Originally published September 27 2005
Unrealistic expectations of thinness lead to eating disorders before real fitness, columnist says
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Arkansas Democrat Gazelle columnist Jan Gaughan says that magazines and TV ads often cause people to feel ashamed of their bodies and have unrealistic expectations of themselves as far as weight loss, and these feelings often cause people to develop eating disorders that have temporary results at best, but more often the results are more devastating than being overweight.
A lot of us know of someone --- a co-worker, the teenage child of a friend, maybe a sibling or a spouse --- for whom dieting and looking thin have assumed an abnormal and unhealthy importance.
And a lot of women, especially, will admit in private what we seldom would in public: that there've been times in our lives when this has been true of us.
We know the scam, and yet we still sense the ad creates an expectation against which we will be measured and found wanting.
For most of us, these were temporary episodes, but I can see how eating or not eating might sometimes get tangled up with all sorts of other urges --- to control life, to retreat from responsibility, to comfort yourself, to flagellate yourself for real or imagined transgressions, to erase yourself, to make yourself visible to a world you think overlooks you, to stay smaller and thereby avoid growing up, to assert your independence from those you feel smother or baby you, to earn approval.
Sometimes that tangle sends things into a spiral, and then the behavior starts to control the person, instead of the other way around.
There's anorexia nervosa, whose sufferers can literally starve themselves to death because they're intensely afraid of becoming fat, even as their bodies are becoming painfully thin.
There's bulimia nervosa, in which people eat a large amount of food, often in secret, then purge themselves.
Serious health consequences can arise from abusing your body this way, and some can be life-threatening.
People with eating disorders and their families are dealing with a serious and heartbreaking situation.
You get only a pinhole view of life when self-consciousness takes the place of consciousness.
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