage to their bodies before getting help.  

The goal of sharing this throwback with you, readers, is to show that Awareness is so powerful. If I had known more back then about eating disorders and their precursors, maybe I could have recognized more powerfully how detrimental body shaming and unhealthy food relationships were. If I had been able to articulate these things to myself, maybe I could have helped my friends more. Looking for signs of eating disorders is important, and treating eating disorders is important, but what about an awareness of unhealthy food habits BEFORE an eating disorder escalates or occurs? How about an awareness of the preventative powers of body love?

This is an excellent segue into a future post, from that reader suggestion that I mentioned earlier, about starting body love conversations EARLY. If the main age groups affected by eating disorders are teens and young adults, then it is very obvious that body love conversations need to take place much sooner than these important years. Additionally, some even develop eating disorders in childhood and more rarely in adulthood. I think it is vitally important to start raising awareness and talking about self love at a very young age, and myself and the WW look forward to sharing some tips about that in a soon-to-come post.