Saturday, September 23, 2017

"But you don't look like you have an eating disorder..."


"I haven't eaten all day. God, I'm so anorexic."

"She's not skinny enough to have an eating disorder."

"Ugh, she's so skinny, she's practically anorexic." 

No.

Stop.


These may be some of the most toxic sentences ever spoken for someone who has an eating disorder.
As someone who has dealt with various types of disordered eating since they were 12 (not diagnosed until I was 18), I can tell you that there is no one way that an eating disorder "looks."
Yes, the most common idea of what an ED looks like is a very skinny female with sunken in eyes and bones protruding, but that is only a small percentage of people who cope with an eating disorder.
In the USA around 20 million women and 10 million men deal with some sort of eating disorder at some point in their life (NEDA). The most commonly known are anorexia and bulimia. But what you may not know is that there are other kinds of EDs and some people may have more than one type.
There are really four(-ish) types of EDs (NEDA):
  1. Anorexia Nervosa: restriction of food/drink resulting in inadequate food/drink intake with a fear of weight-gain.
  2. Bulimia Nervosa: the purging of food/drink through vomiting, excessive exercise, and/or laxatives.
  3. Binge Eating Disorder: seemingly uncontrollable eating/drinking of excessive amounts of food.
  4. EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified): any other eating disorder that causes significant distress in your life but cannot be defined by the other three categories.
Each of these types have many different signs and symptoms and can all be deadly.

Before I continue, I would like to make it extremely clear to anyone who doesn't know: EATING DISORDERS ARE NOT SOLELY ABOUT FOOD/WEIGHT/BODY IMAGE. Yes, those are major factors in what composes them, but what really drives an ED is perfection, and the definition of "perfection" looks different for all of us.

Most of the people who have EDs don't "look" like they have one. The reason the idea that there is a way EDs "look" is so triggering is that when we hear this, it flips a switch inour brains. See, an ED will always tell us that we've failed. "You're not skinny enough." "You don't have good enough self control." "You're not 'sick enough.'" Essentially, you're a failure. When we hear things like those at the beginning of this post, that validates these thoughts and the cycle gets worse.

So please, try and help change the stigma that mental health problems are not adjectives and are not to be taken lightly.

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