David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
The disorder next door: Alarming eating habits
by Tula Karras, SELF
April 25, 2008
SELF poll reveals 65 percent of American women are disordered eaters
SELF?s groundbreaking survey reveals that more than six in 10 women are disordered eaters. Another one in 10 has an eating disorder. Find out if you?re at risk and how to get healthier, starting today.
Michelle Marsh, 32, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, seems like the perfect dieter. If you ran into the 5-foot-1-inch, 103-pound marketing specialist checking food labels for calories in the supermarket or powering through one of her seven weekly workouts, you?d envy her ability to control her intake and burn off any excess, too. But Marsh, who had her first baby nine months ago and is now below her prepregnancy weight (?I?m the tiniest I?ve ever been!? she says), could be the poster girl for an unrecognized epidemic among women: disordered eating.
No, she doesn?t starve herself to an unnatural weight (like anorexics) or throw up daily (like some bulimics), but she doesn?t seem to have a healthy relationship with food or her body, either. ?I spend about half my time thinking about food and meal planning,? she says, although her meals don?t require much planning ? she usually restricts herself to the same foods every day (oatmeal, brown rice and two small corn tortillas with chicken and a sweet potato). ?I weigh myself every morning, and if the scale goes up a pound, I exercise more. If I gained 5 pounds, I?d be very upset.?
Sound familiar? It should: Sixty-five percent of American women who responded to a national survey by SELF are disordered eaters. Eating habits that women think are normal ? such as banishing carbs, skipping meals and, in some cases, even dieting itself ? may actually be symptoms of the syndrome. Although disordered eating doesn?t have the lethal potential of anorexia or bulimia, it can wreck your emotional and physical health, says Cynthia Bulik, Ph.D., director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and SELF's partner in the survey. And it?s everywhere, afflicting women like your sister, your friend, your co-worker ? or you.
The online SELF survey garnered responses from 4,000 women ages 25 to 45 to a detailed questionnaire about their eating habits and found that most disordered eaters fall into one or more of six categories. "Calorie prisoners" are terrified of gaining weight, tend to see food as good or bad and feel extremely guilty if they indulge in something that?s off-limits. Secret eaters binge on junk food at home, in the car ? wherever they won?t be found out. Career dieters may not know what to eat without a plan to follow; despite their efforts, they?re more likely than other types to be overweight or obese. Purgers are obsessed with ridding their body of unwanted calories and bloat by using laxatives, diuretics or occasional vomiting. Food addicts eat to soothe stress, deal with anger, even celebrate a happy event; they think about food nearly all the time. Extreme exercisers work out despite illness, injury or exhaustion and solely for weight loss; they are devastated if they miss a session. Like Marsh, who Bulik describes as a calorie prisoner and an exercise addict, many disordered eaters piece together a painful mix of destructive habits. Others may shift between categories over the years, ricocheting from restricting to bingeing to purging, for instance.
Even more frightening, the SELF survey reveals that an additional 10 percent of women suffer from outright eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, meaning that a total of 75 percent of all American women ? three out of four ? eat, think and behave abnormally around food.
And despite the stereotype that eating issues affect mostly young women, SELF found that those in their 30s and 40s suffer from disordered eating at virtually the same rates. No wonder, given that we live in a culture that spawns best sellers with titles such as "Skinny Bitch" and fetishizes stick-thin, ageless celebs on tabloid shows and Web sites even as our obesity rate continues to rise. ?Dieting is a national pastime for women,? says Margo Maine, Ph.D., an eating disorders specialist in West Hartford, Connecticut. ?As a society, we don?t see the problem.?
Indeed, 67 percent of women surveyed (excluding those with diagnosed eating disorders) are trying to lose weight, mirroring the number who are overweight or obese. A few eat nutritiously and exercise moderately. The rest turn to risky tricks: Thirty-five percent use diet pills, 26 percent cut out entire food groups and 13 percent even smoke to slim down, they confessed to SELF.
The result is failure; extreme measures don?t work. Just ask career dieter Kathie, 42, a mother of two in Fairfax Station, Virginia, who asked that we not print her last name. Raised in a clean-your-plate house where sweets were locked away in a metal cabinet in the basement, Kathie went on her first diet at age 10. ?A neighbor and I tried to see how long we could go without eating,? she says. ?We lasted three days.? Because her access to treats was restricted, Kathie didn?t know how to handle them when she got to college. ?The freshman 15 was more like the freshman 80,? she says. ?I inhaled everything.? Two decades of dieting followed. ?I did the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, Atkins, everything,? Kathie says. ?My mother joked that I had my fat closet and my skinny closet, and I could never get rid of my fat clothes. I felt doomed to be fat.?
by Tula Karras, SELF
April 25, 2008
SELF poll reveals 65 percent of American women are disordered eaters
SELF?s groundbreaking survey reveals that more than six in 10 women are disordered eaters. Another one in 10 has an eating disorder. Find out if you?re at risk and how to get healthier, starting today.
Michelle Marsh, 32, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, seems like the perfect dieter. If you ran into the 5-foot-1-inch, 103-pound marketing specialist checking food labels for calories in the supermarket or powering through one of her seven weekly workouts, you?d envy her ability to control her intake and burn off any excess, too. But Marsh, who had her first baby nine months ago and is now below her prepregnancy weight (?I?m the tiniest I?ve ever been!? she says), could be the poster girl for an unrecognized epidemic among women: disordered eating.
No, she doesn?t starve herself to an unnatural weight (like anorexics) or throw up daily (like some bulimics), but she doesn?t seem to have a healthy relationship with food or her body, either. ?I spend about half my time thinking about food and meal planning,? she says, although her meals don?t require much planning ? she usually restricts herself to the same foods every day (oatmeal, brown rice and two small corn tortillas with chicken and a sweet potato). ?I weigh myself every morning, and if the scale goes up a pound, I exercise more. If I gained 5 pounds, I?d be very upset.?
Sound familiar? It should: Sixty-five percent of American women who responded to a national survey by SELF are disordered eaters. Eating habits that women think are normal ? such as banishing carbs, skipping meals and, in some cases, even dieting itself ? may actually be symptoms of the syndrome. Although disordered eating doesn?t have the lethal potential of anorexia or bulimia, it can wreck your emotional and physical health, says Cynthia Bulik, Ph.D., director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and SELF's partner in the survey. And it?s everywhere, afflicting women like your sister, your friend, your co-worker ? or you.
The online SELF survey garnered responses from 4,000 women ages 25 to 45 to a detailed questionnaire about their eating habits and found that most disordered eaters fall into one or more of six categories. "Calorie prisoners" are terrified of gaining weight, tend to see food as good or bad and feel extremely guilty if they indulge in something that?s off-limits. Secret eaters binge on junk food at home, in the car ? wherever they won?t be found out. Career dieters may not know what to eat without a plan to follow; despite their efforts, they?re more likely than other types to be overweight or obese. Purgers are obsessed with ridding their body of unwanted calories and bloat by using laxatives, diuretics or occasional vomiting. Food addicts eat to soothe stress, deal with anger, even celebrate a happy event; they think about food nearly all the time. Extreme exercisers work out despite illness, injury or exhaustion and solely for weight loss; they are devastated if they miss a session. Like Marsh, who Bulik describes as a calorie prisoner and an exercise addict, many disordered eaters piece together a painful mix of destructive habits. Others may shift between categories over the years, ricocheting from restricting to bingeing to purging, for instance.
Even more frightening, the SELF survey reveals that an additional 10 percent of women suffer from outright eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, meaning that a total of 75 percent of all American women ? three out of four ? eat, think and behave abnormally around food.
And despite the stereotype that eating issues affect mostly young women, SELF found that those in their 30s and 40s suffer from disordered eating at virtually the same rates. No wonder, given that we live in a culture that spawns best sellers with titles such as "Skinny Bitch" and fetishizes stick-thin, ageless celebs on tabloid shows and Web sites even as our obesity rate continues to rise. ?Dieting is a national pastime for women,? says Margo Maine, Ph.D., an eating disorders specialist in West Hartford, Connecticut. ?As a society, we don?t see the problem.?
Indeed, 67 percent of women surveyed (excluding those with diagnosed eating disorders) are trying to lose weight, mirroring the number who are overweight or obese. A few eat nutritiously and exercise moderately. The rest turn to risky tricks: Thirty-five percent use diet pills, 26 percent cut out entire food groups and 13 percent even smoke to slim down, they confessed to SELF.
The result is failure; extreme measures don?t work. Just ask career dieter Kathie, 42, a mother of two in Fairfax Station, Virginia, who asked that we not print her last name. Raised in a clean-your-plate house where sweets were locked away in a metal cabinet in the basement, Kathie went on her first diet at age 10. ?A neighbor and I tried to see how long we could go without eating,? she says. ?We lasted three days.? Because her access to treats was restricted, Kathie didn?t know how to handle them when she got to college. ?The freshman 15 was more like the freshman 80,? she says. ?I inhaled everything.? Two decades of dieting followed. ?I did the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, Atkins, everything,? Kathie says. ?My mother joked that I had my fat closet and my skinny closet, and I could never get rid of my fat clothes. I felt doomed to be fat.?
