Eat your heart out

While the size zero debate/debacle continues to rage across the fashion world and into people’s consciousness, ordinary people with eating disorders are being increasingly forgotten by the mainstream media. It seems that unless you’re horribly obese or size zero and below, you don’t have a problem, or at least not one worth recognising.

Every body image-related worry that the average person feels is put down to what is being projected in the magazines and on the catwalk, if those silly fashion models weren’t so skinny, you’d obviously be a happy and well-rounded individual. This generalisation is both patronising to the individual, making them feel like their main problem is that they are too susceptible to advertising and models, and ignorant to the real problems behind a lot of eating disorders.

The media is doing nothing to try and stem the problems that thousands of people have. The unrealistic, airbrushed images of the women and men in the press are affirming to those people already suffering from eating disorders that they are never going to be quite good enough. Those people on the brink of developing a serious problem are left feeling stranded and unsure about whether to jump towards a happy relationship with their body or work towards the perfected images that are still outdated but prevalent in the media.
In a previous article, Student Direct Fashion Editor Leah Armstrong has commented that the consistent attacks on the size zero models completely ignore the problems that models have with eating disorders, and that there should be more done to help these individuals. It seems that increasingly eating disorders are being seen as disconnected from the individuals, something that they have, not that they are part of. Now more than ever, it is important to see that while models are suffering badly at the hands of the media, normal people are suffering too.
It has been a misconception for far too long that eating disorders fit into the neat categories of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, with nothing in between. Surely, the scientific community has developed far enough, and our understanding has moved along so much that it has become time for eating disorders to be seen for what they are; any kind of problem that damages the individual’s mental well-being by distorting their relationship with their bodies.

This patronising from the mainstream media is continually reinforcing the problem for the thousands of sufferers of the ‘mainstream’ eating disorders, whilst continuing to ignore the ‘smaller’ problems in the lives of both men and women, making them feel increasingly inferior and ‘wrong’ for not fitting into the prescribed categories. Unhealthy relationships with food increasingly exist as problem for men and women of all ages, not just models on the catwalk, and not just if you throw up or starve yourself.

This has all led to the belief that eating disorders are just about fitting into the smallest dress sizes when eating disorders are more commonly a need for control. While a chaotic life is whirling out of control, an eating disorder gives the sufferer a much needed dose of discipline, and however unhealthy in the long term, it gives them stability in the short-term. While to someone without an eating disorder this seems strange, it is perfectly logical to those suffering, and this shouldn’t be ignored. It seems to be common practice to present eating disorders as the sole preserve of people who want to be thin. Eating disorders also stem from physical problems; in their 1995 study, Park, Lawrie, and Freeman looked at how sufferers of anorexia nervosa, more often than not, had glandular fever or another long-term illness just before developing their eating disorder, again something not covered.

Eating disorders should no longer be accompanied with the attitude that the individual in question is in trouble because they lack self-esteem or because they want to be thin. Eating disorders are complex, sophisticated engines that will take over peoples’ lives and stay there. It would be so easy just to blame the fashion industry for causing people to be in these situations, but it completely ignores the real, far more complex, causes behind them. It is important that we stop ignoring the realities, now, more than ever.