I told my mom I was going on a diet when I was ten. Not that I was fat, but I wasn't slender, quite. "You could be so skinny," my mom told me.
I once forgot to eat for almost two weeks, subsisting only on Pepsi Light. "You're a rail!" my mother told me, grinning. At summer band practice later that day, I fainted. At left you see me from that summer. Not fat but no "rail," I was developing what felt like a heavy coffin of flesh, despite plenty of biking, running, swimming and weightlifting.
The thing was, I was all back. Not fat; just a hulking box of a pelvis. I weighed less than my big sister, but wore pants two sizes bigger. I got teased a little by some guys, and Mom, who had always been petite and genuinely beautiful (think Ava Gardner), seemed to take my appearance very personally. Once, she took a snapshot of my two sisters after telling me to get out of the picture. Being a rather rigid, perfectionistic teenager, I took it all to heart. Stupidly to heart. Even though I knew I had bones like a Neanderthal, I began fasting a lot more, increasing my daily mileage. And purging.
It never thinned the ankles nor shrank my flanks, made me taller, tightened my buns, ripped my abs*, made look like Cindy Crawford or any of that nonsense. But I did it, because . . . it was doing something. I just had this inner imperative, somehow. I did it until I stopped, by myself, around age 21.
I guess you could say I had an eating disorder, though I did not wind up in treatment, rot my teeth or kill myself that way. It did not get the better of me. But it does get the better of way too many sufferers, baffling their clinicians and families along the way. A father of a young girl who had starved herself almost to death told me one day, in tears, about physically pressing her into the back seat of the car on the way home from the hospital, to stop her from doing crunches. I wonder how she's doing these days, if she is still alive. Only 50–80% of eating-disordered people emerge on the far shore, cured. A whopping 18–20% of suffers are dead within 20 years; it is THE deadliest mental disorder, its mortality rate exceeding that of bipolar disorder.
I have been thinking about it lately, partly because I work with eating disordered women of all ages, and they are among the most frustrating and challenging of patients. I just got word of one's death a few days ago.
And then there's the cosmetic freak show splashed across billboards and screens, streaming around and through us . . . while another current urges us to live large, think positive and pick up one of those double down things at KFC on the way home. Finger-lickin' good!
Did you see the Daily Kos link the other day to the woman who constructed a life-sized Barbie doll to scale? It's easy—almost facile—to say that Barbie's impossible and heavily marketed proportions hold the key to why young women starve and purge themselves, but it's only a fraction of the story.
Eating disorders are a knot of factors having to do not only with mind, but also body and milieu.
Below you'll find my attempt to tease apart a few of the snarled strands. To paraphrase historian Stephen Ambrose, writing is how I learn, so if you're along for the discovery, thanks.
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