Eating Disorder Talk

So the British Fashion Council (BFC) was set up to orchestrate the Fall London Fashion Week. In March, the BFC set up the Model Health Inquiry (MHI) due to concerns about working and lifestyle problems within the fashion industry. More specifically, the health and working conditions of models within the London Fashion Week extravaganza. The MHI announced the scope, submission and reporting process of their study in May. Early July brought an interim report.

Early findings led to a opinionated statement by the panel’s chairhead, Baroness Kingsmill: it’s inappropriate for models under 16 to be portrayed as women and ultimately, it’s a possibility that the Council will rule against allowing models under 16 to appear in the six-day designer showcase. She even went so far as to say

“We have been given startling medical evidence about the prevalence and impact of eating disorders in certain high-risk industries.
“There was also strongly expressed concern that it is profoundly inappropriate that girls under 16 under the age of consent should be portrayed as adult women.
“The risk of sexualizing these children was high and designers could risk charges of sexual exploitation.” read the BBC article…

So basically, she’s saying that models are hired to promote a sexy, thin, womanly image (let’s not even get into what a paradox that is) and are being treated as though they are walking sexpots? So, what, sometimes drugged, drunk, undernourished girls in sometimes very little clothing are actually still children? Maybe we should stop giving them adult jobs then. Is fashion is the madame of image? Are we all helping promote pimping and starvation?

In a word, yes. Want to debate that? Leave your comment.

london fashion week, model health authority, models, modeling, teen models, sexy, pimps, british fashion council

I just came across this post via a forum referral to the author’s new blog. Looking back through the archives, this woman has made huge strides to recover from an overeating disorder with the main hope of becoming “normal” and “living a normal life, with normal habits.” She’s had huge personal success. And she’s still going, strong. Check out her mission and goals page, too.

The linked post above lists nine rules (aka “markers on the path to normal or intuitive eating.” She plans to expand upon each marker in the future, but her writing is succinct and well-orchestrated, leaving little question of her intention or meaning.

My favourite thing: each post ends with a few (3-5) positives. Here’s a bit from another of her posts:

Yesterday’s objective was to keep choosing to be satisfied, since I was essentially overwhelmed trying to do normal stuff and take care of my daughter as well. Poor thing has mononucleosis, so she’s really suffering right now.

In general, I fulfilled this objective quite well. “I’m satisfied with my satisfaction objective.” LOL

Please consider reading this page, especially if you are looking towards moving out of the eating disorder’s lifestyle, into your own.

Continuing onwards, week three’s top five is all about bulimia; weeks one and two can be found here and here.

1. Ask the Dietitian - First off, I was distracted from reviewing the site due to the damn top-right corner link to the site’s Healthy Body Calculator. It was pretty damn informative. Once I corrected the typo in the height category, that is. Back to the site. As the name indicates, it’s more of a Q and A area where people (I’m assuming visitors to the home site) are asking how to help friends and themselves, clarifying the differences between EDs and even asking for advice regarding firing a potentially bulimic employee whose work performance was horrendous (in part due to the bulimic cycle). Not bad, but I don’t know that it’s been updated in a while. Just check out the calculator and read the rest if you’re looking for camaraderie.

2. Mental Health -Provides links on the American and European descriptions, child and adolescent EDs from the US Surgeon General, diagnosis, treatment, research and other articles. No information provided on the actual page itself. Useful if you’ve got time to kill, opening page, after page. What I find moderately disturbing is the link in the sidebar, “diagnose yourself” - that phrase is a double-edged sword. The link itself is for signup to a 6 or 12-month computerized “decisionbase,” that reportedly tracks personality and psychiatric disorders. Can you say yay, for promoting hypochondria?

3. Healthy Place - The title of this site is Beat Bulimia, giving a positive first impression. Provides links in the sidebar and header to a community forum - also good. Sidebar also contains links about intervention, the author, articles and a newsletter. The main page is a letter touching on the lack of glamour of bulimia vs anorexia - speaking my language; good. This sums it up:

On the Beat Bulimia site, we’ll be talking about the causes of bulimia, what you need to do to recover from bulimia, and how your family and friends can help. Our goal here is to bring bulimics out of hiding and form a virtual community where we can help each other.

4. Payson Road - Well, we have a fuchsia header. And a black background. That’s it. If you Google it, you come up with a link to the Homepage which has a bunch more stuff in equally annoying colours. Which I have not the patience to look at or review because they lost me at the black screen. Hello? Could you not simply put a redirect link?

5. Selfhelp Magazine - This is only linking to an article written by a counsellor. The article thinks aloud about this therapist views initial contact and treatment with a patient showing signs of bulimia. She includes some rather insulting and stereotypical presentment types and explains how she doesn’t exert control over the patient’s binge-purging, choosing to spend time expanding and deepening the patient-therapist relationship. A little too Hallmark for me, but hey, I’m one of those permanent-bubble types of people.

Next week, we’ll be delving into the top ten ranked sites of all things ED-related.

In past years, Body Mass Index (BMI) has gained and lost favour multiple times. Since my last post mentioned BMI’s role in Madrid’s last Fashion Week, I thought I’d do a little calculating and see how the top models “measure up.” You can figure out your own BMI here. Using it, I found out that mine’s 17 - no catwalk strutting for me!

According to Forbes, the following supermodels were the top income earners in 2005.

1. Gisele Bundchen: (5′10″, 127 lbs., 34-24-34) BMI of 18.2.
2. Heidi Klum*: (5′9″, 119 lbs., 35-24-31) BMI of 17.6.
3. Tyra Banks**:(5′10″, 131 lbs., 36-34-36) BMI of 18.8.
4. Kate Moss: (5′7″, 105 lbs., 33-23-35) BMI of 16.4.
5. Adriana Lima: (5′10″, 112 lbs., 34-23-33) BMI of 16.1.

As you can see by plugging in the height and weight of nearly everyone you know (you know you’re curious), model sizes just aren’t realistic. I mean, look at me - I’m nearing Kate Moss’ stats, but my body looks nothing like hers. And it took 20 years of self-deprecating and destruction to do it - get as close, numerically, as I have. She probably couldn’t even maintain it, naturally, either.

* I’m assuming this was before getting pregnant and getting into television nearly full-time.

** It was truly hard to find mention of Tyra’s pre-retirement weight, so I resorted to this.

An article from The Independent, Fashion for size zero fuels rise in eating disorders among models, caused me to swear aloud last night. I mean, is this a surprise? Is it even news? Why is valuable press time being wasted on it when everyone could see that coming?!

The premise is that the drive for size 0 in the fashion world is making more models turn to eating disorders. Experts provided results of a study ultimately commissioned by the British Fashion Council, warning that there is truly little way to measure the prevalence of eating disorders amongst models because though anorexia is most prominent, there is a huge population with hidden disorders such as bulimia. One such expert estimates that nearly 40% of models are engaged in disordered eating habits.

This study came in part as a result of Madrid’s Fashion Week banning models with a BMI lower than 18 from working during the highly publicized event. The ban brought outrage from fashion pros, models and some media; women elsewhere rejoiced, especially given the then recent anorexia-related deaths of Eliana & Luisel Ramos.

In a proactive approach to both end confusion over dress sizes and avoid the “Size Zero” movement, the European Union is planning a continent-wide change in dress sizing - from a number such as 0-16 (which could really mean anything) to bust, waist and hip measurements. This, in my opinion, will clear up a bit of confusion since we’ve all gone into five different stores, only to be 3 different sizes - but I don’t see how this will have a major overall effect on the underlying competition women feel to wear a lower size than their peers. It’s really just changing the type of number, not the meaning of it.

Would you feel more confident wearing a 42″ hips pair of trousers, versus a size 14? Especially when your best friend wore a 36″ hip?

Last week, I started writing about my own story. I talked of my thirst for knowledge about eating disorders and ultimately, my quest for love. Here begins the next part…

So picture a seven-year old. A little chubby, pretty introverted, very sensitive and eager to please. This same girl will smile and act how you want her to while simultaneously planning her own descent.

I started restricting slowly. Eating half of the lunches that my father packed for me - I really didn’t enjoy bologna sandwiches that much anyways, and the pudding that was a treat just made it more evident the lack of wealth in our household.

While other kids were trading wagon wheels and cookies, I was left with a can of generic brand chocolate pudding - the kind that had the ring to pull the top off, but that only the ring pulls off instead. I rarely got the damn stuff open all of the way. I would also have a bright yellow thermos of milk. By lunchtime, it would be warm and if I didn’t finish it when I’d gone home for the day, I’d get to have it with dinner, as well.

I found out quickly that throwing out my lunches was monitored by the cafeteria and playground attendants. The threat of calling my dad to report me seemed serious since I’d been raised that we couldn’t afford much and his heavy hand might teach me the error of wasting food. So I learned that the bathrooms would be my new favourite place.

I flushed my sandwiches in a mixture of warm homo milk and toilet water, hoping the toilet wouldn’t overflow and draw attention to my lunchtime rebellion. I purposely pulled the tabs off of the pudding cans, then claimed that I couldn’t open them and therefore they were permissible to toss.

Within a year, I was becoming “harder to wake up in the morning,” leaving little, if any, time to eat my breakfast of (also) generic Cheerios, drowning in (also homo) milk. Flash forward another year and I’d gone through a growth spurt, was nearing my tween height, and was eating only dinner and cornflakes. Cornflakes because Special K was a great diet cereal but we couldn’t afford much more than (again) no-name brand cornflakes.

By the time I was in seventh grade, I was five feet tall and about 80 pounds. I soon hit my lowest weight, 69 pounds.
Flash forward through two years of treatment and “recovery,” which I will not expand upon, and I’m my adult height (5′6″, though I would grown another half inch in my twenty-second year) and a “recovered” 95 pounds. Then I took the big plunge into modeling.

This is by far, one of the stupidest decisions I’ve ever made. Next week, I’ll explain why.

Diet Blog made me stop and say what? the other day. See, this Brazilian food manufacturer is marketing it’s new product - a no-fat, light yogurt. Seems pretty clear cut. We’re all used to the ads with women roller-blading through a greenery-laden pathway, obviously working their little butts and then rewarding themselves afterwards with a satisfying serving of insert-brand-of-yogurt-here.

The problem with these ads is their portrayal of famous Hollywood images. Not that the images themselves are offensive. The images’ taglines translates to “Forget about it. Men’s preference will never change. Fit Light Yogurt.”

This is abhorrent for so many reasons. It’s intimated that these large women shown are a) trying to land a man by posing as they have; b) don’t have a chance because men have one preference, apparently; and c) goes on the assumption that women, even when they are looking sexy for another person, are looking for men, exclusively.

Being a person with substantial body-image problems who, in general, bats for the hetero team, I can honestly say that I have never considered how my yogurt purchase may affect men. Never.

Last week, I reviewed the top five anorexia sites, as listed by Alexa.

This week, as promised, is my take on the top sites devoted to binge eating disorder (BED).

1. Teen’s Health - Well, the site is targeted towards teens, making it a very easy read. Some of the information is contradictory: people engaged in a binge often eat past feeling full vs. theories about the hypothalamus’ failure to provide a message of fullness. There is some information as to the types of help needed in the case of BED, such as nutritionists to provide a realistic eating plan. The page also has tabs to the right wherein readers can look to other related articles and resources. But overall, this is very introductory - though quite well put together, when considered for teens’ reading.

2. Weight-control Information Network - Provides answers to the questions of risk, prevalence, symptoms, complications, types of therapy relevant to BED. Vague answers about causes and weight loss attempts are also tackled. The bottom of the single page provides a general message titled “you are not alone” and contact information for National Eating Disorder Association and Academy for Eating Disorders. Very safe website: provides medically based facts and doesn’t waste very much time theorizing on anything unproven. One good thing is that there’s a chart which profiles 10 programs in the United States - including the program type, treatment used and age of patients taken. Three additional reading resources are also provided: the oldest was published in 1959; the newest, 2003.

3. athealth.com - My favourite, so far, the main page is a Q and A with the director and a psychologist of the Acoria Eating Disorders Treatment Center in Cincinnati. The interview is very candid, allowing for theorizing and bluntness. This was refreshing, considering how much BED resources are timid and people-pleasing. The sidebar provides newsletters, a lookup for practitioners and treatment centres, self-help and book store sections, a resource centre and featured articles. Very reader-friendly, while being overtly honest. Just my kind of place.

4. a weight out - Since the focus of most of the entire site is overeating, both compulsive and emotional, it’s hard to look at this page as anything directly related to an eating disorder resource. There is a short write about about “when it’s a binge eating disorder” and links on the side bar to symptoms and signs, dieting, child obesity and confessions. Also sidebarred is a link called “Beyond Fen-Phen,” which was the article published in January 1998 by a Cincinnati reporter who had struggled with emotional eating and diet pills. A little old, don’t you think? This site made BED seem as though it was a reason to diet, not a severe eating disorder.

5. Healthy Place - A community devoted to eating disorders. The link above will take you to a transcripted interview between a moderator, audience and author/recovered binge eater, Jane Latimer. I recommend it because it was inspiring and informative. There are, however, very few external links, excepting Latimer’s site and Overeaters Anonymous. All sidebarred items are the usual, but again only internal “Healthy Place” links. I find it semi-disturbing that they’ve cornered the information market, apparently.

Overall, very disappointing but predictable. Overeating and BED have long been stereotyped against. Few people seem to consider binge eating as serious as the other big two disorders. Alarming. Too many people tie it in with being overweight or obese, not as a serious mental condition. Odd, when you consider how many complications and life-long health issues that can be incurred from life with BED.

Is it just another indication of our society’s obsession with thin? To the outside world, anorexia is obviously about being as thin as possible; bulimia is about halting weigh gain due to gorging, via purging in some form. These two are specific methods of getting or staying thin, whereas BED is (again, to the uninvolved eye) about gaining weight from a lack of self-control. Approximately 1 in 142 people suffer from BED, 1 in 1000 from anorexia and 1 in 181 of bulimia (stats according to wrong diagnosis)- yet we are obsessed with the lower “ranking” diseases.

Why do you think that is?

Next week, I’ll review the top five sites related to Bulimia. That should be quite different than this week’s!

BED, overeating, compulsive eating, obesity

Keira Knightly won nearly $6,000 in a lawsuit against The Daily Mail. The suit was to defend against the notion that Knightley, assumed anorexic, was the reason a 19 year old, who Knightly was not friends with, died of anorexia.

The paper ran a picture of a bikini-clad Knightley in January with an editorial statement that expressed a parent’s heartache, and blame towards the media - something that not only would have given themselves negative publicity (should there really be publishing warnings?), but ultimately cost them something like two employees’ monthly salaries.

If pictures like this one of Keira carried a health warning, my darling daughter might have lived.

She has long argued rumours of a possible eating disorder - she blames being naturally thin and states that she is aware of the seriousness of anorexia, since she had an aunt who’d suffered from the disease. This is supposed to be reasonable proof that she doesn’t have one?

Judge for yourself and let me know what you think - is Keira Knightley sick or in need of a slap?

She is rumoured to be considering donating the court’s award to the UK’s Beat - an ED charity.

BEAT, keira knightley, the daily mail