.full of denial. April 14, 2009

.authored by something.of.substance.

.the picture of (mental) health?.

When we see pictures of people in other countries looking as skeletal as Tori Spelling does in the one at left, we are usually asked to send money to help them build a well and buy rice.  But we aren’t in another country; we are in America.  And, here in America, when we see the protruding bones of others, we spend millions attempting to re-create how they did it.

When we publicly confront people with our supposition of their eating being abnormal, there is no doubt they will deny it. A key component of eating disorders are the cognitive distortions that keep you from seeing any problem with what you’re doing to correct your perceived problem with your body. Therefore, simply speculating (whether publicly or privately) that some star or another starves his or herself happy, does no good. If anything, it reinforces their mindset by demonstrating a need to acknowledge their obsession- their weight- for any reason. If there’s no choice someone will come right out and freely admit, “yes. I starve myself and purge on occasion when I actually eat”, why splash their Eating Disorder Denial (EDD) over the daily pages of gossip rags?

The latest to engage in EDD (whose past participants have included Lindsay Lohan and Mary-Kate Olsen) is Tori Spelling who recently blamed her skeletal figure on us just “not having seen her pregnant in the past few years”.   In past interviews, she blamed “tension with her mother”.  This is what happens when people start asking questions you cannot answer:  you blame.

No one would believe these excuses in a vacuum. Even though we are constantly inundated with visuals of rail-thin, ghastly gaunt women, we can still recognize someone who has all visible bones as unhealthy. Yet, we accept these excuses and they even help keep our society enmeshed in a body image crisis. When celebrities constantly deny their distortions and refer to their looks as “healthy” or the result of “losing baby weight” or “simply working out once a week”, they aide in enabling disordered eating for everyone (themselves included). Ours is a culture obsessed with celebrity. Part of our obsession  is driven with the seeming perfection of those we idolize and kill ourselves attempting to emulate. Even though we know, as graduates of high school health classes, that no person (especially over the age of 30) has a metabolism strong enough to waste them away, we accept their excuses and alter our perceptions to include what used to be disturbingly unhealthy as the new reference point for “normal”.  We engage in as much EDD as the people who do so to keep their disorder alive.

.we're supposed to believe this is what 50 extra lbs looks like.

Disordered eating stems from psychological issues. Simply being “too busy” to eat three meals a day or working out “a couple of times a week” or “not being pregnant” does not cause the kind of body mass index drop which needs to occur for our culture to take notice. In fact, in Tori’s case, she claims to have lost 40 lbs since giving birth, despite claiming to only gain 25 lbs while pregnant with daughter Stella.   That would put her at least 15 lbs past “healthy” since she was tiny before.  Yet, since thinning down to an extreme, she has rethought those  former weight gain numbers and announced that she actually gained “50 lbs” while pregnant with daughter Stella which would  still make her 10 lbs heavy of her pre-pregnancy weight (in the photo at top).  One has to wonder why all the weight waffling?

People with EDD justify everything. Her claim of never “counting calories but of eating healthy”, can be debunked by simply thinking about the calories found ina typical day’s diet as out-lined by the actress.

“Breakfast was yogurt, fruit and nuts. Lunch was homemade soup with a sweet potato or soy milk base. We’d snack on celery and peanut butter, and then I’d make lean protein with vegetables for dinner.”

According to The Daily Plate, a diet of the above listed food would be around calories 900 calories (if one upgraded to the “full-fat” options and larger portion sizes of everything named) and not 1,500 calorie minimum recommended for nursing mothers (your calorie requirement plus 300 caloires).

There is nothing healthy about that.

Yet, we as a society have developed the same cognitive distortions centered around eating that keeps . We believe that a 50 lb weight loss can be achieved with no work on our parts. We believe that weighing under 100lbs is not only an acceptably healthy weight for most people, but sexually desirable.  There’s nothing healthy about our thinking, either.

Extreme diet and exercise aside, underweight frames  are also often indicative of other addictive tendencies, such as drug addiction.  Stimulants like cocaine and crystal meth decrease appetite and increase metabolism.  They also alter brain chemicals to induce “feel good” sensations while taking them.  Drug addiction is a disease in and of itself, but, combined with body-image distortions and low feelings of self-worth, can simply aide a co-current disorder.

We are a culture dying to be desirable.  All of this weight obsession is not only not healthy, it isn’t normal.  When pre-teen girls end up in eating disorder clinics and in hospitals suffering cardiac arrests after following the “healthy” lifestyle of their favorite celebu-idol, we react with shock and disgust.   Yet we do nothing.  We are apassing down our psycholigcal obsession with disappearing in the name of “sexiness”.  We are teaching future generations that, as women (and some men), you could always be taking up less space and that that makes you more desirable, personally and professionally.

That being said, anyone engaged in a pattern of disordered eating (including the oft-misunderstood epidemic of binge eating) need the help of mental health professionals as well as medical professionals to correct the glitches in thinking which convince them that food acts in any way other than as a fuel.  Calling them out in a public arena serves to make them all the more resolved to battle against their body by focusing on their looks, something they already do with disasterous results.  And, because we have no intention of actually  helping those we proffer up as  cautionary tales for public consumption, we end up only making a mockery of our concern for ailments as deadly serious as anorexia.  With this blend of ambivalent denial and staged horror on our parts, is it really that shocking that starving oneself can be both glamorous and disconcerting, simultaneously?   Perhaps we should be donating $1 a day after all only, instead of sending emergency food kits, we can buy ourselves a clue.