Eating Disorders Awareness Week misses its mark

Katarina Schultz | Class of 2017

With each passing of Eating Disorders Awareness Week, I find I am increasingly disappointed with what the school has planned. This year’s activities were all about body image and the media. In reality, body image is only one factor in the development of eating disorders. Eating disorders are so much more than what we look like. They are about control, insecurity, self-hate, fear and self-punishment. Yes, sometimes they may start out as diets and have to do with body image, but they are much more than that. I know that many people struggle with having a positive body image, myself included, and I think it’s an important thing to support. I don’t, however, believe that it should be combined with eating disorders. When combined, they encourage the false belief that they are the same thing. You can have an eating disorder without having a skewed body image and vice versa.

I’m also really dissatisfied with all this focus on the media and society when talking about eating disorders. Yes the media and society are broken, but they don’t necessarily cause eating disorders. Ongoing research is showing a greater and greater genetic influence. Trauma also causes eating disorders. There are a whole bunch of factors that influence whether an individual will get an eating disorder. In my own case, and for others I’ve talked to, the media did not cause our eating disorders, but it did make it difficult to recover. Again, diet culture is harmful and needs to be dealt with, but it is only one factor in eating disorders.

We put all our energy into blaming abstracts, but what about the victims? How do we help those actually suffering? How do we educate those who aren’t? This top-down approach of criticizing the media will never reach those of us affected. Talking about society’s flaws will not inspire us to eat our next meal or to keep it down. We need to hear from survivors. We need to hear that recovery is possible. We need open and honest conversations between people about our struggles, not an analytical half-relevant approach. This could bridge the gap between those with eating disorders and those without. We need to rethink our approach to Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Let’s put the focus back on the survivors and the sufferers, not society. We need to talk about what it’s like, about how we got here, and about how to get better. We need to bring it back to the human level. That’s how change is enacted. That’s how we can get the message of our pain and of recovery across to our friends and families that are trying to understand.

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