As much as my inner feminist hates to admit it, I had a Barbie doll when I was younger. I had several of them, in fact. And I even had the Ferrari. And a token Ken doll.

The point of this post isn't to wax nostalgic about toys gone by. It has to do with a recent blog in the Huffington Post about using a life-size Barbie to help raise awareness about eating disorders and body image issues.

Forgive me, but I'm not exactly sure I see the connection between a mental illness and Barbie. We don't connect Baby Cries A Lot and major depression. Or Furbies and animal hoarding. It's a plastic toy. And let's remember that eating disorders and even body image issues existed long before Barbie hit the scene in the 1950's.

I get that Barbie is probably not the best role model for pretty much anything other than reinforcing gender stereotypes.  I get that she is an exaggeration of what some people feel is the "ideal body type."  That being said, so was the Venus of Willendorf, and my body doesn't look a thing like either Venus OR Barbie.  Most women don't.

Our culture has some seriously warped ideas about beauty, especially feminine beauty.  Most of us buy into them, in one form or another.  Most of us don't have eating disorders.


I find blaming Barbie and the like (models, etc) for eating disorders pedantic and not just a little offensive.  I wasn't unable to eat and at death's door because I was over-idealizing a plastic doll with blonde hair.  I was unable to eat because my brain was broken and it needed to be fixed.  The suggestion that I nearly died because I was somehow society's dupe strikes me as a little bizarre.

I'm not saying that cultural body image stuff is irrelevant or totally unrelated.  It isn't.  It forms a backdrop against which eating disorders form and emerge.  Many in the fashion industry have frank eating disorders themselves, so there's definitely some overlap.  But it's not a cause, and I kind of resent it being made to look that way.

A college girl who learns that Barbie has an unrealistic body will be more informed and hopefully a better consumer of media and its messages.  The problem is that knowing these things--that models are Photoshopped, that eating disorders are dangerous, that Barbie is a total fake (the bitch!)--don't prevent eating disorders.  EDs aren't decisions.  They aren't under conscious control--if they were, they wouldn't be an actual mental illness.  I knew plenty about anorexia and Barbie dolls before I got sick, and here's the kicker: I still got sick.

I think stuff like this--however well-intentioned and well-executed it might be--almost trivializes eating disorders.  It makes me feel like a supercilious brat, when that's not the case at all.  Lots of things influenced my eating disorder, and I'm happy to take a good, hard look at any of them.  But, please, leave Barbie out of this one.

Other members of the Academy for Eating Disorders alerted me to this upsetting/appalling/annoying article in Bicycling Magazine.  It's so awful that I'm not going to link to it for any number of reasons: lots of height/weight stats, weight loss stats, and I also don't want to give the article any more traffic than it's already getting.

A recent editorial titled "A Western illness best forgotten" is so off-base and so incorrect, that it can't even be classified as wrong.

And because there's no real way to paraphrase such insanity, I'll let the author speak for himself:

Of course, the desire to have the state influence how satisfied or unsatisfied we are with our bodies is totalitarian, but I had assumed it was essentially harmless - Melbourne University churns out a lot of arts graduates who have studied feminist and cultural studies and these people need to be employed somewhere.

The chances of the Government succeeding in influencing how attractive we find fat or skinny people to be are of course almost nil, but if it keeps a few Labor and Greens voters happily employed, then that's fine by me.

True, some people have questioned whether it is wise for the most overweight societies in human history to be spending money making its fatties feel better about themselves.

They have wondered whether the Government may not be better off spending our money telling us that if we have a negative body image it is because we are lardarses who need to eat less and exercise more.

...In the West, anorexia is most likely to strike urban girls from middle-class families who are often high achievers. The few anorexics in Hong Kong tended to come from poor rural villages where the influence of Western culture, with its adoration of the young and skinny, was weak.

The strangest thing Dr Lee found though, was that the anorexics he saw had none of the self-delusion about their body size that Western anorexics do.

Asked to draw themselves, these anorexics correctly pictured themselves as dangerously thin, whereas Western anorexics will usually draw themselves as overweight.

The Hong Kong anorexics attributed their failure to eat to physical factors such a bloated stomach or blockages in their digestive tracts rather than a desire to be thin.

When he investigated the history of the disease, Dr Lee found that the earliest Western descriptions of the disease from the 1820s more closely matched the patients he was seeing than the textbook definition of anorexia.

In the early 19th century the disease was so rare that it wasn't until 1873 that medicine could even agree on a name for it. In that year a French doctor delivered a paper that sparked widespread interest and understanding of the existence of the disease.

The really interesting thing is what happened next. Though in the 1850s anorexia was a rare disease, by the end of the century it was commonplace. The growth was so marked that it could not be explained away as the result of doctors finally picking up on a disease that had always existed, but of which they had been previously unaware.

In other words, the widespread knowledge of the existence of the disease was responsible for spreading it.

Watters then catalogues the way in which the Western form of anorexia developed in Hong Kong after the media there highlighted a schoolgirl who died of the disease. Within a few years Hong Kong went from having almost no anorexics to being full of them.

Apparently James Campbell missed the first lesson in Epidemiology 101: correlation doesn't equal causation. He doesn't account for the fact that increased awareness of an illness can lead to increased diagnosis, not increased incidence. Maybe I'm off-base, but it seems that increasing diagnosis and treatment of an illness was a good thing.

Furthermore, most people with anorexia don't deliberately try to end up that way. They either eat less or cut out sweets or try to lose a few pounds and then they find themselves stuck in an anorexic hell. Anorexia is ego-syntonic; that means that sufferers don't see the illness as a problem, and that the outcome of the illness (weight loss) is a good thing. As the Western cultural ideals of weight loss and thinness have spread, it doesn't seem unusual that someone with an ego-syntonic illness would latch onto these as a justification for thoughts and behaviors that seem pretty bizarre. With more people dieting, you would naturally expect to have more eating disorders triggered.

I honestly believe that the body dysmorphia is a culturally mediated aspect of anorexia. Culturally-mediated doesn't mean that there's no biological basis, just that you only see these symptoms in certain cultures. Biology helps explain why not everyone in this culture has the symptoms/illness, but the body dysmorphia in anorexia does seem to be pretty consistent with modern, Western cultures (it is much less prevalent in young children with anorexia). But that in and of itself isn't anorexia. It's just one aspect of the illness.

Anorexia is NOT a Western illness. It exists in China, Ghana, and Curacao, at rates that are roughly comparable to the US and Western Europe. Say it with me in a sing-song voice now: someone didn't do his research...

Then there's the issue that if we pay attention to eating disorders, they will go away. To me, this smacks of the larger write-off that many people with eating disorders get, which is: "They're just doing this for attention! If you ignore it, they'll stop!" One must wonder, then, why people with EDs go to such extreme lengths to hide their symptoms if what they really want is attention.

BP ignored the problems in their oil well, and we all know how smashingly that one turned out. As a culture, we've tried to put blinders on to issues like teen pregnancy, homosexuality, and environmental decay, hoping that they will just "go away" and that one day, we will all laugh at how teens used to get pregnant, people were attracted to someone of the same sex, and we honestly thought the world was going to hell. If it worked, it would be convenient. But it doesn't work.

Rates of some cancers have increased over the years, and we don't blame the War on Cancer. When heart disease rates go up, we don't boycott the American Heart Association for trying to help. Anorexia isn't just biology--culture is important. But ignoring a problem to make it go away? It's a short-term solution to a long term problem.

On Facebook today, I read a status update from a friend of mine who asked us to honor the memory of a girl who died from her eating disorder five years ago today. Which is tremendously sad, and I hope that her story will help others pursue the treatment they need and deserve. But that's not the point of my post. The point of my post is that my friend said the girl died from "the pressure to be thin."

No. She died from an eating disorder. Big difference.

I didn't comment on my friend's Facebook status because I didn't want to take away the importance of honoring this girl's memory, nor do I like Facebook arguments because I can't be concise. Also, even despite my friend's statements, we still remain friends and this hasn't changed that.

But "the pressure to be thin?" Seriously?

I'm not saying that the pressure to be thin is irrelevant to eating disorders because it does play a role in some people's triggers, and certainly in obstacles to recovery. But an eating disorder isn't a pathological and deadly response to the pressure to be thin; it's an actual mental illness that involves a life-threatening inability to self-regulate around food. Furthermore, by saying that an eating disorder is "caused" by the pressure to be thin, it excludes all of those with eating disorders who don't have body dysmorphia, those who developed EDs in cultures that didn't place a high value on thinness, and those who developed EDs long before there was a widespread cultural pressure to be thin.

So. Now that we've got that out of the way...

For most of the people I've talked to with eating disorders, being thin is usually the least of their motivators when in the thick of it. I did have a phobia of gaining weight (a massive phobia of weight gain, for that matter) but it wasn't a cultural pressure. It was me. It was from the eating disorder--I didn't feel that pressure before, and I don't really feel it now. I didn't decide to lose weight to look like a model. It was an attempt to eat better, exercise more, maybe lose 5 pounds and pull out of the awful depression I was in. Without my predisposition to anorexia, I'm fairly confident everything would have stopped there. But it didn't.

Did I use our culture's obsession with dieting and thinness as an excuse while in my eating disorder? Yes. And to some extent, it would have felt more sane to tell myself I just wanted to look like some famous waif than to actually understand that I was terrified of food and eating. I never thought of my eating disorder as just "being on a diet" or "trying to be skinny." It was just this single-minded obsession to eat less and exercise more that really had no explanation.

I did think that if I could lose enough weight then maybe I would stop hating what I saw in the mirror. And I'm not going to say that culture had nothing to do with that, but I was well aware that everyone else saw me as too thin. It was my own messed up standards that didn't really kick in until after I had already started walking down the yellow brick road to anorexia. In other words, the intense body hatred was as much a result of my eating disorder as it was a cause.

Saying this girl who died from "the pressure to be thin" minimizes the true, serious nature of eating disorders. It takes a very complicated issue--the interplay of nature and nurture--and so over-simplifies it that the truth is lost. Not that feeling pressure to be thin has nothing to do with eating disorders, but to say that this pressure to be thin is the same thing as an eating disorder is a rather big misstatement.

I have to confess: I have a soft spot in my heart for the Discovery Channel show MythBusters. It's a great show to teach the otherwise uninterested about how to conduct a solid experiment, and there's lots of pyrotechnics--what's not to love? Besides that, the ever-nerdy biologist in me loves to poke holes in commonly held theories and ideas, whether historical, sociological, or scientific.

Which is why I loved this article from (of all places) Discovery News: New TV Show Perpetuates Anorexia Myths. The new TV show, hosted by Jessica Simpson, is called "The Price of Beauty" and will air on VH1. Simpson says this about the show:

“I have always believed that beauty comes from within and confidence will always make a woman beautiful, but I know how much pressure some women put on themselves to look perfect. I am really looking forward to discovering how beauty is perceived in different cultures and participating in some of the crazy things people do to feel beautiful. I know we will all learn a lot on this journey and I am so excited that VH1 is coming along on what I’m sure will be a wild ride.”

Which is all well and good- I have no problem with a show looking at different cultural ideals of beauty, and how it varies from place to place. I think it could be both entertaining and eye-opening.

So what does this have to do with anorexia?

In one of the first episodes, Simpson interviews anorexia sufferer Isabelle Caro, whose appearance in an anti-anorexia billboard caused quite an uproar several years ago. And since Discovery News writer Benjamin Radford did such a good smack-down of the issues, I'll let him speak:

What Isabelle Caro, Jessica Simpson, and the VH1 show don’t realize is that anorexia has little or nothing to do with fashion modeling. Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia are biological diseases, not voluntary behaviors. The idea that a model, photo of a model, or Web site can "encourage" anorexia is not supported by science or research. Images of thin people cannot "encourage" anorexia, any more than photographs of bipolar patients "encourage" bipolar disorder, or photos of diabetics "encourage" diabetes.

Though many people are convinced that anorexia is a threat to most young women because of the media images they see, that’s not what the scientific evidence says. Anorexia is a very rare and complex psychological disorder with many indications of a strong genetic component; as anorexia expert Cynthia Bulik noted in her 2007 study “The Genetics of Anorexia,” published in the Annual Review of Nutrition, “Family studies have consistently demonstrated that anorexia nervosa runs in families.” Most research studies have failed to find a cause-and-effect link between media images of thin people and eating disorders.

...Nearly every woman in America regularly sees thin women in everyday life and the media, yet according to the National Institute of Mental Health, only about one percent of them develop the disease. If there a strong link existed between media exposure and anorexia, we would expect to see an incidence many orders of magnitude higher than is found.

Anorexia is a tragic disease; some young women (and men) do diet to excess and have body image issues. But the scientific research shows that they are the exception, not the rule. The first step in solving a problem is correctly understanding it, and TV shows like “The Price of Beauty” may actually end up doing more harm than good.

Since research suggests that the causes of anorexia have more to do with genetics than thin fashion models, efforts to educate young girls about the artificiality of airbrushed media images won’t do anything to treat or cure anorexia. Girls and young women deserve facts and truth instead of myths and misinformation.

(emphasis mine)

Can I hear a "Hallelujah, amen!"?

If anorexia is seen as a cultural illness by a bunch of diet-crazed beauty freaks, no wonder the allocation for research dollars is minimal, that insurance companies can put up such resistance to covering eating disorder treatment*, that I have been told by so many people to snap out of it and get over it. Yes, I have been exposed to the thin body ideals. Yes, I have probably internalized some of that. No, that has nothing to do with my anorexia.

I wasn't trying to be thin to look like some sort of magazine model; I was terrified of eating and gaining weight. I was aware that anorexia made me look pretty atrocious--I couldn't sense that I had lost weight as my illness progressed, but I could see the gray-yellow skin, the blue nails and lips, the brittle, thinning hair. The culture of thin provides a vocabulary for many sufferers, and it helped me explain to myself and others why I didn't want to eat or tried to avoid eating. I did believe my own bullshit, to some degree. One of the key aspects of anorexia is the inability to understand just how sick you are. So, yeah, telling yourself and your parents and your friends and anyone who cares to listen that your starvation is just an attempt to lose a few pounds and/or just another diet is an easily available defense. It makes sense to you and it helps get those around you to stop breathing down your bony neck.

Anorexia existed before the advent of supermodels, and I have a feeling it will exist after. In the meantime, I'm sending a huge thank you to Benjamin Radford for speaking out on this issue. You can post your own comments at the bottom of the article, so send him some ED Bites lovin'.

*There are other reasons insurance companies can do this, too, not the least of which is the lobbying power fueled by astronomical profits and the fact that it's cheaper to let sufferers die than pay for treatment. But I digress...

I found this Mind Hacks post (Seized by voodoo spirits) interesting on several levels. As someone who has epilepsy--though, fingers crossed, my seizures will remain in the past tense--I relate very much to the search for a "cause." Were my seizures because of the eating disorder? Because of medication? Something else? My seizures began suddenly and with absolutely no warning, coming and going seemingly at random.* Both my family and I were spooked and frightened.

So I read the report of the Haitian woman attributing her epilepsy to spirit possession with no small amount of compassion. And yet I scoffed a bit. As a lifelong skeptic (a cynic when I'm in a bad mood), I find the idea of spirit possession almost laughable. It's kind of like seeing the Virgin Mary in your toast- I mean, the trinity isn't the Father, the Son, and the Holy Toast, amen.

The exact logic and reasoning behind this woman's attributions aren't exactly the point of this post. What got me thinking was the last few lines written by Vaughan:

The cases are interesting as they highlight how easily the 'possession' theory fits with the unpredictable course of epilepsy and its effects when it seems to briefly 'take over' the body and mind of the affected person.

It raises the question of how much observations of epilepsy, a condition that affects approximately 1% of the population, have contributed to the idea of possession throughout the world.

Ideas of epilepsy-as-demon-possession were common in Europe in the Middle Ages and persisted into the nineteenth century. And it made some amount of sense. Human beings like to know "why." We just do. If we can't find an actual reason why rain falls and the sun rises and little Jimmy occasionally falls to the ground and starts twitching, we'll grab ahold of whatever's handy to try and explain it.

This kind of explanation is also common in eating disorders (you didn't really think I wouldn't mention EDs, did you?). When I read stories like this, that are subtitled "Anorexia teenager nearly died to look like Posh Spice Victoria Beckham," I realize how much culture makes a difference in how we interpret an illness.

I don't think this girl is "wrong," per se, because I'm not her and I don't know everything that motivated her. Demons could cause epilepsy- I can't say for sure that they don't, but I can say that there isn't any evidence of this. The same for an anorexic wanting to look like Posh Spice. It's her experience. It's valid. And it does make some amount of sense.

Just as the Haitian woman's beliefs affected her treatment (local medicine man vs. medication), I think our interpretations of eating disorders affect how they are treated. How much control over his/her own behaviors does the sufferer have? What should be the priority- stopping symptoms or more traditional psychotherapy? What causes eating disorders? What is the effect of culture? What about biology?

These are good questions to be answered. Although I have precious few answers, I do know this: EDs are far more complex than a Spice Girl Complex.

*Well, it didn't seem very random at the time as they came and went at about five month intervals, just short of the six month clean slate I needed to get my driver's licence back. Sigh. It does help explain my near-pristine driving record, however.

Many people with eating disorders are well-versed in the ED pop lit, especially the personal stories and novels. Some of it is, of course, the age of many sufferers; most adolescents wouldn't be working their way through a tome on medical complications or feminist meanings of starvation. The other part is much more subtle and more sinister. A lot of times, the sufferer will, consciously or not, read a book to trigger herself.

This is something that people outside the ED world just don't get. Why would you want to learn how to kill yourself better? The answer is that it's just the nature of the disease. I never felt I was a "good enough" anorexic, and my disordered brain was a sponge, soaking up ways to eat fewer calories and get rid of more. I never really went out of my way to find these "tips," usually stumbling across them in my reading (I was the person reading those research-oriented tomes), and by the time I realized I actually had an eating disorder, I was sick enough that most of them had already occurred to me.

There has been much in the news about the new novel Wintergirls, about a high school senior with anorexia. To be honest, I haven't read the book and have no desire to. I know plenty about the inner experiences of anorexia--I don't need to read more about it.

But it's an interesting issue.

The subject was addressed on the Well blog today, when blogger Tara Parker-Pope asked the question "In writing about eating disorders, are authors, unwittingly, creating an alluring guidebook to the disease?"

It's something I realize I have done with my memoir, and it's not something I'm proud of. I went to great efforts during the writing of my second book to tone down as many of the lurid details as possible while still maintaining a narrative. People with eating disorders can be triggered by a wide variety of things, and these triggers are everywhere: supermarket tabloids, The Biggest Loser show, nutrition and "healthy eating" articles, you name it. Part of recovery is learning how to manage these triggers, whether it's knowing that images in magazines are Photoshopped, or eschewing those magazines entirely.

Besides, "Wintergirls," the main "bible" of the eating disordered world is "Wasted" by Marya Hornbacher. I'll admit, I own a copy. My friend in college (who also had an ED) gave it the most succinct and accurate review: "I finished it and then said, well shit, and made myself barf." Like most ED books, it's a train wreck of a book- the writing draws you in and you just keep going and waiting for the wreckage.

Would I be worried if my kid came home with a book about eating disorders? You bet. I read lots of novels about anorexia when I was younger and found them absurdly attractive, in that train wreck sort of way. Perhaps I was recognizing my underlying wiring in the characters. I don't know. I don't believe in banning books but I do believe in being cautious about what I encourage my friends and family to read, especially when books can inadvertently play into the ED mindset. Laura has some good thoughts here.

But I would like people to read more about eating disorders- more of the up-to-date scientific information on causes and treatments. If I really wanted people to know about eating disorders, I wouldn't recommend a novel with the stereotypes about the cold mother and distant father (all gleaned from reviews of "Wintergirls"), no matter how well written or how "haunting" it seemed. I would recommend Walt Kaye's website and FEAST and Maudsley Parents.

Similar things are seen in people with body dysmorphic disorder. A 2004 study found that 20% of people with BDD had occupations in art or design, only 7% of those with major depression did, 3% of those with OCD, and 0% of those with PTSD. Other studies have found that anxious parents were more likely to identify threats in both their own and their children's environment, which could inadvertently influence the development of an anxiety disorder in those children.

It's pretty obvious, then, that classifying eating disorders (classifying anything, really) as "biological" or "psychological" or "social" is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I do believe that EDs are biologically based mental illnesses, and you would have to have a helluva sheaf of research backing your claims to make me budge from that stance. But this isn't the same as biological determinism. Environment is still important; environment matters.

This strange thing called life is turning out to be far more complicated than anyone ever imagined.

Although most of the reporting on obesity and the accompanying "epidemic" has appeared in health or science reports, the accompanying sociocultural aspects of obesity and what it means have been much less covered. A new article from the journal Sociological Inquiry by sociologist Samantha Kwan titled "Framing the Fat Body: Contested Meanings between Government, Activists, and Industry," examines the creation of the obesity epidemic as a cultural--as opposed to a purely medical--phenomenon.

Overweight and obesity are not just medical facts; they are social issues that various groups, industries, and "moral entrepreneurs" vie to define. Sociologists have long recognized that social problems do not derive solely from objective conditions but from a process of collective definition...Thus at the core of some social problems are framing competitions—struggles over the production of ideas and meanings.

"I am trying to get students and audiences to understand that there are competing cultural meanings about the fat body," Kwan says in a press release. "Fat does not, in itself, signify unhealthy and unattractive. These are cultural constructions. We as a society say what it means to be fat, and right now cultural discourses say it's ugly and unhealthy to be fat. … It's also assumed that the body is a reflection of the psyche, including one's moral fiber."

In the paper, Kwan puts it this way:

In many ways then the medical frame depicts the healthy body as a symbol of accomplishment. Individuals who work hard exercising and practice restraint by eating healthily are perceived as victorious. Their reward is weight loss. This symbol is especially ubiquitous in Western societies with a pervasive ethos that bodies can be transformed at will with discipline, hard work, and determination alone (Brownell 1991) and where the body is a metaphor for the psyche (see Bordo 1993). In this social context, fat becomes a morally suspect identity.

And it is this "moral panic" that is so dangerous. There are both medical and social aspects to obesity, but I think it's very valid to examine how this became an epidemic. Considering the amount of money to be made on preventing and remedying obesity, it's obvious who immediately stands to benefit. Before YOU spend YOUR money, I think you should ask yourself whether you have a problem that even needs to be remedied--and if those remedies will even work.

Current culture and technology seem to be adding a modern twist to eating disorders, whether it's the extreme phobia over obesity or pro-ana websites. The expression of the disease seems to be evolving, from starving saints, to the bad good girl, to the model wanna-be, to health freak (and sometimes, it can be all of the above!).

It doesn't change the underlying illness, what goes on at the biochemical level in the brain, but I have to wonder how modern culture is affecting eating disorders. That disordered eating is on the increase I definitely believe, even if it's just on an anecdotal level. The hard numbers on clinical anorexia and bulimia, not to mention binge eating disorder and EDNOS, are almost non-existent.

But there are two quotes from the same article (on people believing they're an unwilling participant in reality TV shows) that sort of ring true to what I feel is happening with eating disorders:

That's not to say reality shows make healthy people delusional, "but, at the very least, it seems possible to me that people who would become ill are becoming ill quicker or in a different way," Ian Gold said.

AND

"I don't think that popular culture causes delusions," said Bell, who is affiliated with King's College London and the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia. "But I do think that it is only possible to fully understand delusions and psychosis in light of our wider culture."

I particularly love that last quote. It absolutely explains what I feel about eating disorders: not caused by popular culture (or parents!), but it's impossible to understand them outside of a cultural context.

When people diet (or otherwise restrict their food), they tend to define themselves by what they don't eat. No meat. No dairy. No wheat. No fat. No taste (haha).

And I think that's interesting. When I was deeply anorexic, I related to that a lot. I would eat anything- as long as it didn't have calories! It's even become a cultural phenomenon. There's a book called "What not to eat."

People aren't stupid. They know they're missing out on things. And dieting=deprivation, however you define diet.

Think about it: you're defining your diet by what isn't in it. This doesn't apply to someone with allergies, of course. They literally have to define their diets (in part) by what they can't eat. But the rest of us have so much more freedom.

When you restrict your food, you restrict your life, and that's what our culture seems to be doing. We're so afraid of what might be (in our food, in our lives) that we start to miss out.

On the blog Vanilla Garlic, Garrett had this to say about the bizarre food requests received by friends:

Really, I don't mind cooking around allergies, likes, dislikes, health problems, and religious or moral viewpoints. I'm not going to serve a ham sammich with tomatoes to a practicing Muslim who gags at the thought of a sliced tomato touching their food. I will not however cook for someone who sits down and says they are on the Atkins for the next three days and can't eat the salad I made (insisting on near-raw hamburger instead), or the vegan eating a cheese bagel because "They're just too good to give up."

I think it comes down to starting to say yes instead of no. What are you going to eat today? What will you choose to include in your diet, in your life? Even if what you eat doesn't change, your mentality might.

What do you think? What are you going to say yes to today?

I've seen a few items in the past day or two that made me realize just how foreign the idea of "dieting is dangerous" really is.

Now, I love the Brits. I seriously do. The concept of putting milk in your tea makes a good thing even better. However, the BBC is currently doing a documentary about how hard it is to be a size zero (UK size 4). Which, okay, fine- most young girls (hell, women of every age) probably don't realize exactly how unrealistic it is. There's an intellectual understanding that models are much thinner than we are, to the point that women outwardly scoff at the anorexic-looking models on catwalks and on the covers of magazines.

Yet we still try. Though many people lament their heights -- personally, an extra half an inch would make pants shopping much easier -- they don't lop off a foot or walk on stilts to change it. Why? Because height is determined by genetics. So is weight, but we'll get there in a bit.

What this BBC documentary did is take an ordinary woman and put her on a diet that would make a starvation diet look like a feast. She took substances to "clean out her bowels." Then, she exercised with a personal trainer. And so on.

Here's the kicker, though: after about 2 weeks of this, she ate a little more than she was 'supposed' to. Then, she felt guilty. Then, she purged. A week or two later? She binged and purged again.

Luckily someone stepped in and said, "No more. You're done."

On the other hand, why did we have to do this "experiment" in the first place? Why should I feel grateful that it stopped when it never should have started to begin with?

Lots of people in Hollywood struggle with drug addictions, yet there are no documentaries and realities shows spelling out how to become an addict. No young person was given a bong and a crack pipe along with supplies and told: have fun! We'll see you in a month. But rehab is on your own.

We know that drugs are addictive and dangerous. However unrealistic it might be to give birth and be out partying a week later, we don't take a new mother and send her packing. Drugs change your brain chemistry. That's why they're addicting.

But dieting changes brain chemistry, too. Though I don't consider an eating disorder an addiction per se, there are too many similarities to be ignored. Enough of the neurochemical changes are the same that I think drugs and dieting operate in the same fashion. Recent research has found the brain changes in a person with anorexia to be the same as when a person uses Ecstasy.

This woman's brain changed, too, when she was starved. Binge eating is an essentially universal response to deprivation. And the cycle of binge eating and purging is ruthlessly addictive. When this young woman interviewed other celebrities and TV hosts, she found that she was not alone. Starvation diets were the norm.

You don't need to become a crack addict to better understand cocaine addiction. And you don't need to starve yourself to understand the Size Zero phenomenon OR eating disorders. We're much more highly evolved than that, and besides: dieting is dangerous.

----------------
Please note: I deliberately did not include the names of the newspaper articles or the documentary because I thought they were exploitative, triggering, and vile. So you're on your own for that one.

Although this research doesn't directly relate to eating disorders, it did make me think.

Scientists at MIT's Institute of Brain Research asked either East Asian people or those raised in America or other Western cultures to solve two different types of problems: one set involved making objective judgements, and one involved making subjective judgements. The researchers hypothesized that people from East Asia -- whose culture emphasizes working together and "taking one for the team" -- would do better at making subjective judgements. Americans, on the other hand, who are taught to value independence, would do better at making objective judgements.

And all evidence points to that hypothesis being true.

The point of this research isn't just that people from different cultures are better at solving different problems. That doesn't seem particularly earth shattering. Indeed, the significance of the research was that the brains of the participants actually functioned differently.

Culture, then, can rewire your brain.

This study didn't examine food or body image in the slightest, so I don't want to make too many conclusions. Yet, if culture can alter brain function, it makes me wonder: how does living in a food-phobic, diet-philic culture change the way we think?

Some of the ways it changes our thinking seems less permanent. We're more willing to tolerate, even encourage, too low of a body weight, even in a recovering anorexic. A large child seems to reflect poorly on a parent.* And while most parents don't want a malnourished child, many parents and physicians are willing to settle on a low body weight.

Not only that, but we get used to seeing people- women and men- who have unrealistic body shapes and sizes. So while we may tell ourselves that "most women don't look like that," we become used to seeing it. And so it may take longer for people to recognize there is a problem.

Everyone is dieting, we say. Body obsession is normal. He'll snap out of it. She just wants to look like insert-name-of-latest-celebrity-basket-case-here. We see pictures of people who are anorexic all the time.

I also think people are re-trained as to what is an acceptable amount of food for a person to eat. Jokes abound as to how much a teenage boy needs to eat. A teen girl may need less than a teen boy (on average), but her needs, too, go up. Dieting puts her at risk for iron deficiencies and lower IQs.

Even now, my nutritional needs are far greater than most of the people around me. It's hard to deal with. But maybe I don't eat huge amounts. Maybe a lot of the people around me aren't eating enough. Maybe no one knows what a proper meal is.

Kind of makes you think.

*Granted, most therapists think the parents of an anorexic child are somehow flawed as well. Kind of a no-win situation, no?

You don't want to gain weight during the holidays, right? Not you! You will escape the gluttony that is the 5 weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years'.

Wait! You can do more! Not only can you keep from gainingweight, you can actually lose! That's right. You know that holiday party you've been dreading next weekend? The one you bought that sexy little black dress for that now doesn't fit because you had that extra slice of turkey on Thanksgiving and gained 20 pounds?

That dress.

You can wear it again. With these seven easy ways to lose ten pounds in ten minutes, you can impress your friends, rekindle your husband's waning desire, and make the slutty office secretary jealous.

1. Amputate a limb! No longer is it no pain, no gain. It's also no pain, no loss! Call your doctor today and soon you will be able to lose up to 30 pounds with a few simple cuts.
2. Before you step on the scale in the morning, pick up two 5-pound hand weights. With weights in hand, step on the scale. Note the number. Then, set the weights down and step back on the scale. The number should be ten pounds lower. Good for you!
3. No hand weights? No problem! Buy a cheap, old-model bathroom scale. For this method to work, it can't be digital. Turn the dial on the scale so that it's set at 10 pounds below zero. Now step on the scale as usual. Ta-da! You weigh less!
4. Buy a more expensive version of your little black dress. All women know that more expensive clothing means smaller sizes. You might not lose weight, but you'll be able to wear that size 4 you've always wanted.
5. When you check your height, wear stilts. A guaranteed way to lower your BMI, without any fad diets or exercise.
6. Encourage your friends to gain weight. You'll look thinner next to them.
7. Use leeches. Blood has weight. If you let the leeches remove enough blood, your weight will go down. They've been used as a homeopathic remedy for ages, so it's guaranteed to be safe and improve your health.

See? Anyone can lose weight and improve their body image- in no time flat!!!

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I'm realizing that this is about as scientific and helpful as a lot of the other articles out there. I hope you, uh, enjoy it.

I found this articles funny until I realized that these people were being serious. Dead serious. Most of the people I know (who don't diet) don't really gain weight during the holidays. Why? It's just food. Seriously.

It's.

Just.

Food.

I'm not there yet. And over-indulging isn't one of my strong points. Even just typing the word "indulge" sends chills down my spine.

But there's also a huge difference between "enjoyment" and "gluttony". If a woman enjoys what she eats, she is somehow being a glutton. There aren't any "Hungry Woman" microwave dinners. There are Healthy Choice, Weight Watchers "Right Ones", and Lean Cuisine. Part of the reason I feel odd eating in front of other women (my male classmate notwithstanding because he has a hollow leg somewhere) is that I eat so much more than they do. I get that I have a pretty fast metabolism, that I'm pretty active. Yet I have a hard time, even after all of this, to eat more than someone else.

Women who eat a lot are pigs.

This is what our culture tells us. These weight loss articles really aren't geared towards men. They're not. Men don't have "vanity sizing." Not that they don't have their own food, weight, and body image issues.

And a shout out to Rachel at The F Word for inspiring this post.