The danger of the reductive eating disorder image is never more apparent when discussing EDs in midlife and beyond. Because an aging body is increasingly more inflexible when facing physical damage, the risks associated with an ED are heightened. Dangers include disruption of heart function, diminishing cognitive ability, and osteoporosis (among others). All risks may be precluded or worsened by disordered eating and often overshadow the incidence of EDs, making detection and diagnosis more difficult. 

 

Bibliography (show notes):

“Causes of Middle-Aged Women Eating Disorders.” Eating Disorder Hope, 30 June 2017, www.eatingdisorderhope.com/treatment-for-eating-disorders/special-issues/older-women/causes.

Dennett, Carrie. “Perspective | The Overlooked Crisis of Eating Disorders among Middle-Aged Women.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 18 June 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/the-overlooked-crisis-of-eating-disorders-among-middle-aged-women/2019/06/14/e5358616-87d5-11e9-a491-25df61c78dc4_story.html.

“Facing Eating Disorders in Midlife.” Performance by Mary Tantillo, UR Medicine, Youtube, 5 Apr. 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2IhhewfnHI.

Lauren Muhlheim, PsyD. “What Are Midlife Eating Disorders?” Verywell Mind, 5 Jan. 2021, www.verywellmind.com/midlife-eating-disorders-4177137.

Publishing, Harvard Health. “Disordered Eating in Midlife and Beyond.” Harvard Health, www.health.harvard.edu/womens-health/disordered-eating-in-midlife-and-beyond.

Sloneker, Wendy. “Eating Disorders in Midlife and Menopause.” Gennev, Gennev, 12 Feb. 2021, gennev.com/education/eating-disorders-in-midlife.

“What We Need to Know about Eating Disorders in Midlife.” Eating Disorders Catalogue, 24 Aug. 2018, www.edcatalogue.com/need-know-eating-disorders-midlife/.

Eating disorders can reach anyone, yes. But eating disorder treatment does not. Cultural messaging, such as that motivated by media and film, perpetuate an ED stereotype: you must be a white, young, thin, affluent female to be deserving of an eating disorder. Racial and ethnic minority groups such as Hispanic/Latinx Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans essentially become a blind spot in Eating Disorder research, diagnosis, and recovery. Let’s collectively work to deconstruct our own internalized beauty and thin ideals by examining our implicit biases of certain genders, ages, races, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations, body shapes, and weights as deserving of an eating disorder. Listen to today’s episode to learn more about race-based stereotypes in ED diagnosis and treatment. 

 

 

Bibliography (show notes):

“Beyond ‘Eating Disorders Don't Discriminate.’” The Emily Program, 18 Feb. 2021, www.emilyprogram.com/blog/beyond-eating-disorders-dont-discriminate/. 

Eating Disorders among Minorities - Toledo Center. 26 Dec. 2018, toledocenter.com/eating-disorders/eating-disorders-among-minorities/. 

Eyre, Rebecca, and Erikka Dzirasa. If Eating Disorders Don't Discriminate, Why Is the Recovery Community so Homogenous? MHAM Webinar: Eating Disorders and Racial Disparities, Mental Health Awareness of Michiana, 15 Jan. 2021, youtu.be/0-8SGPs3q3o.

Gray, Anissa. “Yes, Black Girls Get Eating Disorders.” Shondaland, 2 Jan. 2020, www.shondaland.com/live/body/a30171323/black-girls-eating-disorders/. 

Gordon, Kathryn H et al. “The impact of racial stereotypes on eating disorder recognition.” The International journal of eating disorders vol. 32,2 (2002): 219-24. doi:10.1002/eat.10070

Kendall, Mikki. “When Black Girls Hear That 'Our Bodies Are All Wrong'.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Feb. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/opinion/sunday/black-women-eating-disorders.html.

Kent, Clarkisha. “Black Women Suffer From Eating Disorders Too, Stop Pushing Us Out Of Those Conversations.” Wear Your Voice, 19 Nov. 2019, wearyourvoicemag.com/stop-erasing-black-women-discussions-eating-disorders/.

Meraji, Shereen Marisol. “When It Comes To Race, Eating Disorders Don't Discriminate.” NPR, NPR, 3 Mar. 2019, www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/03/699410379/when-it-comes-to-race-eating-disorders-dont-discriminate. 

“More Ethnic Minorities Are Suffering From Eating Disorders.” Edited by Crystal Karges, Eating Disorder Hope, 16 Apr. 2019, www.eatingdisorderhope.com/information/eating-disorder/ethnic-minorities. 

“Our Mission.” Project HEAL, www.theprojectheal.org/our-mission. 

“People of Color and Eating Disorders.” National Eating Disorders Association, 26 Feb. 2018, www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/people-color-and-eating-disorders

Redd, Achea. “Women of Color: The Eating Disorder Survivors Who Suffer in Silence.” Swaay, 16 June 2020, swaay.com/black-women-color-eating-disorders. 

Sala, Margarita et al. “Race, ethnicity, and eating disorder recognition by peers.” Eating disorders vol. 21,5 (2013): 423-36. doi:10.1080/10640266.2013.827540

Sim, Leslie. “Our Eating Disorders Blind Spot: Sex and Ethnic/Racial Disparities in Help-Seeking for Eating Disorders.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings, vol. 94, no. 8, 2019, pp. 1398–1400., doi:10.1016/j.mayocp.2019.06.006. 

Thompson, Becky W. A Hunger so Wide and so Deep: a Multiracial View of Women's Eating Problems. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Today's discussion focuses on Marti Noxon's To The Bone (2017) which tells the harrowing story of twenty-year-old Ellen (played by Lily Collins) who struggles with anorexia amidst a challenging family dynamic that aggravates her feelings of helplessness and lack of control. As one of the more recent cultural portrayals of EDs, I discuss how this film is problematic by employing film critic Laura Mulvey's understanding of fetishistic scopophilia. 

 

Bibliography (show notes):

Anorexia Nervosa. 28 Feb. 2018, www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/learn/by-eating-disorder/anorexia. 

Bahr, Lindsey. “'To the Bone' Walks Fine Line of Depicting Eating Disorders.” AP NEWS, Associated Press, 12 July 2017, apnews.com/article/0e2dd724949145c180569ee624245a97.

Boker, Pamela A. “‘How Can He Be so Nothungry?": Fetishism, Anorexia, and the Disavowal of the Cultural ‘I’ in ‘Light in August.’” Faulkner Journal, vol. 7, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 175–191. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24907643. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.

Chu, Paige. “Illness as Aesthetic.” The Varsity, 3 Sept. 2018, thevarsity.ca/2018/09/03/illness-as-aesthetic/.

Gilbert, Sophie. “'To the Bone' and the Trouble With Anorexia on Film.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 19 July 2017, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/07/to-the-bone-review-netflix/533517/.

Haynes, Todd, director. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Youtube, 1988, www.youtube.com/watch?v=H13d1nOorJM. 

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 8th ed., Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 620-631.

Noxon, Marti, director. To The Bone. Netflix, 2017, www.netflix.com/watch/80171659?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C6ee4505264385b3738adfe32df0c1a8d3c45383d%3A8e7e3c6ff0af3bd21e67ad63ece30c9f8a91ce3e%2C6ee4505264385b3738adfe32df0c1a8d3c45383d%3A8e7e3c6ff0af3bd21e67ad63ece30c9f8a91ce3e%2Cunknown%2C. 

Schmidt, Randy. Karen Carpenter: Starved of Love, by Randy Schmidt | Extract. 23 Oct. 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/24/karen-carpenter-anorexia-book-extract. 

Tyson, Maggie. “The Modern Glamorization Of Eating Disorders.” HealthyWay, 3 Aug. 2018, www.healthyway.com/content/the-modern-glamorization-of-eating-disorders/.

Waldman, Katy. “We Need to Reject the False Narratives Around Anorexia. I Can Start by Telling My Story.” Slate Magazine, 7 Dec. 2015, www.slate.com/articles/double_x/cover_story/2015/12/we_need_to_reject_the_false_narratives_around_anorexia.html.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, pp. 2–13. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1212758. Accessed 3 Nov. 2020.

Woolley, Dawn. “The Dissecting Gaze: Fashioned Bodies on Social Networking Sites.” Leeds Arts University Repository, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 23 July 2020, lau.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/17666/.

Aggie Laboe, a senior at the University of Notre Dame, details her own eating disorder and recovery. We discuss Aggie finding her voice during recovery including her work with The Body Positive, the research she's conducted, and how she is fighting to recognize eating disorders on Notre Dame's campus. 

Read her Observer article here:

https://ndsmcobserver.com/2020/09/why-we-need-to-talk-about-eating-disorders/

Joyce Diebels, the host of the LifeToEnjoyce Podcast who is a joyful mindset coach, joins us to discuss her work helping women lead a happy and healthy life. We discuss making peace with food, our bodies, and internalizing self-worth.

Elyse Resch, co-author of Intuitive Eating: An Anti-Diet Revolutionary Approach, joins us to discuss intuitive eating as a tool in eating disorder recovery!

This episode recaps the last 10 episodes including topics such as types of eating disorders, risk factors, stages of trauma in EDs, trigger-to-disordered behavior response, EDs through a historical lens, our body-obsessed culture, ED depiction on screen, college campuses & quarantine leading to an arising, resurfacing, or worsening of EDs, modes of recovery, making peace with weight change, and evolutionary theories of EDs. This episode is concluded with a Q&A directed by questions from listeners.

Eating disorder treatment is largely ineffective. Our understanding of how to treat EDs is limited because the etiology is not well understood. This week's episode attempts to understand the "why" of EDs through an evolutionary lens. We discuss theories such as the intrasexual competition hypothesis, reductive suppression hypothesis, adapted to flee famine hypothesis, thrifty genotype hypothesis, dual intervention point model, and a psychoneuroimmunological approach. All theories explain EDs as a response to a threat and identifying this threat is critical to inform our treatment practices in recovery.

What does live worth living mean to you? Finding meaning and worthiness of life does not have an expiration date. It is instead a life-long quest that one begins when deciding to recover from an ED. Although recovery looks different for each eating disorder survivor, each generally undergoes 5 stages, multiple "modes" of recovery (including physical, relational, psychological, and behavioral), and must address co-occurring disorders if applicable. Recovery requires kinship and self-forgiveness, especially if one relapses into destructive behavior. These themes, in addition to how to make peace with weight change, are topics discussed in this episode.

From the rigid social confinement to food insecurity to weight-stigmatizing media messaging, 2020 has been a breeding ground for eating disorders. Specifically, eating disorders thrive in isolation. How might this truth be witnessed during quarantine? Find out in this episode, where we discuss the resurgence, worsening, or development of EDs during a global pandemic. Our host, Kiera, also shares her own struggles and triumphs during quarantine. This episode also features an insightful poem about body dysmorphia written by Ana Paula (@anapaula.aguilarv).