Last month Lifetime premiered a show about eating disorders, hosted and produced by Tracey Gold. The actress famous from the hit sitcom Growing Pains nearly died from anorexia. In each one-hour episode of Starving Secrets, Gold, she works with women in the grips of anorexia or bulimia. Is this a good idea? In this post, my daughter and co-author, Lisa, gives her opinion.
LISA: I strive to be a positive example and an advocate for recovery from eating disorders, but I continuously find myself wary of media coverage of the issue; the content ends up being more for entertainment than education.
After reading a review of Tracey Gold's new series Starving Secrets on Lifetime, I caught the first episode but had to turn it off midway through. I found the content triggering, although it was not necessarily graphic. Perhaps I'm not ready to be watching documentary series focused on eating disorders; the topic feels all to close to home.
Each episode follows two women with eating disorders, in this case one woman was severely anorexic and the other bulimic. I related to each of their stories based upon my own years of torment, flip-flopping between anorexia and bulimia. I somewhat perversely found myself wondering why I wasn't able to whittle my weight down as impossibly low as the anorexic lady and conversely had to turn away when they focused on the bulimic girl.
I quite literally cannot stomach visuals of individuals binging and purging, especially as I have put a concerted effort into ceasing this behavior, an admitted challenge and daily struggle. I cringe when seeing what has essentially been my life played out on television.
My mom and I wrote a very personal book about eating disorders in hopes of helping other people see their way through. http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Mother-Daughter-Fight-Anorexia/dp/04...
They are secretive diseases for a reason, wrought with shame and guilt. That was why it was important for us to set our experience in context—from biology to societal pressures. I personally could not allow a camera to document my episodes of binging and purging. I just can't see how would that help anybody.
I wish I could step back and analyze Starving Secrets from more of an anthropological standpoint. Of course, I also wish I never had personal experience with anorexia or bulimia. There is something fascinating about eating disorders. As when we see a car wreck on the freeway, or watch Fear Factor, the subject matter is terrifying, yet spectators cannot avert their eyes.
Eating disorders are deeply misunderstood. A truly successful show needs to focus on being more educational than theatrical. Getting effective treatment is not only about coming to terms with the disease, (a willingness to admit there is in fact a problem) but reaching the "enough" moment.
The problem with Starving Secrets and others that have documented eating disorders (What's Eating You? On E! and Intervention on A&E) is that they stimulate our fascination, show lurid scenes and apparent progress, and then the hour is over. Certainly, eating disorders need to be talked about, more struggles brought out of the shadows, but not by essentially glamorizing the issue. On television, receiving treatment seems all too easy: Write into a show and ask for help; they find a treatment program, the individual goes for a few months and everything gets better. As if eating disorders were a lifestyle choice and you can choose to stop just by reaching out for help. If there were a clear-cut path or an "on-off" switch, I would have chosen them long ago.
