Eating Disorders-Blog #4

I’ve been surprised to more fully understand the disorder behind eating disorders. In the past, my initial understanding of eating disorders were that girls didn’t like the way they looked physically and maybe didn’t have much self confidence either, so they starved themselves to become thin. Since watching the documentary and discussing eating disorders in class I now more deeply understand the psychological and genetic component to eating disorders.

The documentary that we watched in class spoke on the actuality that eating disorders can be quite a mental and psychological war within the disordered eater. It explained how there are certain personalities that are predisposed to the eating disorder and then usually some sort of trauma is what pushes the predisposed person to start an eating disorder. This was a different understanding than mine previously of just girls who had body image issues and wanted to be thin like the magazines. I know that still plays a role in it, but it is only one layer of eating disorders.

A question I still have lingering in the back of my mind is how do people actually starve themselves? If I go a day with barely eating because I’m really busy or something, I cannot resist the urge to eat something. My body gets angry with me. I get light headed. My stomach hurts. I just don’t understand how someone could go months or years without eating more than 500-1,000 calories in a day. In the excerpt from the book “Wasted” Hornbacher explains, “By winter I was starving. Malnutrition is not a joke.” Hornbacher goes on to describe the mental and physical feelings that go along with starvation on pages 110-111. I just can’t imagine on the day to day level of not eating enough. I don’t know if this seems like too simple of a question or inconsiderate, but I am just horribly surprised by how the human is capable of separating their body from their minds and withholding food when their bodies are screaming for food. It seems like we as humans can be just as destructive to ourselves as we can be to the world (i.e. wars and not treating the environment well, etc).