Weapons of eating disorders?

Q: Have you seen this? A new eating disorder, orthorexia, is a fixation on eating “too healthy”. I was curious about ur thoughts since the description of the disorder sounds like clean-eating. Where does one draw the line?

A: Yep, I’m familiar with the term “orthorexia.” I’m more annoyed by it than anything, but mainly because the term is abused as if to say that anyone who focuses on what they consider to be healthier eating has to have some form of anxiety about it. It has to be disordering our lives. If anything, clean eating is about learning how to make healthier living a part of our lives.

Before I even begin, Dr. Steven Bratman – the creator of the term – says the following:

FYI: “orthorexia nervosa” is not currently a diagnosis, nor do I have any personal interest in making it one. It’s a description.

The fact is, the concept of orthorexia isn’t very new – it’s almost 15 years old. It hasn’t been picked up by the DSM (the manual that is used to determine and define mental disorders), so there isn’t a very hard-set list of rules for it. (In fact, the creator of the term has said on several occasions he has no desire to see it as such, either.) So no, I’m not surprised – in the least – that there are media outlets taking the term and wildly applying it to anyone who has any focus on healthy eating in their lives. There’s no standard by which they must abide in discussing it.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m well aware of the fact that there are anorexics who hide within the “clean eating community” because it’s generally accepted that most-if-not-all of us are food snobs and do, in fact, turn our noses up at certain foods processed in certain ways. However, regardless of how well you may eat, you are never removed from the reality that is… America. Your office will always have candy. Your meetings will always have those stupid bagels. You will always have more soft drink vending machines than there are the little machines that dispense the fruit and sandwiches. You still have to function within reality. At the point where you are removing yourself from reality because of an anxiety you develop over having the perfect diet? That’s where you should do a little thinking – your eating habits are disordering your lifestyle.

Clean eating, as I see it, isn’t a focus on nutrients – which is why I don’t discuss the specifics of them here. I’m not going to only eat my tomatoes with olive oil – because I want allllllll the lycopene – as a part of clean eating. Clean eating trusts the fact that the vast array of vegetable, fruits and proteins are going to nourish you by virtue of what they are. You don’t, essentially, have to obsess. You know that the default standard of clean eating – whole food – is going to have you covered.

To me, clean eating isn’t meant to be life, it is a part of life. If anything, as a former emotional eater, clean eating gave me back my life. Clean eating is about enlisting standards, and doing everything you can to live and abide by those standards.You can do that without it being considered disordered, and I’m pretty sure that we can all agree on that. If that were the case, any time a person acted on a standard that caused them to deviate from the norm, they’d be considered “disordered.”

And while I’m really cringing at the thought of shrugging off something that can be a mental health issue, when it comes to eating in this country – a country that has a habit of defending the very companies that serve them neurotoxins and call it “natural flavoring,” hands them little packets of cancer-causing agents and call it “sweetener” and sells them cheaply-made $0.99 dinners and won’t even identify the meat in the “meat patty” on the cover because they don’t know which meat is in it – if we were to define “normal” as “the current status quo,” and we were all expected to eat like everyone else? We’d all be screwed. All we have to do is look at the collective of Blacks in America and see how screwed we’ve been in trying to eat like everyone else.

That’s how you know that orthorexia is about more than the decision to eat healthier. It’s obviously imperative to have standards. And, as Bratman says, “I do not, and have never claimed that vegetarianism, veganism, or any other approach to eating healthy food is inherently an eating disorder!”

As obvious throughout Bratman’s entire site, he has some severe regrets for the way his term has kind of picked up legs and walked through the nation’s conversation about food. Throughout the comments on his site, he can be found explaining away the fact that the media is abusing the concept. He offers up half-hearted rebuttals against the people in the comments sections of his site who offer up their loved ones as “orthorexics” because “they have an unhealthy obsession with eating healthily.”

To the average American who is more inclined to use any and every excuse they can to justify their own unhealthy habits, they’d rather take the term and use that to imply that there’s wrong to have any standards in regards to food. It’s being used as a derailing tactic, and it’s annoying. This is where the media comes into play. Because of the way food debates are portrayed, the concept of “any” or “all” of us who are healthier eaters having actual eating disorders… or the idea that the attempt to try to eat healthier is somehow disordered is enough to get any journo’s attention. I doubt Bratman ever intended this.

In all honesty, I believe that anything can overtake people’s lives. While clean eating isn’t inherently disordered eating, it certainly can become such… and only you can make that determination for yourself. When I was first learning, I thrust myself into the center of every clean eating book I could, but learning about food was very different from obsessing over when I’d eat next or – even worse – pursuing and indulging in my next emotional eating binge. That knowledge I developed changed my life. So… while self-reflection is always important, the threat of being “called” (not “diagnosed,” as Bartman said himself) orthorexic shouldn’t be enough to turn one away from pursuing healthier eating. Considering the abuse of the term and in comparison to the eating habits of the rest of the country, I wonder how terrible of a thing that’d be.

Q&A Wednesday: Is Clean Eating An Eating Disorder? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Q&A Wednesday: What Happens When You Regress From Clean Eating?
2. Q&A Wednesday: Clean Eating For Tummy Troubles?
3. Q&A Wednesday: What IS Clean Eating, Anyway?

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: eating disorders, orthorexia, orthorexia nervosa, steven bratman

Q: I feel like I do not know what to eat to lose weight, so I skip or lessen my intake. I know this is counterproductive. How do I break this bad thinking/behavior to have a healthy-successful-leaner life?

A: What this sounds like, to me, is a general fear of food because of what it’s done to you. It’s a pretty disordered understanding of eating, because eating is your primary form of nourishment. It’s how you cleanse your body, care for your body, love your body. A fear of the very thing that sustains you because of weight… it actually saddens me. I understand it, but it saddens me.

Did I fear food? I don’t know. If I was conscious when I was eating – as opposed to mindlessly eating like a zombie – then I did feel something about it. I almost felt guilty eating, and felt like I shouldn’t be eating until I lost weight (and considering how much weight I would’ve needed to lose, I might’ve never been able to eat again.) Was that borne of fear of food? Perhaps.

To be honest, I had a lot of disordered understandings when it came to food and really, I’d stand to reason that a lot of women do. Just because, in the interest of marketing a product, we’re always being beaten over the head with messages that we’re imperfect and we accept that it has to do with the food. So, in turn, instead of changing the food we eat, we blame the quantity of food we eat… and that somehow translates into a fear of eating.

It’s strange and doesn’t feel logical to me now, but I get it. And it’s hard to embrace any kind of eating when you fear food because you believe food makes you “fat.” If being “less fat” is the goal, you believe – thanks to marketing and stories of models eating carrots and ice cubes – eating less will get it done.

It’s also a part of the mentality that makes dieting so easy to embrace. We believe that dieting works because dieting helps you “eat less,” especially since those carrot-and-ice-cube-eating-models “eat less” and, well, they’re beautiful.

Damn all that.

I’m human. I like food. I’m wired to like food. I’m also not built to compete with a marketing machine with enough money to chemically engineer food in a way that removes my ability to control myself.

Realizing that was part of what set me free of my fear of food.

I don’t feel fear of food, because I now know that food doesn’t have control over me. I don’t fear food because I now know that food is supposed to be enjoyable – fruits were made sweet to compel us to not only nourish ourselves, but repopulate the Earth with their seeds to grow more fruit. Knowing that makes me comfortable with the idea that I can actually enjoy the flavor of “sweet.” I don’t feel held captive when I’m in the presence of sweets.

So, to put it all bluntly, learning that I could make enjoyable meals with fruits and vegetables (and a little meat) and that these meals resulted in weight loss was so exciting for me that my relationship with food was completely changed. I was too busy trying to learn how to cook and tasting new flavors. Being afraid of food was no longer an issue. I could eat, enjoy life and still maintain my weight.

You kind of have to put faith into it. You just have to. You have to understand that the fruits and vegetables that we grow are the things we’re supposed to eat, and should never be distrusted in a fashion that makes you not want to eat.

And what makes this “counter-productive,” as she called it?

Because stress about the inability to eat is the only source of stress for man, his body became used to the eventual chain of events. His body knows: Lots of stress = lack of food coming in. How did his body react? His body decided to hold on to what it had – by way of diminishing the amount of energy his body could exert all at one time, by way of making sure his body took a very long time to lose weight, by way of making sure it held onto every pound and fat cell it could. This bodily reaction would only further compel man to step up his hunting skills… why? Because he didn’t want to feel that way! He didn’t want his family to feel that way! He had to get his caveman hustle on! When man was finally able to tackle that antelope or whatever-what-have-you, the fats and salts in the meat were sooooo satisfying that they would cure man of the bodily reaction to stress.

Excerpted from Telling A Tale of Stress and Emotional Eating | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

Even though that post talked mainly about stress, the body’s reaction to “there’s no food coming in” is always the same. It results in weight loss becoming more difficult.

What would I suggest? I’d suggest embracing a lifestyle that consists of primarily fruits and vegetables, with whichever meats you prefer served in portions no larger than the size of your hand. Make yourself nice dishes that taste wonderfully, and keep yourself from feeling too hungry. Pace yourself – don’t expect overnight success – and you will do just fine.

Is there anyone else out there who has felt this way? How are you dealing with it? How did you cope with your fear?

Q&A Wednesday: I Don’t Trust Food! I’m Afraid To Eat! is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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1. Can We Really Trust Nutrition Labels?
2. Q&A Wednesday: How Much Fat Is OK In My Food?
3. Q&A Wednesday: I Work In Fast Food And Want To Lose Weight! Help!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dieting, disordered eating, disorders, eating disorders, fear of food

Firstly, I see all white women, almost all brunettes.

I also see emotional eating.

You know why I see emotional eating? Look at what they’re “indulging” in. They’re indulging in cupcakes. Cakes. Pies. Comfort food. Things that are good for making you feel. You can’t eat emotionally on broccoli (unless your Mom loved you with broccoli… and that’s a tad bit rare.) It doesn’t have the tools – read: sugar and fat and salt – to give you what you’re looking for.

I see women eating in silence. In hiding. I mean, because you’re overindulging so much that surely, you can’t eat this way in front of another human being, right?

I see women who were never raised to understand that there’s no shame in enjoying the pleasures of food. I see women who were never given the tools to destress and detach themselves from their day.

There was a movie I saw once, where the girl was an active cutter. She used cutting herself as a way of relaxing and decoupling from the stresses in her day to day life. I bring this up because she was painfully meticulous about it. She’d carry her cutting kit with her everywhere she went. She had a little routine to her set up, too – she’d retrieve her kit, open it, lay out her tools (first aid, blade, sharpener), sharpen her cutting tool, exhale… and go to work.

This reminds me of that.

I see addiction. From the DSM IV:

• Preoccupation with use of the chemical between periods of use.
• Using more of the chemical than had been anticipated.
• The development of tolerance to the chemical in question.
• A characteristic withdrawal syndrome from the chemical.
• Use of the chemical to avoid or control withdrawal symptoms.
• Repeated efforts to cut back or stop the drug use.
• Intoxication at inappropriate times (such as at work), or when withdrawal interferes with daily functioning (such as when hangover makes person too sick to go to work).
• A reduction in social, occupational or recreational activities in favor of further substance use.
• Continued substance use in spite of the individual having suffered social, emotional, or physical problems related to drug use.

I see a few of those embodied in this picture.

Can you imagine seeking pleasure from something that, when you finally bite into it, doesn’t even compel you to crack a smile? I mean, I wrote a while back a post about being afraid of food… and this is what I see, here. Women who are afraid of food in a sense that compels them to deal with the duality of “knowing better” but being addicted to the feeling they get from the food… and having no one to talk to about food addiction do things like this. (the people around them may even say things like “you’re supposed to be addicted to food! duh!” or “food isn’t an addiction. you just have no self control.”)

I know lots of people normalize this kind of behavior – “There’s nothing wrong with this… I do this all the time, and I’m just fine…” but it worries me. The woman sitting in the bathroom near the toilet? Terribly troubling. The woman hugging the pie in the bathroom? Cringeworthy. Food shouldn’t “love you” like that.

The Society Pages opens their post on these paintings as follows:

Growing up in America, we learn that sweets and junk food are “guilty pleasures.” Women, especially, are supposed to refrain from such indulgences.  And, if they cannot — if they, for example, desire more than that modest slice of cake served to each birthday guest — then they should feel not only guilt, but shame.  For overindulging is grotesque and it, accordingly, should be hidden and kept secret.

This is the cultural background to Lee Price‘s realist paintings of women (mostly her) eating sweets and junk food.  She draws two contrasts.  First, she makes very public something we are supposed to do only in private.  Not only do the paintings literally display the transgression, the birds eye view and frequent nudity exaggerates the sheer display of the indulgence.  And, second, she takes something that is supposedly disgusting and shameful and presents it in a medium associated with (high) art, challenging the association of indulgence with poor character and a lack of refinement.  Fascinating. [source]

I must admit, though, that the fact that they don’t bring up the fact that these images embody the characteristics of addiction or the visuals of emotional eating is troublesome.. but it just lets me know that there’s a lot of work to do in regards to getting out the message.

What do you see, here? Do you see yourself in any of these images? I know I did.

Portraits of Addiction: What Do Your See? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. What Is Sugar Addiction?
2. Take The Quiz: Do You Have An Unhealthy Food Addiction?
3. The Four-Week Plan For Curbing Your Sugar Addiction

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 22 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: addiction, art, binging, disordered eating, eating disorder, eating disorders, emotional eating, food guilt, food shaming, guilt, habits, lee price, shame, society, women

Last week, a young woman who underwent gastric bypass surgery came about as having now suffering from anorexia nervosa, and we now know she’s not the only one. Chevese Turner, a 43-year-old woman from Maryland, has also come forward with a post-op eating disorder, crediting her gastric bypass surgery for her bulimia. She says the surgery didn’t teach her proper eating habits, and she continued to gorge on food, but the small size of her stomach forced her to purge and vomit. This is getting serious, folks. There is too much hype surrounding the “no diet, no exercise” weight loss methods, and you don’t want to pay for you tiny waist with your life.

Just because the surgery is accessible to you, doesn’t mean you should do it. Dr. Lauren Grunebaum, a psychotherapist specialized in treating individuals and families with eating disorders, agrees. “The surgery merely put a band-aid on the problem,” she says.

“These women used unhealthy eating to deal with emotional problems prior to their surgery,” she explains. “Simply having the surgery to shrink their stomachs did nothing to help them find healthier coping mechanisms.”

Your health should be your number one concern when considering any form of weight loss. Yes, people are motivated to lose weight based on the way they look, that’s probably not going to change. But will you like the way you look when your hair falls out, your liver and kidneys go into failure, and you’re strapped to a hospital bed, being force-fed carrot mush through tubes shoved up your nostrils?

This is serious business, my friends. Women are dying every day from eating disorders, and now it seems the very surgery that is promoted to stop an unhealthy eating lifestyle is causing it instead. Surgery is dangerous and it’s not sustainable.

This is what Turner had to say to ABC News:

“I had always struggled with binge eating, and my relationships with food didn’t change just because of the lap band. Even though binging is really painful when your stomach is restricted like that, I would still binge knowing that I would throw it up. I felt like finally I could be bulimic, like this was what I wanted all along.”

This is scary, and no one should have to suffer through this, especially since this is preventable. If we were more willing to encourage the hard (but sustainable) practices of proper nutrition and exercise, as opposed to quick (but painful) fixes of surgery, maybe we could finally get the obesity epidemic, and the eating disorder epidemic, under control.

Dr. Grunebaum adds, “Unless an individual deals with the underlying issues that led to the unhealthy eating/starving, she will go right back to them in one form or another.”

I’m hoping more women out there will heed this call and seriously reflect on what kind of life they want to live. And paramount to that, how long they want to live that life. Because while nutrition and exercise will add years to your life, surgery could all-too easily take it away.

Now, I don’t particularly care for the preachy end of the post, but I do think it’s an interesting situation. Weight loss surgery resulting in the development of an eating disorder?

Thoughts?

From Bypass To Bulimia? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 24 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bulimia, bypass, eating disorders, gastric bypass, weight loss surgery

Taken from Yahoo! News:

“In my eyes, I thought my children were perfect,” the first lady said. “I didn’t see the changes.”

But the family’s pediatrician, she said, kept a close eye on trends in African-American children and “warned that he was concerned that something was getting off-balance.” The doctor “cautioned me that I had to take a look at my own children’s BMI,” or body mass index, the first lady said.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that there were people who were actually put off by her statements publicly addressing Sasha and Malia’s weight. Actually, don’t. Hold that thought.

I’m not surprised because honestly, this kind of uproar is why our children are in such dire straits as it is. Did you know that one in three children develop type 2 diabetes; that one out of every two Black children in America develop type 2 diabetes? That, although being overweight doesn’t cause these directly, it absolutely serves as a symptom that goes hand in hand as the result of a larger problem?

So… in knowing this, the blogosphere has still decided that it doesn’t make sense that the pediatrician might say to the First Lady, “Perhaps you should keep an eye out for your daughter… we don’t know if this has to do with a genetic predisposition, a distribution of the population being predisposed to foods that cause these issues (i.e. too many Blacks living in environments that encourage unhealthy eating), or whatever… but just be careful and keep an eye on that number.” Now, you can imagine my surprise.

I am understanding why my former doctor was so apprehensive about discussing my weight with me. Now, I am understanding how the conversation about health, weight, and where the two actually merge is able to be derailed so easily. Now, I see what the problem is. Are we that easily offended by conversations about weight that we think this kind of chat must remain private? Do we hold so fast to proving to everyone that we are the Joneses (as opposed to keeping up with them) that anyone showing that their armor has a chink in it gets the side eye?

Apparently, First Lady Obama (since bloggers tend to forget that the Obamas have titles) did just that.

A fundamental lack of understanding of what was said, it seems, is what’s causing the uproar. Couple that with an article claiming she put her girls on a diet, and you’ve got the ingredients for a very spicy topic. Although the link from the Daily Mail (a verrrrrry reputable source… that’s sarcasm, by the way) is titled “Reform begins at home: Michelle Obama puts daughters on a diet as she launches anti-obesity campaign,” the only information you will find within includes the following:

Michelle Obama started a campaign to tackle childhood obesity in the U.S. on a personal vein – with an admission that her own daughters were becoming overweight before a diet nipped the problem in the bud.

The First Lady said that she had been warned by the family paediatrician that ‘something was getting out of balance’ with her two children Malia 11, and Sasha, 8.

‘In my eyes I thought my children were perfect – I didn’t see the changes,’ Mrs Obama said at an event organised by US health officials.

The girls then had to adhere to new ground rules – less burgers, low-fat milk, and fruits and water instead of sugary drinks; the change was significant, she said.

Doesn’t sound like a diet to me. Sounds like a lifestyle change. Too bad neither the HuffPo writer nor the StrollerDerby writer tended to that. Imagine how surprised I am.

Firstly, we have an inability to understand the quote about something being “out of balance.” Secondly, we have a failure to understand what a diet is. It’s not always of the “grapefruit/mashed potato/banana diet” ilk. Lastly, it’s the Daily Mail. I don’t know that I’d opt for that as the source of my anything. The heartfelt writings about eating disorders are… meaningful dialogue, but sorely misplaced.

If we want to talk to our young girls about their weight and their health, fine! Lets! Lets make sure that we explain to them the difference between losing weight for health and losing weight for aesthetic purposes. Let’s make sure that we talk to them what the body mass index (or BMI) actually is, and the difference between the BMI’s definition of “overweight” and society’s definition of “overweight.” Let’s make sure that we teach them the importance of good longlasting health. Let’s make sure that we help them understand how beautiful they are, how strong they are, how much world they will have to fight and face every day, how people will use words like “fat” even when they’re rail thin just to try to break them down and break their hearts, and how none of it will make a difference unless they own those understandings.

And most importantly, let’s make sure that we enter those conversations with healthy understandings of the above as well. ‘Cause if I see any more bloggers losing their minds over something so simple and stupid, I’m loading up my paintball gun.

First Lady Obama “Puts Daughters On Diet,” Blogosphere Goes Nuts is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blackness, eating disorders, obama

I can remember.

Approximately 4 months after I had my daughter, I was starving and didn’t have much food in the fridge… so I decided I was going to order a pizza. I was thankful that they had online ordering, so that I didn’t have to deal with the order taker on the phone remembering the details that go along with my particular phone number.

“Oh, you want the chicken alfredo pizza like you ordered the other day?”

No thanks, dude. I could just place my little order online, and wait to sign the little receipt.

This time, I was acutely aware of the fact that ordering all these pizzas so often was only going to make me fat. (I was already well over 300 lbs at this point.) I knew I shouldn’t be doing all this ordering… but I was struggling with the fact that I was starving to the point where I thought I was gon’ die. Die… do y’all hear me? Die.

So… I made a resolution with myself. I’d order the pizza, eat as much of it as I wanted and then throw it all up afterwards. Okay, cool.

Pizza arrives, and I immediately smash at least half of it. I give myself a little time to recognize what I’ve done, then I go over to the sink and shove a butterknife down my throat.

Nothing happened. I immediately panicked. I shoved it even further down my throat. Again, nothing.

I was completely mortified. My plan was foiled. I wouldn’t be vomiting up any pizza that night. But I’d spend the rest of the night confused and crying about it. I took that as a sign from The Powers That Be that I had no business trying to puke up any food, and that if I was going to lose weight… I’d be doing it The Way That Makes Sense.

Although I want to giggle at the idea of being able to stick a whole butterknife down my throat and have nothing happen, I can only smirk at it because this entire situation reminds me of how desperate I was to get beyond this “fat thing” and how I was so lost and confused about why I’d scarf down [what I'd definitely consider] too much food, only to be starving again a few hours later.

I can remember.

I know what it’s like to live in a world where everyone’s in DC, telling you to “Meet us in Los Angeles,” and not handing you a map. You’ve got a long way to go and no idea how to get there. Sure, you might know to just travel west… but that’s about it. Eventually, “travelling west” isn’t going to cut it anymore… and might leave you just as lost as you were before you began.

That’s what this weight thing feels like. Everyone’s telling me to “get skinny,” and no one’s telling me how. The only message I hear is “lose the weight, it’s disgusting” – and I hear it from everyone around me – and I become even more frantic in my quest to rid myself of this…. this thing that society says is so disgusting and deplorable..

…and then, I feel like I’ve hit the holy grail of logic: If my body doesn’t digest the food, I don’t have to deal with the weight, right? So, I try to starve myself, but then I miss having food in my mouth. I start to miss tasting flavors. I miss the texture of food sliding down my throat. I miss that “full” feeling…

…and then, before I know it, I think I’ve hit paydirt: I won’t starve myself! I’ll eat whatever I want! I’ll just puke it back up and not have to worry about putting on the weight. Boom. Easy. Except… it wasn’t so easy, at least for me.

The number of women who’ve spoken to me and shared with me that they’ve suffered from eating disorders since I’ve began this site is… let’s just say its in the triple digits. At least. And, for “colored girls,” that’s a lot. A lot more than our community seems to acknowledge, especially since every time the topic of eating disorders comes up among colored girls, the conversation is always squashed with “What? That’s white girl shit.”

I do not write this post to stand up on a soap box and proclaim that I have the answer to the problem that eating disorders present… because in my mind (and in my heart), eating disorders are, again, a symptom of a larger problem that no one seems to have the desire to address (probably because no one can make money off of it.) We all hate something that we have no idea how to get rid of… because we’re all listening to people who stand to make money off of keeping us confused and hopeless. (I’m just sayin’ – if you didn’t already know that you could use a container of water, the shake weight might not’ve made those guys millionaires.) We all hate something that we have no idea how to get rid of… even if it means that we wind up hating ourselves in the process. We all succumb to a cycle that profits from our failure… a cycle that perpetuates our failure intentionally.

I didn’t hate myself for being fat – but that’s not because I had this amazingly inflated sense of self-esteem, it was because I refused to hate myself… regardless of how fat I was. I used to tell myself that I had plenty of reasons to love myself regardless of how unattractive society made me feel as a fat woman… and I worked hard to make sure that my community could see my worth even if their first instinct was to devalue me based on my looks. But now, I realize the problem.

The problem wasn’t that I wanted someone to value me in ways beyond my appearance. The problem was that I was compelled to do so in response to feeling as if I was worthless for being fat. What compels a woman to feel so helpless, so hopeless and so worthless that she’d malnourish her body in order to meet the standards of people who don’t know her? Women admit to allowing their hair and teeth to fall out just so that they can remain (or reclaim) thin… women admit to fainting in the middle of workout routines… women admitting to living and thriving on laxatives to “empty out” and hoping to “balance out” at the end of the day… women admitting to binging on food only to vomit it up, feel guilt about the vomit and lick up their own vomit… we’re willing to ignore this as a community because it’s easier to write it off as “white girl shit?” Word?

I already have a problem with the way no one seems to care that little Black girls are growing up not understanding their history, their culture, their feelings and urges, their emotions, their bodies or their place in the world. Now, they cannot understand their desires? Their desire, their need to do the very thing evolution compels them to do to survive? Eat? We can’t teach them how to listen to their bodies? We can’t tell them that our bodies give us signals every day? We can’t tell them that it’s okay to NOT be rail thin, and that that’s never a reason to harm ourselves or treat ourselves poorly or intentionally malnourish ourselves?

The women who’ve shared their story with me, regardless of color, are all fearful of talking about weight. If they obsess over it too much, they fear sliding back into that trap of “fat is bad… must rid body of fat by any means necessary.” How do you change that? Do you start with society? Or do you start with telling individual women to appreciate themselves regardless of size? Or do you tell them that it’s okay to want to look different, to think you could look better… but it’s never worth risking your life or jeopardizing your health? Do we campaign against that hatred and that thing that puts all of a woman’s worth in her appearance?

I mean, all this time that I’ve been saying that women need to put their health first… maybe this will help people understand why. There are a ton of ways to lose weight, but are you jeopardizing your health in the process? Are you killing yourself to lose weight? Do you demonize fat to the point where it hinders your ability to love yourself? There are a billion ways to lose weight… only one way to soundly and sanely keep it off. No one’s talking about that part, though.

I am an advocate for therapy. I don’t care about stigmas – as far as I’m concerned, stupid stigmas compelled me to yo-yo diet and wind up worse off than I’d ever been before – and I don’t care about the opinions of people who don’t care about me… or even know me. I am an advocate for women acknowledging their weaknesses and speaking with someone who is trained to help you develop a sound and sane path to wellness. I’m also keenly aware of the stigma within the Black community regarding seeing a therapist – either it’s “white girl shit,” it’s “for crazy people… and you’re not crazy, you just don’t wanna be fat anymore… that’s not crazy” or it’s “immoral.. you don’t need a therapist, you need to go speak to a pastor.”

With all due respect, every single one of those answers is inappropriate and incorrect.

As I said before, I didn’t write this post to appear as if I’m on a soapbox and looking down at anyone as if I have all the answers. I asked more than enough questions in this post to make it clear that I don’t have the answers… I just have the understanding. I have the confusion. I have the hurt, the fear and the empathy for women who have gone through this and are still going through this… and would rather remain overweight (even though they may still secretely hate fat) than look at the reasons they may have gained the weight in the first place, for fear of re-developing their eating disorder.

I write this for awareness. I write this in the hopes that the mothers who read my site will hug their daughters a little tighter, praise them for being intelligent and loving human beings who may feel uncomfortable with their bodies, but should never see that as a reason to jeopardize their health. Hell, I write this in hopes that the women who read my site will hug themselves a little tighter, praise themselves for being intelligent and loving human beings who may feel uncomfortable with their bodies, but should never see that as a reason to jeopardize their health. I write this hoping that we will realize how we’ve let this fat hatred push us to a painful desperation that causes us to risk our lives to be thin. I write this in the hopes that we will create environments that will encourage women to (a) no longer hate themselves for not wanting to change, (b) no longer hate themselves for wanting to change but not understanding why it’s so hard and (c) no longer feel compelled to hate or shame other women for being in different places in their journey.. because we all know the pressures involved with weight in this society. Black, White, Latina, Asian, whatever.

I write this for all the Black women I know and love – even the ones who e-mail me that I’ve never met – who are just done with the dieting, done with the pain, done with the self-hatred, done with the pressure, done with it all. I’m writing this for each woman who is ready to stop and just… find God within herself… and love her… fiercely.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Eating Disorders When Dieting Wasn’t Enuf is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. “Black Women Are Too Fat To Have Eating Disorders!”
2. Considered Keeping a Food Diary?
3. Weekend WTF: Have You Considered Trying The Poop Burger?

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 32 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: binge eating, culture, eating disorders, society, stigmas, white girl stuff