ASK DR. BAUGHAN                                      June 26, 1998

CREATING EATING DISORDERS

There are several degrees of eating disorders.  Anorexia nervosa and bulimia can be life-threatening conditions.  They exist against a backdrop of pervasive disturbed relationships to food, weight and body image in our society.  Ninety percent or more of diagnosed eating disorders are in women; the percent is about the same of teenage girls who diet or are dissatisfied with their weight.  This is a phenomenon that is more common in the United States than other developed countries.  The cultural soil that grows this problem is tilled and amended by the fashion and entertainment industry that abhors or ridicules biologically healthy female fat distribution.  But there must be the pruning and trimming at the local community level to continue the crop after crop of young women who buy into the myth that thinness is essential to attractiveness and self-worth.  Young people have the power to blunt or reverse the pressures to eat in unhealthy patterns.

First the girls.  Girls face a tough choice.  It seems more biologically based that women will place a high value on relationships.  This can be exaggerated by social pressures to make girls feel that they really are not worth anything unless they have a boyfriend.  The variation on this distortion is that if they have a boyfriend, nothing else really matters.  Unfortunately, it is a social and biological predicament that boys are less attuned to relationships in adolescence.  So girls may become dependent on teenage boys’ definition of attractiveness to determine their own sense of worth or attractiveness.  If boys think any fat is bad, then they think that the natural body shape of most girls is unattractive.  So most girls would then be left to feel bad about their bodies.  Is their only healthy choice to “not care” what boys think?  Here is a secret:  girls who feel good about themselves, regardless of their weight, exude attractiveness.

Now for the boys.  For most boys, becoming a man takes higher priority than having an emotional relationship with a girl.  There are many pressures to learn how to feel and use power in becoming a man.  Boys can have a powerful influence on girls.  That power can be used in a healthy or unhealthy way.  “You need to lose some weight.  You have some fat there; why don’t you lose that?” are powerful statements to girls.  Use your power wisely.  You need not bring  someone else down to feel more powerful yourself.

By the teen years, many eating patterns are set for life.  If food is not seen as the energy of life, but as either an emotional salve or a substance that sabotages desirable body image, then the stage is set for widespread poor nutrition and a persistent large number of frank eating disorders.  Pause when you eat to appreciate the life it gives you.  Pause when you comment on someone else’s body.  What we say to each other day to day, in the cafeterias or when hanging out, create the atmosphere we live in, for better or worse.