Read Online An Apple a Day by Emma Woolf - Free Book Online

help?
    Because it doesn’t matter enough. The only recent intervention I can recall, at policy level, is the politician Lynne Featherstone’s comments about curvy women in the TV series Mad Men . It’s still on the BBC website.
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    â€œChristina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous” says Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone, who held up Hendricks’ outline as an ideal shape for women.
    Highlighting the “over-exposure” of skinny models and the impact they have on body image among young people, Ms Featherstone went on: “We need more of these role models. There is such a sensation when there is a curvy role model. It shouldn’t be so unusual.” (BBC News, July 2010)
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    Cue many inches of newsprint analyzing Christina Hendricks’s shape—is she size 14, size 16?—and her generous bosom, reportedly GG. Of course the media love this kind of sound bite—they show some close-ups of Hendricks’s cleavage and get another opportunity to pass judgment on women’s bodies, but one might have hoped for more from a politician. Featherstone’s pejorative reference to “skinny” women and her celebration of “curvy” role models is reductive, simplistic. It’s precisely this kind of tactless language that, however unintentionally, fuels women’s anxieties and insecurities about their bodies (as online readers of this story pointed out).
    And as for saying, “her curves are fabulous”—it’s hardly a serious way to address a health crisis, is it?
    On the rare occasions that eating disorders are mentioned in the media, they are linked to a tragic death—usually a teenage girl—or a female celebrity whom the trashy magazines have decided is getting too thin (after previously vilifying her for being too fat). But having a specific body shape—be it “curvy” or “skinny”—is not the same as having a mental illness. When eating disorders are discussed in public, it’s often assumed that women are starving themselves because they want to look like supermodels. But anorexia is about much more than what body shape happens to be in vogue with fashion editors or designers (whose sample sizes are mostly unwearable by all but prepubescent girls). Many catwalk models look quite bizarre in real life, freakishly tall and thin—and that’s not why most anorexics are starving themselves.
    No, anorexia is more serious than that, and the true extent of the problem will never be known. While the terms “epidemic” and “silent killer” are thrown around too carelessly by the media, the fact is that we don’t have accurate medical data because eating disorders are shameful and silent and often invisible. It’s in the nature of the disease to remain hidden—particularly with bulimia or binge-eating, where sufferers may appear to eat normally in public, and often maintain a normal body weight.
    Figures from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) (usually taken to be the most accurate) suggest that 1.6 million people in the U.K. are affected by an eating disorder. It is estimated that 10 percent have anorexia, 40 percent have bulimia, and the remainder fall into the category of ED-NOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified), which includes binge-eating disorder.
    However, these figures are based on the Department of Health’s Hospital Episode Statistics, so they leave out the unreported cases where sufferers are not receiving professional help or have not been diagnosed. And even the official research isn’t consistent: an NHS study in 2007 (the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey) showed that up to 6.4 percent of adults displayed signs of aneating disorder. I recently read an article in which it was claimed that “75 percent of all American women endorse some unhealthy thoughts, feelings or behaviors related to food or their bodies”