Not thin enough? Not sick enough? YOU—eating disordered?
I’ve done it. In just a few sessions I made my mark on a future generation of nutrition providers—an intern interested in eating disorder treatment, no less. She was, like most, biased by the sensationalized images and the media’s descriptions of emaciated anorexics; of teenage girls who ‘just wanted to be thin’; and of visibly unhealthy looking bulimics. Those were people with eating disorders, she believed. Yet in the few days she has spent with me, she’s seen anorexic men, normal weight binge eaters, and women in their 40s, 50s and 60s struggling with eating disorders. Some developed their disorder recently, some only recently presented for treatment, having struggled with their relationship with food for decades. All are pained by their condition—no one chose to live with a disorder. Really, there are places they’d much rather be than in a medical office on a nice summer day. Yet what they all have in common is that their appearance is not a give away. Most look just fine, I must ...