{image credit :: jeredb}

Eating disorders are serious, life-threatening mental and physical illnesses. I repeat: Eating disorders are serious, life-threatening mental and physical illnesses.

Got it?

With all of the tireless advocacy work that organizations around the globe are doing, I am hopeful that this message is being transmitted. Being tuned in to the efforts of such organizations as NEDA, ANAD, Generation Mirror, Eating Disorder Network of Maryland, and more, I see champions of this cause fighting endlessly to spread awareness about these disorders.

But we’re not there yet.

Myths about eating disorders abound. Perhaps most prevalent is the notion that eating disorders only impact young, white females, and that they are disorders of vanity. People won’t say this, at least not often and typically not to my face, but I see the vestiges of these old beliefs everywhere – insurance companies that won’t recognize eating disorders as the potentially fatal medial conditions that they are, tee-shirts sold by major retailers that paint eating disorders as a fashion statement, and even eating disorder campaigns that focus solely on a small segment of those affected.

Again, I am hopeful that the tides are turning and that reality of these illnesses are becoming more apparent. Today, over half of Americans know someone with or have an eating disorder. To be a better parent, co-worker, cousin, son, or friend, shouldn’t we know the truth?

Here are five of the lesser talked about myths that I come across regularly:

MYTH: Eating disorder treatment is too expensive and insurance won’t help.

FACT: The best eating disorder treatment is individualized and often includes a combination of psychotherapy, nutritional therapy, medical monitoring, and other types of treatment (such as family therapy, expressive therapies, and more). The cost of such treatment varies somewhat by such factors as geographic location, the licensure of the clinicians, and the availability of services in an area. However, treatment for an eating disorder is vital for full recovery, and most treatment centers will work with an individual to help them get the services that they need. While we often hear tragic stories of insurance companies denying payment, there are many insurance companies who do regularly pay for treatment, especially at lower levels of care (e.g. intensive outpatient services). The only way to know whether your insurance company will cover treatment is to speak with them directly. One’s doctors and other providers can also advocate for payment, and there are also actions one can take to appeal a decision of an insurance company. To learn more about this, visit NEDA’s page.

MYTH: Eating disorders are caused by bad parenting.

FACT: People with eating disorders often have difficult relationships with family. People without eating disorders also often have difficult relationships with family. While history has been full of accounts of how narcissistic, hypercritical, and unloving parents have pushed their children into eating disorders, today most experts agree that parents do not cause eating disorders. This is not to say that familial influence does not play a role in the way that an eating disorder is expressed, but we also know that the development of an eating disorder is multi-faceted. It involves a complex combination of genetic predisposition, temperament, learning, stress, and more. In fact, most individuals rely on their families for support during a battle with an eating disorder, and family can be one’s biggest champion.

MYTH: People who binge eat just need willpower.

FACT: Binge eating is part of both Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Disorder, and is also often a part of other disorders as well. Binge eating can occur in response to a period of restricting food intake, emotional stress, or for other reasons. It does not, however, occur in response to a lack of willpower. Individuals who struggle with binging are from every age, gender, ethnic group, sexual orientation, and faith. They are also of every size, shape, and weight, and it’s not possible to tell whether someone has this issue by looking and him or her. You also cannot tell how much of this mythical “willpower” that an individual possesses simply by looking at what they eat. Binge eating is a serious and often very distressing issue, and one that requires both compassion and persistence to treat effectively.

MYTH: Everyone who has an eating disorder has been abused.

FACT: While our intuition or even clinical experience tells us that those individuals with eating disorders are more likely to have experienced trauma, research generally does not support this. Data usually shows that approximately 50% of the population have experienced trauma, a number that also holds true among individuals with eating disorders. Trauma can be a somewhat subjective idea, however, and the impact of events can differ greatly among individuals depending on many factors — age, supports, and resiliency, to name a few. When a trauma has occurred and is determined to be entwined with an eating disorder, it is often the case that an individual will need to address this as part of their treatment.

MYTH: To recover from an eating disorder, one just needs to start eating normally.

FACT: If only this were the case… Too many individuals have been told this by loved ones who they themselves were desperate for a way to help the person suffering. While developing “normal eating”, as defined by eating an amount appropriate to provide necessary calories and nutrients, is a vital part of the recovery process, it is not the only part. Individuals in recovery often have to start by recognizing their disordered eating patterns and even develop a sense of what normalized eating is. For some, eating issues have been part of their lives since being a young child and they have only a vague idea of what constitutes a healthy meal. Eating disorder treatment also often involves other important components, like developing alternative means of expressing one’s self, building self-esteem, andreconnecting with relationships.

For more myths, and the truth behind them, check out Generation Mirror.

What eating disorder myths have you heard?

{image credit :: patricio villarroel}

For most of us, the sight of little blue booties or a 20-week ultrasound plastered on facebook is a sweet one. Our hearts are warmed by knowing that a new little life is taking form inside of someone we love. Perhaps it reminds us of those lovely little moments when we were carrying our own child, or it generates excitement for the time in our lives when we’ll be ready to do the same.

But for a smaller, though significant, number, these images send a jab of intense pain through the heart. For women who have been trying to conceive – or who has stopped trying – reminders of the body’s betrayal can be gut-wrenching.

Over seven million women in the United States have spent more than one year trying to conceive, the diagnostic criteria for infertility. This is a little over one in ten women who struggle with what can be one of the most trying and painful experience of a human’s life. And yet, even in the health and body-image world, we usually hear barely a word spoken about how this experience can alter one’s perception of themselves.

In fact, while we do know that infertility is associated with depression, there’s a dearth of research on how infertility impacts individuals’ body image and self-concept. This silence is dangerous because it mirrors the hushed and hidden nature of the issue itself. Couples who are struggling to become pregnant, or faced with their inability to do so, rarely bring this up in the company of others. Ironically perhaps, the color of an infant’s feces becomes appropriate dinner conversation, but detailing your second round of IVF does not.

This type of isolation, whether socially or self-induced, combined with the emotional toll that infertility takes produces all kinds of intense feelings for a woman. She’s faced with working through a form of grief that perhaps few of her loved ones can comprehend. She’s struggling to maintain a relationship with a partner that can be intensely strained by putting intimacy on an egg-timer. And she’s taking a painful assessment of her values in order to make some extremely difficult decisions.

So it’s no surprise that in our society of buck up, cowgirl and sweeping emotions under the proverbial rug, women with infertility turn quickly on themselves, and specifically their bodies.

As women in our culture, we’re simply not used to the fact that sometimes working harder doesn’t produce the outcome that you so desire. We’re taught to believe that if we invest the resources and will into pursuing a goal, we will achieve it. But what about when all of our efforts fail? We feel powerless. We get angry. We get hopeless. And we rage against the bodies that feel as though they are betraying us.

For women with histories of disordered eating, this experience can be especially devastating, and sometimes send them spiraling back into a bitter relationship with food and their bodies. Thoughts of what bodies are “meant” to do swirl through their minds, and the ways in which their own bodies seem to fall short rock their internal world.

And so they do what they know how – they exert control in the only ways they can. Their eating may become restrictive or, conversely, unmanageable, or they may find themselves desperately attempting to bridle their bodies in other ways. They exercise to the point of exhaustion, they chart their basal body temperature with the precision of an air traffic controller, or they analyze every subtle shift in their bodies. And inevitably, as always happens when we attempt to alleviate our anxieties through exerting control on the body, disappointment eventually comes rushing in. And when it does, the pain that is buried and unspoken comes along with it.

Moving this experience out of the shadows is one way to prevent these feelings from narrowing one’s life. This of course comes with a host of other risks – such as feeling exposed and having one’s reproductive organs be, well, out on the table. But carefully selecting individuals one’s trusts to share this experience with can be key to allowing our bodies to release the burden of carrying this on our own.

There are limits to what friends and family can do in terms of support, and so talking to a professional or finding a support group can be helpful in sorting through the myriad of emotions that are triggered as well. For resources and support, check out the Resolve.org page.

Have you ever felt that your body betrayed you? How did you cope with these feelings?

“The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.” – Marilyn Monroe

{image credit :: joshua mellin}

Walking down the street to my office the other morning, I was more than a little surprised to see a 22,000 pound buxom beauty staring me down. To be honest, she was staring far above me, standing over 26 feet high with her iconic dress shading onlookers like the tree of life.

The immortalized woman in question is Marylin Monroe, or at least a statue of the beloved starlet. Recently unveiled in Chicago, the steel and aluminum piece overlooks the bustling street below with that coy smile made famous by the 1955 film, The Seven Year Itch.

I might have been the only one to catch the irony, but I found it interesting that the woman that body image advocates have long pointed to as the exemplar of curvaceous womanhood was now overtaking Michigan Avenue like Godzilla.

Pointing out Marilyn Monroe’s dress size and weight has long been a body image warrior’s battle cry. Reportedly between a size 12 and 14, Monroe is frequently referenced when we talk about the evils of the media and the increasingly unrealistic standard of beauty in our society.

“But did you know that Marilyn was a Size 14?” we say, incredulously. “If she were alive today, she would be considered fat!”  And then we puff out our chests and raise our eyebrows expectantly, hoping these facts will knock some sense into the masses that we think are deluded by the Kate Mosses and Calista Flockharts of our day (Okay, so I clearly need a bit of celebrity updating. Miranda Kerr, perhaps?).

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly recognize just how distorted our perception of thin has become. And pointing to Monroe’s slightly larger frame can give an attention-grabbing reason to think twice about our cultural norms.

But what if history was wrong? Does our argument fall apart?

For better or worse, Monroe likely wasn’t a Size 12 or 14 or 16 – at least not by today’s sizing. In a witty piece on NPR, writer Jessica Siegel (who wears a 12) tried on a Marilyn original dress… and couldn’t zip it up. There was apparently over a six inch gap.

So if Monroe wasn’t a Size 12 – if we can’t point to a beauty icon to show how these standards have changed – where does that leave us?

Ironically, maybe it leaves us in a better place than where we started. I’m not so sure that using a sixty-plus year old statistic about another woman’s dress size really helps the cause of creating our own body size appreciation.

What I’ve found is that while facts like this one are interesting, they rely a bit too much on our left brains. They make sense, we nod our heads in agreement, but don’t change much about how we feel about ourselves – at least not substantially. Attention grabbing? Yes. Life altering? Not so much.

And maybe the point is not to be life-altering, but rather to remind us that cultural ideals do shift and change, and thus enslaving ourselves to them is a futile effort. Even more interesting, in my opinion, is learning about the way that Monroe’s own body changed in the course of her life. According to historians, her weight fluctuated by about 20% in her adult life – not a huge amount, but enough that it made a difference on her 5’5 frame. And through that Monroe remained poised and confident, proud of her beautiful curves.

So perhaps Monroe’s Size 16 doesn’t hold water anymore, but there’s still plenty that we can learn from the bombshell. One of my favorites? ”I want to grow old without facelifts. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made.” Now that is truth.

Do you think the Marilyn myth keeps us too focused on others? Has is helped you in feeling better about your body?

{Image Credit :: Annie Varland}

You tossed and turned all night after a major blowout with your girlfriend that left your face smudged with your not-so-waterproof mascara. Your hair hangs like a dirty mop, greasy from being out last night in the muggy summer air. Your teeth are slightly stained from all the coffee you’ve been drinking to make it through “the busy period” and your breath… well, it ain’t pretty. You notice a huge pimple forming on your chin and you pile on goopy white acne cream, hoping the fire-engine red at least turns into a more subtle pink by the wedding tomorrow.

This might be the least desirable time for someone to tell you that you look beautiful.

You call bullshit.

Are you suffering from negative body image? Do you have a distorted perception of yourself? Are you in need of some positive affirmations reminding you of your beauty?

Maybe… but maybe not.

As body image advocates, we often spent inordinate amounts of time and energy telling people that they are beautiful. That no matter their size, shape, color, hair texture, or personal style, they possess this magical, ethereal quality that we call beauty.

When I refer here to beauty, I am talking about physical attractiveness. Sure, there are an infinite number of others ways that we can define beauty. But for the sake of the point that I hope I can establish today, I mean the aesthetic quality that launches a thousand ships and intrigues our visual senses.

Now, I whole-heartedly believe that beauty is built on diversity, and I believe there should be no “standard” of physical beauty (whether there is is another issue). I see this physical beauty in the gorgeous depths of wrinkles around eyes and in the gentle curves of flesh around bellies. To me, the human body in all of its imperfect glory is stunning.

But there are still days when I look in the mirror and don’t feel beautiful. In fact, I don’t look beautiful either. I’m tired, I’m stressed, my skin is breaking out and my fingernails are breaking.

And it’s okay.

I don’t need to tell myself I’m beautiful because, well… it doesn’t matter that much.

When we constantly tell each other, “No, you are pretty! He just didn’t see it!” or “You’re crazy not to see how beautiful you are today!”, we buy into the belief that we have to be beautiful to be okay. We feel this urgent need to help each other see that we *really are* physically attractive, implying that it’s vitally important that this is true. We hear it from magazines, billboards, radio – but most importantly, we hear it from each other.

Well, there are more important things in life than being pretty.

When we focus on ourselves as ornamental – as things to be looked at and acknowledged for our physical attributes – we lose sight of the fact that we are so much more than how we look. So what if someone truly isn’t beautiful? Does that make them less of a person? Are they capable of less amazing things? Can their bodies, perhaps not aesthetically pleasing (though that is quite subjective, of course), not be used in the pursuit of adventure, joy, and peace? Do they not deserve our love?

So here’s my point. Affirming ourselves doesn’t have to come from convincing ourselves that we are physically attractive. We can spend years of our lives trying to feel beautiful and still encounter people – including ourselves -to whom we do not appear attractive. Instead, we can remind ourselves that beauty is not all it’s cracked up to be. Our lives are so much richer, wider, more important than what we or others can physically. When we fill our children’s minds with platitudes about how beautiful they are no matter what (while not praising their kindness, intelligence, or creativity), we teach them that beauty is the primary – the only – currency.

This doesn’t mean we should ditch our attempts to boost our confidence in the way that we look. There’s no denying that we are biologically wired to prefer things that please us aesthetically. But we’re also wired to be so much more.

As the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For today, behold something else about yourself.

This post is part of the Self-Discovery, Word by Series. Val over at Balancing Val is the awesome host this month and has asked the community to focus on the word BEAUTY. Learn more details here!