The truth is that 80% of people with Eating Disorders are overweight and the majority of the remainder fit into the ‘normal’ weight category (the definition of which is debatable, but in medical terms is someone with a BMI between 18 and 25). Only a tiny percentage of sufferers actually appear emaciated. So why is that that is the image that comes to mind whenever Eating Disorders are mentioned in the media? Because extremes work, shockingly low weights grab attention and skeletal women sell.
The research supports the fact that the general public has an extremely distorted perception of what Eating Disorders are, the different kinds of problem, the cause, the people they affect, but most of all, the image. It’s true that images speak 1000 words, so if we are constantly forced make connections between extreme thinness and Eating Disorders, then that is what we will do, and that association is a powerful tool.
As you know, I aim to question and challenge such misconceptions… so here goes:
Imagine, if you will, a Where’s Wally puzzle. Multiply the size of it by a hundred or so and then try to find Wally and Wilma in amongst the sea of red and white striped jumper-clad characters. Good Luck. The puzzle is the high street, Wilma is bulimic and Wally has binge eating disorder but exercises excessively. You haven’t got a cat in hells chance of spotting them.
Eating Disordered folk, perhaps uninterestingly, come in many shapes and sizes, colours and races, ages and sexualities. We could be your best friend, your husband, your teacher or your sibling and by looking at us, you wouldn’t have a clue. Weightloss is merely a symptom, not a sign. Anorexia, Bulimia, and Binge Eating Disorder are more than just a number, a look, an appearance – they are mental illnesses and it is impossible to be able to detect the mental anguish of someone with an Eating Disorder by looking at size and shape.
In addition to all this, the images used by journalists, dictated by the magazine editors are proven to be dangerous. Perhaps not to the extreme that all who see them will immediately hop on the latest fad diet and obsessively count calories of their own and everyone elses food around them, but it certainly doesn’t help. B-eatfound that out of the 1000 people who took part in their research, 70% said that the images chosen to illustrate stories and articles about Eating Disorders had a negative effect on their body image. It’s pretty ironic to see that the same publications that slag off size 0, warn of the dangers of ‘thinspiration’ and ‘pro-ana’, and promote ‘healthy ways’ to lose a stone in two weeks, are the same that use dangerous images that have an obviously damaging impact on their readers.
Personally, I am completely against using images of girls, women and men in their underwear with bones sticking out all over the place. They don’t capture what Eating Disorders are all about, can be seen as ‘thinspiration’ themselves – hence being used for readers to compete with, giving them a quite possibly fatal target to aim for, and worryingly, if these are the images that we automatically presume Eating Disorders to look like, many more cases will slip through the net either by not being noticed or not believing themselves to be “ill enough” to seek, or even deserve help.
I occassionally post the odd picture of myself, or allow a newspaper to print one of me, which may seem somewhat hypocritical as even at my healthiest, I have never been the image of health and even at my heaviest people would describe me as thin or slim. However, I write so much about this that I want to put a face to the name, to the message. I always consider which pictures I choose to use and I put them into context – they are NEVER just an illustration.
Stephen Fry explains this much more eloquently than myself:
“It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
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