Not Just Surface Damage

INTRODUCTION We live in an increasingly eating-disordered world. Health issues have gone beyond a person’s well-being and now form the moral code of secular society. As such, food has taken on similarly moralistic definitions. We now hear of good food vs. bad food. Permissible food vs. food you should NEVER eat.

Being fat is the ultimate sin.

Why has fat become such a despised thing? Stereotypical descriptions of fat people include “lazy”, “stupid” and “ugly”.

The reason people get fat, as it is believed, is because they have no self-control. Fat people are stupid because they don’t know that fat is bad for them, that it will lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a host of other diseases.

As the media goes into hysterics about an impending “obesity epidemic”, the other end of the spectrum, eating disorders, receives unfair coverage as well. The media assumes that people develop eating disorders because they want to look like models on a fashion runway, that eating disorders are diets horribly gone wrong. The most frequently associated image of an eating disorder is that of an emaciated, bag of bones kind of girl.