Eating Disorders: The Quest for Thinness

By: Edward T. Welch

Do you ever wish that you could just forget about food?  What started as an innocent diet has turned into a monster.  You eat too little.  You eat too much.  You restrict.  You binge.  It's getting harder to cover up what you are doing.  At first you tried exercise, then vomiting, then laxatives.  Maybe you tried cutting too.  Who would have thought that food-or the fear of it-would become the center of your life?  Heroine, cocaine, and other street drugs lead to addictions.  But food?

Food for you is no longer....just food.  You know of course, that you are not alone; many people struggle with eating disorders.  It's easy to see why.  Advertisers sell their products using only one slim body type; movies show impossibly thin, surgically enhanced heroes and heroines; high profile athletes have body fat percentages that can only be maintained with round-the-clock work-puts; food is everywhere; and more than half the U.S. is on a diet. In some countries food is a nutrition.  Here food is nutrition, but it also means beauty, control, comfort, guilt, shame, love, and loathing.

Food Problems Start Small

You began life with normal eating habits: You ate when you were hungry and didn't eat when you were full.  But in a weight conscious world, where food is used for comfort, you take small steps and "normal" gradually disappears.  You want to be thin, so you become more serious about dieting.  You like how food makes you feel, so you overeat and binge.  Those who are close to you start noticing that food is becoming your obsession.  You don't see it because your obsession has tricked you into thinking you are doing better than ever.  But the truth is that your struggles with food have gained threat momentum, and you have become anorexic, bulimic, or both.

The Quest for Thinness Cont...