Interesting commentary from the Huffington Post on my Newsweek column...
In her first
column for Women In The World, journalist Emma Woolf wrote a dispatch this week not just from London, where she's based, but from the outskirts of an eating disorder.
Like an expat returning to the country of those who feed themselves, Woolf came home to a startling reality that the negative feelings about food and weight she thought belonged to her illness pervade "healthy" life.
The truth is, I'm not the only woman who has starved herself skinny, or tried to; many of us feel guilty, worthless, or out of control around food. I'm not the only one who has calculated each day what they will and will not eat; or wondered "if I eat whenever I'm hungry, will I ever be able to stop?" No matter how feisty or feminist you think you are, I bet there's a part of you that would like to be slimmer... As Western levels of obesity soar, profoundly disordered eating and body dysmorphia also proliferate.
What Woolf hits on in her piece is that we tend to see the three phenomena -- eating disorders, a general cultural anxiety about food and weight and skyrocketing obesity rates-- as separate problems with separate solutions. Instead, we need to recognize that they all stem from the same root. Obesity isn't the opposite of anorexia (or bulimia or disordered eating or just distorted thinking about food). It's its twin.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaret-wheeler-johnson/eating-disorders-created-equal_b_3575863.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
