(âSeventy-five percent of Women Have Disordered Eating,â PsychCentral.com , 23 April 2008). Seventy-five percent sounds high, but it depends on the definition of âdisordered eatingâ (and it may not be far wrong when you consider the obesity crisis in the U.S.).
Whatever the true figures, eating disorders are life-threatening conditions. And theyâre affecting women disproportionately: of the 1.6 million sufferers estimated by NICE, only 11 percent are male. Since I started writing my Times column, Iâve been amazed how many women have admitted their own problems with emotional eating: that they use food as a way of rewarding or punishing themselves, that theyâre ravenous all the time, that they diet constantly and break their diets and have low self-esteem. I know them, you know themâyou may well be one of them yourself. Not skeletal, not dying, maybe not even that thin. Anorexics and bulimics and overeaters and many others, whatever their actual weight, have this in common: a sense of shame about their appetite, a feeling of being out of control around foodâanxiety about eating, guilt around every bite.
Most of these women donât appear on the official statistics. Theyâre not hospital patients, theyâre ânormal.â I know I hid my anorexia from myself, from those closest to me, for as long as I could: it was only the radical weight loss that forced me to stop denying it. I can only imagine how much harder it must be to ask for help when youâre frantically overeating in private, already filled with shame, or bingeing and then vomiting.
I donât want to tar all women with the same brush. I donât want to generalize from women just dieting to those like me with a serious mental illness: I do understand that wanting to dropa dress size isnât the same as anorexia. In fact I wish it hadnât been necessary to raise the issue at all, but the situation is getting worse, not better: many of us experience body hatred (or mild dislike) every day. Images of beauty are becoming more idealized and bizarre; some of our most famous female celebrities look like Barbie dolls. The routine airbrushing of models and actresses in magazines gives boys and men a wholly distorted view of the female body as slim with huge breasts, perfectly toned and tanned, smooth and flawless.
Iâm no more or less susceptible than any other woman. In terms of withstanding media pressure Iâd say Iâm quite robust: I know how to Photoshop an image and Iâm pretty savvy about the artifice behind it all. I donât bother reading gossip magazines (unless Iâm in a supermarket queue or at the hairdresser) and Iâve never aspired to look like those celebrities, all hair extensions and laser-whitened teeth. Sure, I shave my legs and I pluck my eyebrows and I wear makeup and perfume and deodorant. But I canât escape the madness around me, the impossible demands being put on women, to be thin, sexy, fertile, beautiful.
Weâre surrounded by these unrealistic images in magazines, on television and cinema screens. The perma-tans, the hairless limbs (why have women starting waxing their arms?) and wrinkle-free foreheads. Surely Iâm not the only one who scans through interviews with well-known women to check their ages, who wonders how they managed to bear children, or whether they ever eat. Why do I do that?
In a much-reported interview in 2006 to launch her beachwear line, the celebrity Elizabeth Hurley revealed that she ate just one meal and precisely six raisins a day in order to keep her figure slim enough for her signature skintight white jeans (she owns over thirty pairs). To be counting out raisins in your early forties strikes me as slightly sad, but who am I to judge?
Even the least girly and most cynical among us notices the difference between âthemâ and us; how perfect they are and how imperfect we are. Really, how are we
Whatever the true figures, eating disorders are life-threatening conditions. And theyâre affecting women disproportionately: of the 1.6 million sufferers estimated by NICE, only 11 percent are male. Since I started writing my Times column, Iâve been amazed how many women have admitted their own problems with emotional eating: that they use food as a way of rewarding or punishing themselves, that theyâre ravenous all the time, that they diet constantly and break their diets and have low self-esteem. I know them, you know themâyou may well be one of them yourself. Not skeletal, not dying, maybe not even that thin. Anorexics and bulimics and overeaters and many others, whatever their actual weight, have this in common: a sense of shame about their appetite, a feeling of being out of control around foodâanxiety about eating, guilt around every bite.
Most of these women donât appear on the official statistics. Theyâre not hospital patients, theyâre ânormal.â I know I hid my anorexia from myself, from those closest to me, for as long as I could: it was only the radical weight loss that forced me to stop denying it. I can only imagine how much harder it must be to ask for help when youâre frantically overeating in private, already filled with shame, or bingeing and then vomiting.
I donât want to tar all women with the same brush. I donât want to generalize from women just dieting to those like me with a serious mental illness: I do understand that wanting to dropa dress size isnât the same as anorexia. In fact I wish it hadnât been necessary to raise the issue at all, but the situation is getting worse, not better: many of us experience body hatred (or mild dislike) every day. Images of beauty are becoming more idealized and bizarre; some of our most famous female celebrities look like Barbie dolls. The routine airbrushing of models and actresses in magazines gives boys and men a wholly distorted view of the female body as slim with huge breasts, perfectly toned and tanned, smooth and flawless.
Iâm no more or less susceptible than any other woman. In terms of withstanding media pressure Iâd say Iâm quite robust: I know how to Photoshop an image and Iâm pretty savvy about the artifice behind it all. I donât bother reading gossip magazines (unless Iâm in a supermarket queue or at the hairdresser) and Iâve never aspired to look like those celebrities, all hair extensions and laser-whitened teeth. Sure, I shave my legs and I pluck my eyebrows and I wear makeup and perfume and deodorant. But I canât escape the madness around me, the impossible demands being put on women, to be thin, sexy, fertile, beautiful.
Weâre surrounded by these unrealistic images in magazines, on television and cinema screens. The perma-tans, the hairless limbs (why have women starting waxing their arms?) and wrinkle-free foreheads. Surely Iâm not the only one who scans through interviews with well-known women to check their ages, who wonders how they managed to bear children, or whether they ever eat. Why do I do that?
In a much-reported interview in 2006 to launch her beachwear line, the celebrity Elizabeth Hurley revealed that she ate just one meal and precisely six raisins a day in order to keep her figure slim enough for her signature skintight white jeans (she owns over thirty pairs). To be counting out raisins in your early forties strikes me as slightly sad, but who am I to judge?
Even the least girly and most cynical among us notices the difference between âthemâ and us; how perfect they are and how imperfect we are. Really, how are we
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