If you’re stocking up on back-to-school supplies, a crucial item is eating disorders’ awareness. You may be trying to zip up that extra-ten pounds of camp/vacation-noshing flesh. Or you just might want to look great as you reconnect with friends and vow to have a good year.
But if you’re trying to take off weight by unhealthy means such as fasting, purging or using diet products (a.k.a. disordered eating behaviors), you may be on the school bus to trouble.
If I said, “People with eating disorders worry about fat,” you’d probably ask me what rock I’d just crawled out from under. Usually, the gateway to an eating disorder is a fear of fat -- and a diet (followed by the next and the next and every other behavior meant to get rid of fat). Given that eating disorders are far more complicated than a desire for thinness, and brain and biological factors also play a role, still the more anti-obesity craziness, the more fertile ground for a latent eating disorder.
So we have to ponder the truth about obesity. Is it really the severe health crisis the public health sector has been decrying?
I was taken aback by a recent New York Times Magazine article about pregnant women who are morbidly obese.
It is a ghastly image: up to 600-pound mothers-to-be in unprepared maternity wards. Beyond the demand for bigger scales, extra-wide operating tables and longer surgical instruments (obese women are twice as likely as normal-weight women to require Caesarian Sections), the situation is dangerous. Newly-minted “bariatric obstetricians” are desperately try to manage the risks:
After another weekend of carpooling my 12-year daughter to soccer, I came across a timely study on the theme of athletes and menstruation. There’s been an alarming trend in teenage female athletes: As many as 25 percent of our daughters who participate in athletics stop menstruating -- compared with 2 to 5 percent in the general population.
Continue reading "Why Did I Lose My Periods? Ask Your Gut" »
Anyone who’s tried dieting has been lambasted with the concept of “willpower.” It’s a voice in your head that barks, “don’t eat this and that or you’ll get fat.” In the case of eating disorders, willpower also translates to willing yourself not to binge or purge or restrict.
That may sound like the right approach to healing. But if you think about willpower this way, healing is submitting to a punitive, parental force that tells you “don’t” when some other child-like part of you says "do." Maybe not such a good healing tactic.