Brave Girl Eating

My hat is off to Harriet Brown for sharing her story and her insights so well. My daughter suffered terribly with this problem, and her mother and I attempted many solutions, none of them successful. Happily, after 10 years my daughter came out of it, seemingly unscathed. The only visible change in her life was a new boyfriend whom she married. They are still married after 20 years, and she is still not anorexic.

Perhaps one clue is that my daughter told me that at the age of eight she developed an obsession with weight and her body after an MD--her pediatrician--commented on her chubby thighs, and that she should eat less. At the time, she was BARELY chubby. Badly informed health professionals can do a lot of damage, and this one did. Add to that our society's obsession with slenderness, and looksism with regard to its women in particular, not to mention diet industry advertising, and you have a recipe for disaster in many young women.

I am guessing that my daughter came to mistakenly believe that she would be undesirable to men unless she was very thin, and developed a repugnance to eating, associating that with sexual undesirability. When she met a man who loved her, she relaxed about the whole issue.

I wish that meeting a loving partner would be a solution for more people, but a better solution might be our coming to embrace the concept of diverse forms of beauty, which really comes in all shapes and sizes.

Bill Fabrey
Council on Size & Weight Discrimination
www.cswd.org
Mt. Marion, NY

Harriet, thank you for starting this blog. My youngest daughter (20 years old) is anorexic and it is so hard. After reading as much as possible, talking with counselors, I agree that there is a genetic predisposition and an underlying anxiety disorder. My daughter has been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and now she (and we) are on the slow painful road to recovery. I have had to accept there is not a time frame for her to recover and there are occasional setbacks. Please keep up your blog.

"And until we can talk about eating disorders the way, say, people now talk about autism...."

Ouch. The way in which people currently talk about autism is extremely dismissive of autistics' experiences, instead focusing entirely on parents', siblings' and doctors' views. Contrary to popular belief, when people talk about a wave of autism sweeping through the population (and other alarmist rhetoric), most of its "victims" (to borrow a deeply problematic, yet common, term) are people perfectly capable of speaking for themselves and making their own decisions, and not the stereotypical small, nonverbal child in headgear banging his skull against the wall. Our voices are commonly excluded from the cultural conversation. Most major organizations that claim to advocate for us refuse to include us in shaping their policies. We've tried to be included, and have been repeatedly shut out.

Surely this is not what you are hoping for in our cultural conversation around eating disorders. Perhaps a different example or goal is in order.

In my opinion an E.D. is a way of coping with anxiety, low self esteem, shame, anger and pain.

Over the course of the past several years I've watched my best friend care for her dying sister. They lost their fight in June after a lifetime (she was 50 years old) fighting for her life. She was confronted with anger, disgust, apathy and general disinterest by the majority of health care professionals she turned to for help. In short, she was denied the caring counsel of physicians who deemed her condition a choice, then chose not to treat her with any real compassion.

When the medical community is educated about the real biological, genetic and psychological causes, and an attitude change toward eating disorders is realized, public opinion may follow.

My friend's sister chose to be a part of that change. She spent her last weeks and days working to build something that will effect the changes needed. For more information about the current research being supported by one of America's most prestigious research hospitals, contact:

Rebecca E. Saunders Fund in Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Research at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.