Wow, just saw the article about black women with an ED and I suddenly don't feel so alone. I'm black and I have AN and I distinctly remember saying to my psych that I couldn't have anorexia because I wasn't white or middle class. The stereotype really affected my perception of the illness and it was part of the reason I was in denial for so long. I honestly felt like I was the only black person in existence with anorexia because I've never seen another one. :o It's nice to know I'm not. I must admit, I did feel kind of awkward in hospital when the majority of the nurses were black and it felt like they were silently judging me, especially as in African/Caribbean culture, being curvy and even overweight is considered attractive. I mean, even pre ED, I had family members asking me when I was going to put 'some meat on my bones'. I had an interesting comment from my sister. She said that people don't associate black people with eating disorders and at my worst, she would have assumed I was on drugs but not that I had an eating disorder. It's really alienating. I've also had people imply that I'm not black and this is a 'white' illness, which obviously, doesn't really help with my self loathing because I've always felt that in some way, my ED made me a 'traitor' to my race and is a symbol of me buying into the Western world's thin= beautiful values. It's total BS because I never ever believed or internalised any of that stuff but all the same, I do think that part of my illness was trying not to become overweight like the majority of my family. And it doesn't help with recovery because my family have no experience of eating disorders and no idea of what it means and I have the additional guilt of dealing with the 'If you were back home (in West Africa), you wouldn't be able to have anorexia' comments. *sigh*
/rant

The "size issue" seems to be perennial. There are articles about it constantly and they always say the same thing. And there's one thing they always say that I don't believe is necessarily true: that more expensive clothing is more generously sized. I know for a fact that in certain designer clothing (i.e., European brands NOT made in China, as opposed to European brand licensees who DO manufacture in China), I wear at least one size larger than I do in typical suburban mall store clothing. Am I odd or something?

I do find the whole practice of vanity sizing to be insulting, however. Do manufacturers really think I am so stupid that I didn't notice that, although my measurements have remained pretty much unchanged for over 30 years, my "size" keeps going down? And for some reason it is worse for clothing sold in the U.S. When I purchase clothing from the UK, which I do often, I wear two sizes larger than I buy in the U.S. - my "old" size from 30 years ago.