Eating Disorders

Starving for Praise

TW: Mentions of Eating Disorders Jessie Davidson

I never asked to have an eating disorder. I just wanted to ft into my favourite jeans again. I was 14 and I’d been given new jeans for my birthday. I loved them. But for a few weeks, I couldn’t fnd them. When they fnally turned up, they were too tight. I asked mum if I’d gotten fat. She hesitated before replying, “I guess I have noticed you getting a bit bigger.” That sentence carved itself into my brain. Maybe if I had grown up in a world where weight gain and the word ‘fat’ weren’t overwhelmingly negative, maybe I wouldn’t have spent the summer of 2019 counting calories, running of my weight and dreading the thought of putting food in my mouth, knowing I would only rush to the toilet afterwards and force myself to throw it back up. That summer, food became numbers. Mirrors became fear. Words became controlling. When my already slender friends started diets to lose weight, I wondered how I must look in their eyes? Suddenly it seemed like everybody was talking about what they looked like. I became smaller and as I evaporated, praise of my new body encouraged me to keep starving myself or throwing up. Even when my jeans became too big for me, when I began to avoid breakfast and lunch, when I fainted in class, I convinced myself I wasn’t sick. I told myself I had control. I didn’t. I was losing myself to the words I was hearing. Words matter. Words from others, words from the media and our own words infuence ourselves and the people around us - and they can do damage. Somehow, we are conditioned to comment on our own and other’s appearances. Social media certainly exposes that.

Children learn early to comment on appearance, even in a negative way. They see comments on friend’s and family’s posts. They’re told they’re so pretty, so tall, so little. Or they see comments on their favourite celebrity, dragging them based on height, weight, clothing choice. We are conditioned to associate thin with healthy and good, measuring ourselves and others against slender ideals. We ignore the damage caused when the drive to be thin becomes a mental illness. We ignore when that illness causes physical issues such as heart and kidney problems, or even death. Eating disorders are one of the deadliest mental illnesses, second only to opioid addiction. Katie Babbott is an eating disorder researcher at Auckland University and co-founder of the eating disorder support website, Āhei. She told me about a study of primary school students where researchers asked young kids why health is important. The children said things like “So that you won’t be a fat blob”; “So that nobody will laugh at you for being fat”; and “So that you aren’t ugly and lazy”. “As young as fve they’ve already picked up this fatphobic language and bias, so it’s unsuprising that the language we use around weight, shape and size is powerful. We need to be really careful how we talk about food and bodies.”

We are teaching children that weight equals worth.

New Zealand is seeing children worried about their appearance at increasingly young ages. Kids as young as 8 are waitlisted for eating disorder clinics. Everyday, more than 10,000 girls ask Google if they’re pretty enough. Entire generations are growing up feeling inadequate because they don’t match the aspired body type that was fed to us all from birth.

“Food became numbers. Mirrors became fear. Words became controlling.”

“It’s common for friends and families to encourage weight loss,” says Babbott. “This can be knowingly or unknowingly. This comes from the massive belief that skinny equals healthy, which is not true.” Family and friends strengthen the idea that how we look measures our worth. These messages can be as subtle as a waiter pointing out the lite options on the menu or asking if you need that second helping, or as unsubtle as unsolicited diet advice.

Babbott says fatphobia has been around for decades, and these conversations would have contributed to eating disorders prior to the rise of social media. However she says that with the internet and social media, messaging is much more readily available than previously. “We are living in a culture with an extraordinary emphasis on bodies, food, and appearance. Along the way, we’ve somehow gotten morality muddled up in the mix, as though certain bodies are ‘good’ and others are ‘bad’, and that we are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on the type of body we live in.” “My mum and my sister were always very focussed on how they looked and it rubbed of on me. I was always being told I should join them on one of their diets,” she says. “When I was 7 my mum was worried about my weight so she made me get up and go on runs with her 4 days a week before school. But I believe the trigger for my eating disorder was watching a talk show where they had a girl talking about her experience with bulimia. She began describing exactly how she would make herself sick after meals.

She mentions that encouragement and praise about weight loss can be dangerous because it may be encouraging harmful behaviour such as purging, restriction and over-exercising. These can become difcult to stop if they’re regularly praised. Babbott says many individuals with an eating disorder struggle with things like perfectionism and control. Food, whether under or over eating, is a way to exert control and power over a situation. Most eating disorder patients experience high anxiety, so controlling dietary intake and eating the ‘perfect’ amount of calories reduces the anxiety. With this in mind, we can see how the messages we spread can exert a heavy infuence over those who sufer from eating disorders. Lara (not her real name) is a survivor of bulimia. She describes her early-teen self as “geeky, blessed with braces, an anxious perfectionist, and an incredibly normal looking girl going through the bodily changes that everyone goes through.” Lara says weight was an often-discussed topic in her household growing up and believes this resulted in her ever-present concern about her appearance and the development of her illness.

“That night, I made my way to the bathroom. I vividly remember looking in the mirror and thinking, am I really going to do this? I think some part of me was trying to fght this urge. Because what people don’t realise is that once you start, it’s nearly impossible to stop. I was 12.” Lara spent the next three years in a state of on-andof surges of bulimia that she didn’t initially believe was serious: “I treated it like a diet. I convinced myself that if I wanted to, I could stop at any time. I was very wrong.” Year 11 hit Lara like a brick. Surrounded by peers constantly comparing themselves to each other, both in looks and grades, it was at this point that Lara’s bulimia took full control.

“I began to hide in a very depressive state. I didn’t sleep, “I treated it like a diet. I convinced myself that if I wanted to, I could stop at any time. I was very wrong.”

I didn’t eat, if I did eat it came back up. Most of my time I spent in front of a mirror listing reasons why I was an awful person. I think the worst part of it was my friends and family telling me how great I looked, how skinny I had become. I didn’t want to exist anymore.” It was only until the start of year 12 when Lara and her family began to seek help. August this year marked Lara’s frst six months of being purge free in the last four and a half years. Lara’s story is one of many examples of growing up in a weight-stigmatised household. She was taught from a very young age that skinny is beautiful, and watched her sister and mum struggle with this idea for much of her life.

When Lara told me that her trigger for the development of her eating disorder was the TV show she watched, I began thinking: Can talking about eating disorders be the reason some people develop eating disorders? Katie Babbott says it’s a good question but the idea that talking about eating disorders causes eating disorders is a bit of a myth. “People believe this about lots of things actually, and that’s a big part of the reason why there’s so much stigma around discussing things like self-harm and suicide.” She says research has found that safely acknowledging and talking about mental health may in fact reduce, rather than increase the risk. Although there are always exceptions, talking safely may even lead to improvements in mental health, helping people feel more comfortable disclosing that they have a problem or seeking help for their issues. However, not all talk is safe, Babbott says. “Talking about eating disorders in the context of safe conversations with a loved one is really diferent from talking about eating disorders or getting ideas from other people who are actively struggling - on pro-ana websites, tik tok and so on. The former is really important, and the latter is really dangerous.” Babbott says it’s best not to talk about bodies, weight, shape or size at all. Whether it’s their body, your body or others. This advice can also be used in general, not just for those sufering with an eating disorder.

“There’s this really interesting concept called body neutrality, which is the idea you don’t have to hate your body OR love your body - you just have to respect it and take good care of it. This is a really good goal, not just for eating disorder suferers and their families, but for everyone! The goal of body-neutrality allows for a healthy middle ground between hating your body and loving your body. “Just like a relationship with a partner, parent or sibling takes work, so too does your relationship with your body. Your body is your home; a vessel in which to live a meaningful life. Working to nurture it and treat it with kindness and compassion is the ultimate goal of body-respect, and using kind, neutral, and respectful language when talking about bodies is really important.”

“The worst part of it was my friends and family telling me how great I looked, how skinny I had become. I didn’t want to exist anymore. “

What can we each do to change the narrative that focuses on our bodies?

My own advice to anyone whose loved one is struggling with body image issues or an eating disorder, is just to truly listen to them. We can all make a diference by noticing weight stigma and fatphobic behaviours and calling them out. Be aware if you use them yourself. Support your friends and family who struggle with body image before it develops into something bigger and harder to control.

Focus less on someone’s appearance and more on their strengths, ideas, ambitions and dreams. At the end of the day our bodies are not the most interesting part of ourselves. Besides, life is too short to live without chocolate.

EDANZ - Freephone 0800 2 EDANZ or 0800 233 269 Healthline – 0800 611 116