Special K has come out with numerous television commercials promoting their Special K diet plan.
Their latest ad features a modelesque woman sitting at the breakfast table, staring forlornly at her breakfast bowl. Then, she opens her cabinet and smiles at the array of Special K cereals at her disposal.
In the opening scene of the commercial, you can clearly see the model’s protruding collarbone as she pushes her bowl away. It also doesn’t help that the model is wearing a boat-neck sweatshirt which greatly accentuates her collarbone.
It is absolutely ridiculous that Special K is insinuating the already-thin model needs to lose weight (or that someone that thin would actually think she needs to lose weight).
This ad is another example of how the media projects an unrealistic idea of thin. While Special K might be playing on the fact that women are unsatisfied with their bodies at any size, this is not the message they should be promoting. Rather, Special K should be promoting body acceptance.
The Kardashian sisters peddle QuickTrim diet supplements despite "loving" their curves.
When the reality show “Keeping up with the Kardashians” debuted in 2007, I remember being very happy to see that Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian represented a curvier body type.
Thanks to the Kardashian sisters, young women could finally be proud of having hips, breasts, and a butt.
Unfortunately, Khloe Kardashian has been plagued by pregnancy rumors in the media lately, due to a slight weight gain.
Always blunt, Khloe “defended” her weight gain by admitting to US Weekly, “I’m not pregnant, I’m just fat.”
Though the Kardashians have always claimed to love and embrace their curves, they are now endorsing a weight loss supplement called QuickTrim. It seems as though the Kardashians have fallen prey to Hollywood’s narrow standards of beauty.
I think the Kardashians’ endorsement of QuickTrim sends a confusing message to young women. While the Kardashians claim to represent a curvier body type, by endorsing a diet supplement, they are just buying into Hollywood’s standards of thin.
Kourtney, Kim and Khloe Kardashian strut their stuff.
Maddy Bohannon hales from Menlo Park, California. She is senior at the University of San Francisco and will graduate with a B.A. in Communication Studies and a minor in Psychology. She is a self -professed human pop culture trivia dictionary (she’ll be happy to be your celebrity trivia lifeline on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”). In her free time, Maddy can be found flipping through the pages of celebrity tabloids and or enjoying all of what the wonderful city of San Francisco has to offer (AKA, the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market, Golden Gate Park, and Bi-Rite Creamery).
Kai Hibbard after her experience on "The Biggest Loser"
They laugh, they cry, they shed half their body weight!
Okay, admittedly I have never seen a full episode of NBC’s “The Biggest Loser,” but apparently, I’m in the minority. Since 2004, viewers in more than 90 countries have watched overweight contestants swap unhealthy habits for wholesome lifestyles, often emerging as toned and taut finalists vying for the ultimate clean-living reward: cold, hard cash.
While the contestants clearly and very, very literally work their butts off for the glory of being crowned “The Biggest Loser,” the breakneck speed at which some shed pounds can often seems too good to be true.
And apparently, it is.
Body Love Wellness founder Golda Poretsky recently spoke with Season 3 finalist Kai Hibbard about her experiences on the hit show, and Hibbard’s side of the story isn’t pretty. Nor is it anything like the warm and fuzzy accounts I’ve heard from “The Biggest Loser” fans who tune in every week.
Hibbard exposes a long list of behind-the-scenes transgressions, but the most startling is that participating in “The Biggest Loser” led her to develop an eating disorder.
You can read the full three-part interview at Poretsky’s site (warning: it’s full of potential triggers for anyone struggling with an eating disorder), but below are a few choice quotes:
“There was a registered dietician[sic] that was supposed to be helping [the contestants at the ranch] as well…but every time she tried to give us advice…the crew or production would step in and tell us that we were not to listen to anybody except our trainers. And my trainer’s a nice person, but I have no idea what she had for a nutritional background at all.”
“It gave me a really fun eating disorder that I battle every day, and it also messed up my mental body image because the lighter I got during that TV show, the more I hated my body… I do still struggle [with an eating disorder]. I do. My husband says I’m still afraid of food…I’m still pretty messed up from the show. It doesn’t help that when I go in public…the first thing they usually ask me is ‘what do you weigh now?’”
“I feel…that I have a responsibility to counteract some of the harm that that show does. Because I took a piece of being that problem, I now own a piece of being the solution…When I have people come to me crying, telling me how hard they work and how they log their food and how they’ve done everything they could and [they ask] ‘Why can’t I lose 12 pounds in a week like you?’ I feel a responsibility to get out there and go, ‘You know what? Sue me if you want to, NBC, but I’m telling these people, I didn’t lose 12 pounds in a week. It didn’t happen. It wasn’t a week. And even when it looks like I lost 12 pounds in a week…I was so severely dehydrated that I was completely unhealthy.”
Those are some serious allegations, and whether or not you believe them is up to you. But to complicate the sticky situation further, Kai promotes a line of diet pills and gushes about them on her web site.
She claims she lost weight “without exercising or changing my diet!” Ugh. Isn’t this contradicting every reason she might have had to expose the harsh extremes on the set of “The Biggest Loser”? If you’re speaking out against the show because you “feel a responsibility” to divulge the dangers of overboard weight-loss tactics, what are you doing promoting an appetite suppressant?
But as Poretsky points out on her site, “She may think that weight loss is an appropriate goal, and still be offended and harmed by her treatment and the treatment of her fellow contestants.” Good point. And something to think about next time you tune in to watch a too-good-to-be-true TV moment.
An earlier version of this post appears at the author’s personal blog.
There is a scale in my bathroom. It is not my scale, but it is in my space. Every time I take a shower, I drop my clothes next to it and look at it and feel it look at me. Like it’s challenging me.
I have an interesting history with scales. Although I can remember being dissatisfied with my body from a young age, I can’t ever really remember being dissatisfied with my weight, specifically. I can’t remember a time where I weighed “too much” or even a time where I was aware of what I weighed at all. I was aware that I was fatter than the other girls, but there was no number attached to it. It was an idea, a notion. But it was strong enough, even without a specific number, to affect the way I felt about my body and myself and to keep me locked in disordered eating patterns for years.
Even at the height of my disordered eating habits, I wasn’t weighing myself. It wasn’t because I wasn’t concerned with how fat I was—trust me, I was—but because in everything I had ever read about eating disorders, a preoccupation with scales was one of the biggest symptoms, and I refused to be sick. I refused to be disordered. I stepped on the scale at the doctor’s office and that was it. I told my friends how I didn’t weigh myself, how I didn’t care about some stupid number. I acted like this made my eating behaviors OK, like there was nothing wrong with me or the way I treated myself as long as I wasn’t focused on a number, like nobody would notice how much trouble I was in as long as I wasn’t outwardly obsessed with my body. And for the most part, it worked.
It’s important to note that I have never had an officially diagnosed eating disorder. For a year in high school, I secretly kept a food journal and restricted myself to 900 calories a day. I watched myself turn from a size 18-sometimes-16 to a size 14-sometimes-12 and acted like I had no idea where the weight was going, like it was some natural occurrence that I had no part in.
I was so good at hiding my behavior behind my anti-scale rhetoric. In fact, I was downright body positive, encouraging my friends to throw out their own scales and embrace their figures and ignore the sizes stitched into their jeans even as I obsessively tracked the number of calories going into my body every day. Those behaviors continued into college, where I eventually ended up limiting myself to one meal a day. I was hungry so often that I lost my ability to recognize what hunger felt like. But I fit no diagnostic criteria; I did not weigh myself; I even wrote term papers about fatphobia in feminism: as far as I was concerned, I was nowhere near sick.
Through a lot of struggle and reflection, I eventually recognized that I had a problem and took steps to overcome it. Now I eat well. I count nothing. I focus on how foods make my body feel rather than how they make me look. It’s been a struggle, but I’m the happiest with my body that I have ever been; 99% of the time I think I look fantastic.
So yesterday, I got on that bathroom scale. I got tired of it challenging me, so I stepped onto it, confident that I was finally ready to see what it had to tell me. I wasn’t ready for what came next.
The number that came up was the highest I’d seen on a scale since I was 17. As soon as that realization hit me, I felt sick. As though by reflex, I started considering the possibility of skipping breakfast, thinking about how easy it would be to replace lunch with coffee, imagining myself explaining to my roommates that I was eating a tiny dinner because money was tight.
It took me ten minutes of mental calorie-counting to realize what I was doing. Suddenly, I was angry. I was ashamed at myself for immediately falling into those thoughts, thoughts I hadn’t had in nearly two years. I was furious that something that I thought I had beaten had come back so effortlessly, had reappeared and taken control as though it had never gone away at all.
And that’s the point of this, I suppose: these things don’t just go away. Not after six months or a year or two years. Maybe not at all — I don’t know.
I’m mostly good at fighting off my food demons, good at ignoring or counteracting anti-fat messages, good at loving my body and loving myself. But there are still moments that catch me by surprise, where the voice of my past sneaks in and whispers to me: “Well, you did it once and you turned out alright, didn’t you? What’s the harm in doing it again? You weren’t even sick, really.” Those moments are hard. They are scarce, but they are scary.
I thought facing the scale would be a victory. I thought it would be a sign of my full recovery. I thought I was ready, that I was better. Now I realize that perhaps I’m not, that perhaps facing a scale on a regular basis is not something that I can handle. More importantly, I think, is that it is not something I need to handle. I don’t need to “beat” that scale. I have nothing to prove, except that I am here, and that I am happy, and that I am healthy. And if staying healthy means never stepping on a bathroom scale again, then so be it.
Jillian Michaels, the in-your-face trainer from NBC’s extreme weight-loss competition “The Biggest Loser,” is facing not one, not two, but three lawsuits over the “Maximum Strength Calorie Control” diet supplement she endorses. Three separate women have filed lawsuits claiming that the pills are ineffective and potentially dangerous.
Despite the claims on the box, these pills will not make you look like this woman.
That the pills don’t work is no surprise—have diet pills ever worked?—but a lot of Michaels’ fans have been expressing disappointment that she would endorse such a product in the first place. Michaels has always claimed to be anti-pill, instead insisting that diet and exercise alone should be enough to make any body into, well, her body.
To those who have lost faith in their fitness hero, I can only say this: if you are surprised, you are not paying attention. Someone who endorses The Biggest Loser’s wildly unhealthy combination of undereating and overexercising (contestants would often intentionally dehydrate themselves to shed pounds) pretty obviously doesn’t have anyone’s best health interests in mind. But because the narrative spun around The Biggest Loser is one of hope and change and reinvention and finally being the person you always wanted to be and blah blah blah, it’s understandable how audiences, especially those with their own body concerns, eventually come to put trust in a figure like Michaels.
So what does it mean when a trusted fitness guru with a culturally ideal body tells you it’s OK to take a pill? Well, you’re probably going to take a pill. And that’s why I have absolutely no sympathy for Michaels in this situation. She’s being irresponsible and she knows it. She’s participating in a cultural exercise that puts a failure to achieve an “ideal” body squarely on the shoulders of an individual. She’s perpetuating an impossible ideal and she’s lying about how to reach it—she’s lying by insisting that it can even be reached by the average person.
Michaels has dedicated her life to building this body, but tells dieters that they can achieve similar results through a pill.
What her popularity masks is that fitness is her job. The reason she looks the way she does is that she dedicates her entire life to it. Her world is a gym and a carefully planned menu of appropriate foods designed to give her those arms and those legs and those abs. She doesn’t take those pills and she knows that taking those pills isn’t going to help you, yet she tells you to take them anyway because it’s going to put dollars in her pocket and in the pockets of countless executives in suits whose interests begin and end with how much money they made this quarter.
To the women who took these pills with the hope that they would be the end of a struggle: I feel for you. I hope that you will one day go to the gym because it makes you feel strong and not because it might make you thin. I hope that you find peace in the body that you have been given.
To Jillian Michaels: I hope that one day you realize the influence that you wield, and that you choose to use it for good rather than to sell yet another fruitless, harmful dream.
A friend of mine recently sent me this video in which little Sophie, with the help of her mother, sends out an important message via YouTube. The title seems like a big DUH (“Beauty is Not How Skinny You Are”), but it surely is a message we don’t hear enough. The message extends past dissatisfaction with body weight as Sophie asks the audience “Why are you trying to look like someone else?”:
Why are we trying to look like someone else? Why do companies want us to want to look like someone else?
You might think, “I’m not trying to look like someone else!”, but the truth is that social standards of beauty say that we are only attractive if we have certain physical attributes. These physical attributes tend to come from a select pool of celebrities, too.
Just glancing at the magazine racks as I do my grocery shopping, I can’t escape constant reminders that I, too, can get Michelle Obama’s arms, or Cameron Diaz’s abs, or follow Britney’s quick weight loss plan. How do I copy Kristin Stewart’s outfit, or Beyonce’s hair? My complexion is most like Halle Berry’s, and here is a list of lipstick shades she wears! These magazines say that I, too, can be glamorous, and so can you–we just need to alter our appearances to match Hollywood standards.
As technology advances, we are not limited to simply changing workouts or getting new haircuts! A wide array of reality shows about cosmetic surgery inform us that we have new options!
A contestand from "The Swan" after having plastic surgery. Is this the cost of beauty?
Shows like The Swan (2004-2005), which About-Face protested, and ABC’s Extreme Makeover (2002-2007) portray cosmetic surgery as just another makeover. There is also MTV’s I Want a Famous Face (2004-2005), which documents people who go through surgery and makeovers to look more like the certain celebrities.
As rates of cosmetic surgery rise, more and more people request specific celebrities’ features. The most requested celebrity nose is Jessica Alba’s. Women are asking for collagen injections to get Angelina Jolie’s lips. There are people asking specifically for Scarlett Johansson’s eyes. Would you want to go under the knife to look like your favorite celebrity?
With these shows and ads telling me that looking like my favorite celebrity is as easy as 1, 2, 3, little Sophie’s voice pops back into my head: “Why are you trying to look like someone else?”
Little can remind us more of the beauty of our individuality than a child’s voice reminding us that “You are unique.” Sophie tells the viewer that there will never be another person like them, so why would we want to look like someone else?
“Do you want me to look like somebody else?” she asks. Hearing that from a young girl is almost heartbreaking because we imagine that girls as little as Sophie should be free from the media influences that tell them to change.
If we don’t want Sophie to change and doubt her own uniqueness, why would we want to change ourselves? As Sophie repeats the question “Why do you want to look like someone else?”, I find that I can’t come up with a better answer than “I don’t.”
Do you want to look like someone else? Why or why not?
–Tea
Tea is a college student in Berkeley studying Art and Sociology. While working at a café, she realized there was a lot of negative body talk floating around and wanted to encourage women to rethink the roles their bodies have in their lives. She hopes they would embrace their bodies (and minds!) rather than aspire towards unattainable ideals. What good is a body if you can’t enjoy it? When she’s not blogging for About Face, she writes, runs a photography business, and cuddles up with good books.
Mauritanian girls forced to gain large amounts of weight so they will be more appealing to men
Some things simply exhaust me. An article in the October 2009 issue of Marie Claire magazine, titled “Forced to be Fat”, is one of them. It also made me sad, angry and horrified. And you know what? It made me a little bit jealous.
In the country of Mauritania, girls and young women are often force-fed up to 16,000 calories a day to make them fat. The article states:
Now big women are back in vogue, and the custom of funneling rich food into young girls like geese farmed for foie gras is once again thriving unchecked…Government figures from before the 2008 coup put the rate at 50 to 60 percent in rural areas and 20 to 30 percent in cities. “The practice is re-emerging because men still find mounds of female flesh comforting and erotic,” explains Seyid Ould Seyid, a Mauritanian male journalist. “The attraction is ingrained from birth.”
Let me be clear: The practice of force-feeding is barbaric and abusive. It’s an invasion of your body no less violent than rape. Picture a young girl in Mauritania sent by her parents to a remote hut where she is force fed gruel and animal fat. She feels sick, scared and alone.
But while you’re at it, also picture a young girl in the United States, laying alone on the bathroom floor after binging on so much food she vomits it all up. She feels sick, scared, and alone. Both are equally painful and unfair. Neither girl is able to have a healthy relationship with their own body.
Here is my disclaimer: I am a fat woman. I weight over 250 pounds and wear a size 22. And I have wrestled the eating disorder monsters most of my life. I have binged to the point of vomiting. I have starved myself dizzy on lemonade and maple syrup fad diets.
This Mauritanian women fits her cultural beauty standards.
Can you blame me for fantasizing about living in a country where men would flock to my “mounds of female flesh”? Ironically, I think I even experienced this cultural difference when I took a cab and was actually proposed to by the Somali cab driver who, upon finding out I was single, replied that he would marry me because I was the “perfect size”.
I am struck by the realization that women’s bodies are considered beautiful only in how they appeal to men. As the article states, Mauritania’s view of beauty is the United State’s obsession with super-thinness in reverse. We are valued in a way that makes our bodies nothing more than fetishes.
What is missing in Mauritania as well as the United States is the idea of choice — the choice we are all entitled to regarding our own bodies. Do any of us really feel we are able to choose what we would like to look like and be okay with our bodies? How much does each of us prescribe to what society is telling us we should look like?
I believe in my own worth and my own beauty whether I’m a size 22 or a size 2; it’s been a hard-fought battle, and I have to renew my commitment every day. I keep thinking about how every time I watch the evening news there is a story about the obesity epidemic. It is drummed into us on a daily basis accompanied by those infamous anonymous headless photos of fat people walking down the street.
Now I can picture the same news story in Mauritania, only the headless photos depict skinny idealized Western images of physical attractiveness. In the end it feels like none of us win and quite frankly, that exhausts me.
For a long time, I have believed in the power of empathizing with a fictional character to transform the way we feel about ourselves. But how does this relationship play out when that character is not human, but cartoon?
Lisa from The Simpsons
In The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson stands out as a character very different to the rest of her family. She is intellectual, self-reflective and idealistic. So it should come as no surprise when she, just like any other real-life female, experiences body image problems.
In the episode “Sleeping With the Enemy”, Lisa is teased at school about her “big butt”, which sends her into a downward spiral of negative body image and unhealthy eating habits. She reads Thin by Third Grade and indulges in retail therapy — only to find a clothing store where a sales assistant planes down the thighs of a mannequin so it conforms to the new skinny standard. She discusses her feelings with Bart, saying, “I know that this obsession with thinness is unhealthy and anti-feminist, but that’s what a fat girl would say!”
Family Guy's Meg Griffin
Lisa is not the only cartoon character to have body image struggles. Family Guy’s Meg Griffin is a socially awkward, self-conscious teenage girl who is generally mistreated by her family, and her appearance is often exploited in the name of humor.
In the episode “Barely Legal”, Meg is depressed about not having a date to her prom, telling the family dog Brian “I’m so fat and gross,” and threatening to kill herself.
Meg's replacement in her family's reality TV show
In other episodes, her brother Chris draws pictures of her with a pig’s body, father Peter farts in her face, she is depicted as a bulldog, and she is replaced by a prettier actress when the family gets their own reality show.
Meg isn’t portrayed as intellectual, like Lisa, and therefore her body image problems are not as complex. While their crises both stem from being made fun of, Lisa has the ability to question it, even as she succumbs to it. On the other hand, Meg is not shown being critical of her own position.
As in real life, neither characters’ struggles are ever fully resolved. At the end of the Simpsons episode, Homer asks Lisa if everything is OK, but she refuses to say that she’s now comfortable with her body. Instead, she acknowledges that, like many women still obsessed by weight, she has a long way to go. The fact that the issue wasn’t neatly resolved meant that it was a little more thought-provoking than a typical cartoon happy ending. In Meg’s case, the jokes just don’t stop coming.
Do you relate to Lisa or Meg? Are cartoon characters an effective means of exploring body image issues?
Girls like Sarah Totonchi (shown here in 1986) were convinced they were fat at age nine
In his recent article for the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Zaslow reports recently contacting women from a 1986 study of fourth graders, in which 75% of the girls revealed that they felt like they weighed too much, and more than half claimed to be on diets.
The girls weren’t alone in their concerns about weight: a fourth-grade boy, when interviewed, said “Fat girls aren’t like regular girls. They aren’t attractive.”
But the societal pressure on girls has increased exponentially during the two decades since the first interview. The original girls from the study had reported drinking diet sodas and watching exercise videos. Now one of them, a middle-school teacher, has to fight with her students to get them to take a few bites of their lunches.
There have been several books in recent years that portray the trend towards increasing body image issues in young girls, which include Mary Piper’s Reviving Ophelia and Joan Jacob Brumberg’s The Body Project. But perhaps the most visceral account comes from Marya Hornbacher, in her autobiographical book, Wasted.
Hornbacher relates several incidents from her childhood: arguing with a friend at age five about who could eat food with the least amount of sugar, panicking after eating two slices of pizza at a party, feeling as though the body in the mirror belonged to someone else. She writes:
“At four I stood, a tiny Eve, choked with mortification at my body, the curve and plane of belly and thigh. At four I realized that I simply would not do. My body, being solid, was too much.” (p. 15)
At age nine, Hornbacher began inducing vomiting, and entered the nightmare world of bulimia and anorexia.
What compels girls as young as nine to embark on dangerous diets and eating disorders? To imagine fourth graders conscientiously sipping diet sodas and watching exercise videos is strange enough, but the situation has moved far beyond that. However, when girls grow up surrounded by media images of alarmingly thin women and food advertisements that link weight with worth, is it really so surprising?
Even one voice of sanity in a girl’s life can make a difference. Don’t be afraid to speak to any young girls that you know, and let them know that their value doesn’t depend on their weight. The Dove website has some great resources, including the True You mentoring guide and some excellent films, especially “Onslaught” and “Amy”.
Help combat the messages young women receive: speak out today!
–Elizabeth
Elizabeth Weaver was trained as an artist, and currently writes for an international women’s organization. She is passionate about helping women to understand their own unique beauty, and hopes to be a good self-image role model to her 3-year-old god-daughter.
In 2006, when Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Thin came out, I watched the film on my computer in the single dorm room that had become something of a cave for me. I was in the throes of a life-threatening eating disorder, and, needless to say, the film hit home. A few months later, I saw the documentary again, though in a different context: I watched it at an inpatient eating disorder treatment facility where I would spend the bulk of my 22nd year.
Shelly talks about her feeding tube
I agree with Kate’s thoughts (“‘Thin’ Is Thick With Reality”) that the film touches on something very real, although I think there is a subtlety that may not be apparent to all viewers.
The vast majority of films about addiction and mental illness focus on the “rock bottom”: the shocking and devastating turmoil in the addicts’ lives and all those around him/her. Thin appears to explore something deeper: the painfully difficult yet life-changing process of recovery. However, in truth, it is stuck in the same awestruck stare that other media attention has always been — the skeletal images, the double-digit weights, the tubes and medications and blood.
When I listen to the women in Thin tell their stories, I sadly do not hear the voices of these struggling women; I hear the competitive, proud, sick voices of their eating disorders. One may think I cannot truly know what is going on in their heads — and to a certain extent that is always true — but I assure you that I know an eating disorder voice when I hear one because it makes my heart ache with empathy in a way that no other sound can.
When I watched this documentary while I was sick, I was enthralled. I compared my body and my weight to each image and number on the screen or in the book. If I weighed less, I felt like I was winning. If I was more, if their bones protruded where mine did not — I was a failure. I felt undeserving of treatment because I was not as sick as every single one of those girls. This film was incredibly triggering — a term used in the treatment of addiction to refer to images, events, people, etc. that trigger addictive thoughts or behaviors. We would say that we were “triggered” when something made us feel more compelled to engage in self-destructive behaviors or resist treatment.
Though it is confusing for those on the outside to understand, an eating disorder is more like a parasitic being that slowly takes over more and more control than merely a disease of behavior and health. That voice and personification of the eating disorder is not so much metaphorical as it is an incredibly accurate and useful way of conceptualizing a disease that so often becomes difficult to disentangle from one’s true self. A notable percentage of the psychological community has actually proposed that eating disorders be categorized as psychotic disorders due to the extreme level of disconnection with reality.
“It’s totally disgusting, I know, but I had to get it out of me” says Shelly, when speaking of purging through her feeding tube, yet she smiles coquettishly as she says it. I can see behind her eyes that even as she may be embarrassed, her eating disorder is proud and nostalgic. Greenfield gives these women the opportunity to share their most terrible secrets, and though their honesty may seem brave, I know — from my own experience and from the experiences of other women I have known — that eating disorders crave the opportunity to brag, to compete, to shock, to live in the limelight.
One of the reasons it is so hard for many women to give up their eating disorders and embrace the long and arduous process of recovery is that they have grown up or lived much of their lives getting attention, love, and nourishment (in every sense of the word) as a result of being sick. To feed into that (pun intended), to give them yet another stage on which to dwell in the sickness in the form of being the subjects of this film, is neither service to these women nor help for the viewers. It perpetuates the sensationalized image of eating disorders — the gruesome images that, like a car crash one cannot look away from — instead of focusing on recovery, treatment, and prevention. Yes, it is important to know how bad things can get. But to dwell in numbers and behaviors — in short, to dwell in symptoms — is to miss the point and to reduce these women — much like their eating disorders have — to bodies.
I long for an opportunity to tell the story I now know is my more interesting one — not the story of body hatred, of lifelong depression, of self-destruction and of pushing my body and soul to the limits of life. For a long time I thought that was the most interesting thing about me. But it is not. I have also spent the last few years fighting for my life. Not because I was starving myself or throwing up my food but quite the opposite — I have been fighting because I have stopped doing those things.
Having an eating disorder was easy. But recovery gave me a life.
Hornbacher relates several incidents from her childhood: arguing with a friend at age five about who could eat food with the least amount of sugar, panicking after eating two slices of pizza at a party, feeling as though the body in the mirror belonged to someone else. She writes: