About a million Australians are going into this holiday season - which is often defined by feasting - struggling with an eating disorder. Many of those will be hiding in plain sight.
They’ll be struggling but the people around them won’t have any idea because they don’t fit the stereotype. They don’t look the way people with eating disorders are supposed to look. It’s why experts say there are a significant number of people who are not being diagnosed. They may be unsure about what's going on, or they don't feel like they can ask for help because their experience feels so unusual.
In this episode, we hear from AJ who developed an eating disorder at the age of 11. Being an indigenous male, he didn’t think that he could possibly have an eating disorder. “I had heard of eating disorders,” he tells us. “I thought they only happened to pretty young girls who did ballet.” As a result, he went undiagnosed and untreated for years until a thoughtful teacher intervened.
June is in her 70s and has also struggled with stigma. Her ED wasn’t diagnosed she was well into her 30s, despite being there since she was 11. “The stereotype that you have to be thin to have an eating disorder is so false,” she says. “People can look very (I hate to use the word) normal, and still have an eating disorder.” She says the stigma she faced as a young woman was awful but things are improving.
Social media influencer, Katie, suffered from anorexia when she was a student, but being a person in a larger body, nobody questioned her unhealthy behaviours. “I’ve talked to people about having an eating disorder and people assume it was binge eating disorder and I’m like ‘no, I was fully starving myself’.” She says she didn’t think she had an ED either. “If you wrote down the things I was doing without knowing what I look like, anybody would say that was an eating disorder.
Researcher and author of Butterfly’s Community Insights Report, Claire Lister, says the data shows people who suffer from eating disorders are just as likely to hold unhelpful beliefs about them. Michelle Blanchard from the National Mental Health Commission says people are beginning to understand the complexity of eating disorders but the myths and stereotypes are still a barrier for many who live with them. The question is how do we help them come out?

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