Just an observation (purely anecdotal) but it seems like the women that are anorexics/bulimics are thin. Now obviously I’m sure this has something to do with all the food they are not eating/barfing up, but outside of that I can’t help but get this vibe that ‘thin’ (I use that in quotes since thin is somewhat subjective, particularly on this board) women have more hang-ups about their body than fat women.
Now I know that fat women have plenty of eating issues and body image issues. I guess I would have assumed they’d be the same (i.e. if a woman who is 130 is telling herself ‘omg I’m so fat’ I’d imagine a woman who is 260 is thinking that x2 as much) however it doesn’t seem to be the case; in fact I would say that a lot of the bigger women I’ve known have had a much more down-to-earth attitude about their bodies.
I think that can also depend on your perception of “eating disorder.” Would you consider regularly binge eating but not barfing it all up an eating disorder? If so, then fat people are even more likely than thin people to have one.
Regardless, I’m interested to see other responses on this thread. I’m sorry I’m not giving a more definite opinion, but this is something I’ve never thought of before (even though I’m a woman who used to have an eating disorder), so I don’t think anything I’d have to say would be particularly useful or that I’d be able to really back it up with anything.
ISTM that overweight yet not obese women do indeed have fewer body size issues than most, despite the “do I look fat in this?” stereotype that pertains to them.
OTOH, thin women are more likely to feel they have to obsessively watch their weight, while obese women are more likely to have self-esteem issues due to actually being fat, while a good chunk (ha!) of larger women don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with being the size they are – that’s why they don’t lose weight.
I’m not sure. The one woman that I knew who had previously had an eating disorder was in great physical shape when I knew her (e.g., running marathons and such)…but I wouldn’t call her thin. And, in fact, I would say she was less thin than most marathon-runner types I know.
My assumption was that the eating disorder in her case may have come from having a conception of what she wanted to look like that was unrealistic for her body type. I.e., clearly even when this woman was in fantastic physical shape with presumably little body fat, she was never going to have the really thin body type, so I imagine that if she desired that the only way she could even approach it would be to basically starve herself.
Of course, my assumption about her body type being a factor in her eating disorder could be wrong or it could be that she is not typical. But, I am just suggesting that things might be more complicated.
Eating disorders and body image dysfunction is a pretty broad set of issues.
Anorexia (constricted eating, laxatives, diuretics, compulsive overexercising)
Bulimia (binge and purge)
Compulsive overeating
Binge eating
Addiction to plastic surgery
Diet roller coaster
Diet pills
Thin women have more hangups about their bodies? If their hangups are leading them to be bulimic or anorexic, and they are “successful” at it, they will become thin but the “hangup” won’t go away. Perhaps some people who are heavier realize how long it might take to become as slim as they want to be, and they try to accept themselves in the meantime, as heavier but working on it?
None of these are meant to be generalizations since it really is case by case.
Lots of thin women work really hard to stay that way (I know some don’t, but a lot do) and so would be more likely to think about it more, I think.
When it comes to average-sized girls with eating disorders, I think they’re more likely to be hyper-aware of their size and aware that they “don’t look anorexic”… or are afraid that if they whine about how they’re fat, nobody will argue.
It’s really stupid when you think about it, but you can’t always tell someone’s hangups unless they talk about it. I think fat women and average sized women are just less likely to talk about it. Plus there’s the sort of value judgment that goes along with it- being “able” to restrict yourself down to 100 calories a day, avoid sweets and fats and carbs and liquid calories and so on, and be skinny/lose weight are things that people can be jealous of (even if they’re riddled with crazy and unhealthily extreme), whereas being able to put away a baker’s dozen at krispy kreme within ten minutes is not really something most people would tell their friends.
I would consider myself thin (in fact, my husband thinks that I am too thin) and I do not think I have any more hang-ups about my body than anyone else. I eat about 1500 calories a day, sometimes more. I eat when I am hungry. I do not constantly talk about food or how much of it I’m eating. I do not want to gain weight but I understand that my weight will fluctuate day-to-day (some days I weigh more than yesterday, some days less). But it’s all good. I do not think it’s accurate to assume that everyone who is thin has to work hard at it - some people are just naturally thin and don’t really think about it.
Since one of the major factors that precipitates an eating disorder is dieting/food restriction, people at the higher end of the spectrum are at greater risk for eating disorders, simply because larger people are more likely to engage in dieting behaviour. Predisposing factors need to be present as well in order to set off the full syndrome, but weight loss for one reason or another (it doesn’t have to be dieting – it can be illness or injury or depression or what have you – but as you can guess dieting is far more common than those in terms of producing weight loss) is almost always the “trigger” for the gun of predisposing factors (which include family history, family body habitus, and a slew of socioenvironmental factors). So in a group of people all of whom have the predisposing factors, the larger ones will be more likely to set off that crucial precipitating factor.
Higher premorbid weight in the presence of the full syndrome is also a bad prognostic indicator, because recovery almost always involves return to the body’s natural set point weight, and higher-BMI individuals have a lot of social presssure as well as their own reluctance preventing the return to set point.
Women who find themselves at the high end of the BMI range are no more likely to have a down-to-earth attitude about their bodies than a person with visible tics is likely to accept them with equanimity. While some may certainly embrace acceptance, scratch the surface and you will find just as many if not more who affect nonchalance while feeling a sense of futility or resignation over repeated efforts to attain the societal norm without lasting success.
While I’m happy that we have access to such plentiful food, I’m a little upset that it has led to psychological disorders.
How the heck do people develop EATING disorders? It’s like developing a psychological breathing disorder, the way I see it.
Anyway, my personal experience is that thin people don’t seem to be more likely to have weight related self esteem issues than fat people. Obese people seem to be more likely to be more unhappy more of the time, and “common sense” tells us that you usually don’t get obese by living a normal lifestyle and eating normally.
Well it would be tough to diagnose a fat woman as anorexic until she fasted long enough to get thin…
My experience with bulimics is that they are not typically as thin as anorexics.
One of the odd things about eating disorders is that the body image issue is so directed toward the individual with the disorder, and not others. An 80 pound anorexic will complain she looks too fat while complimenting a 130 pound woman on her nice shape.
For fat people the choice is to go nuts over it or accept the obesity. The personality to do this is not linearly correlated with size, so if some people are unhappy at 25 pounds overweight, that does not mean that another is twice as unhappy at 50 punds overweight.
mswas what would you say to my telling you that I could predict at age 5 years old which child with the same height and weight and the same parental obesity status was going to be obese later in life and be right more than 9 out of 10 times? And no the trick isn’t that more than 1 out of ten kids are obese by age 10.
Seperate than that (and I’ll explain after I hear a response) is the simple fact that obese people do not per se hav an eating disorder. They have a very well-selected for adaptation to put on weight in times of plenty. Its our environment that has changed such that such a tendency has become maladaptive.
What he said. By definition, if you’re overweight, you almost definitely have an eating disorder.
As someone who is thin, I don’t know how many callories there are in what I eat, I’m not obsessed with exercise, I just eat until I’m full and don’t eat past that and if I ever started gaining weight I would cut back on portion size. That’s just common sense, not obsession. And I think that most thin people are that way. The number of unhealthily thin people I see is pretty minute, and from what I am aware, most people who exercise regularly do so because it gives them more energy–not because they’re afraid of their body.
What about European countries where people are majority thin, and yet there is plenty of food for low prices to eat?
An American majority has an eating problem because of two things:
Being told to finish their plate.
Being taught that “deals” are always good.
Until we break one of those, the majority will continue to gain weight. And if you can’t control how much you eat due to two ideological points that were taught by your parents, then you have an “issue.” I.e. a disorder.
I suppose it would depend upon what effects that had upon their health. Part of people’s eating is what is passed down by their parents. Most people do not break the eating habits they were raised with, and most Americans were raised with truly atrocious eating habits. You’d have to cross-reference and show me that these people do not eat at McDonald’s to show that they do not have an eating disorder.
If you can show that they eat a fairly healthy diet, and yet gain weight then that’s something.
Also, don’t conflate obese with overweight. Being overweight means that you do not conform to the applied standards of body weight, which tells us very little in and of itself. Obese generally implies that someone is fat to a level where it’s a health problem. My Father is chronically overweight, around 300lbs, he’s a couple inches shorter than I am, and I am just now getting to the age where I really need to pay attention to what I eat. Since I have been doing so I have been sloughing the pounds off. I lost about 10 lbs in the month of May just by changing activity and eating habits. I am doing this because I do not wish to be obese like my Father. If I were to eat like my Father who is a meat and potatoes man, then it would be an eating disorder. He has a desk job and therefore a diet that was designed around a more active agrarian lifestyle is a disorder. We are humans and have an incredible ability to adapt to our environment.
That and in continental Europe at least their food tends to be of a higher nutritive content. Junk Food is less popular there than it is here. Though, I have heard obesity is on the rise there due to the saturation of fast food culture.
To be sure Americans’ slovenly habits … our driving everywhere, our supersizing portions, the abundance of porr nutrtional choices, our excessive hours of watching tv and playing on the computer … are major factors in American obesity. But there are few places left where most people are thin. Even in Europe. American vices are very catchy.
But another part of the problem is the very focus on weight and body image. As one of my previous links illustrates such focus is almost always counterproductive. The focus must be on the lifestyle choices that are associated with good health whatever your weight: regular exercise; not eating past being full; good food choices including many fruits and vegatables and whole grain. The weight you are when you do that is a healthy weight for you. Sage Rat the very concept that you would react to weight gain over your natural thin state by cutting back on your portion size, which would mean stopping when still hungry since you currently stop as soon as you are not, is a symptom of the problem, of how pervasively we have been inculcated with responding to external cues and are insecure regarding our body images. Now using that as a flag to reevaluate your habits, that would be something different.
But to answer the question, mswas, I can show that they eat about the same as their peer group, are raised the same, even compared to fraternal twins, and yet gain weight more than their peers or fraternal twins. And again, I can identify kids at great likelihood to be obese before they are obese and by the time they are five. Turns out that kids all have a period where they lose the baby fat and become thinner and then bottom out and start gaining fat again. The age that that occurs is called the “adiposity rebound” and those with an early rebound (before 5) are 10 to 15X more likely to be obese later in life than those with late rebound. Even though those with late rebound may be fatter at age 5. This predispostion may or may not be destiny (the research to see if we can intervene effectively with early and intensive family focused behavioral interventions has not yet been done - although I am trying to get our large medical group to do exactly that sort of study) but the predisposition is clearly determined very early on. And we are wired that way because such a tendency was more likely to keep us alive in past days, say almost all of human history when famine was always potentially just a season away. Yes, I believe we can adapt, but doing so effectively requires a systems approach, not pathologizing either those who are heavy or those who are thin.
As to conflating overweight and obesity- they have clinical definitions. In kids obesity is the top 5% of historic (not current) norms for body mass index (BMI) and overweight is 85-95%ile of those same historic norms. (Hence the bizzareness that 15% of kids are in the top 5%!) In adults obese is a BMI over 30 and overweight is 25 to 29.9 by definition. True enough “overweight” in adults is not associated with poorer health outcomes whereas obese is.
I wouldn’t have seen that coming at all considering she was a marathon runner. At least, I assume she has good knowledge of nutrition and exercise and understands the consequences of ‘starvation mode’ - *especially * on an endurance runner.
I guess I didn’t realize how deep in the psyche these disorders may be.