“I thought…If I came back and I’m cuter and thinner…then I’ll get the role.” For six months, Clarkson was bulimic, until a friend discovered her problem. “One of my guy friends caught on to it, and I just felt so ashamed and embarrassed,” she tells the mag. “I literally went cold turkey and snapped out of it.”
Aimee Liu, the author of over 10 books, spoke with me recently about her new work, Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders (Warner Books, 2007), and how her life with anorexia impacted the words within.
Kelly Jad’on: Why the title, Gaining?
Aimee Liu: That is the word which strikes fear and loathing in the hearts of those with eating disorders. It is associated with gaining fat. It has richer meanings, though. Gaining pleasure, gaining independence, gaining confidence. All of these appetites are connected. To gain freedom from eating disorders, you have to gain in power and maturity. This is central to recovery from eating disorders.
In our culture, women are told implicitly to be afraid of gaining weight both in pounds and purpose; a lot of women portrayed as celebrities or in fashion magazines are encouraged to remain in a state of immature adolescence. The unspoken message has long been that an “ideal†woman is a perennial child whose sole value and responsibility is to look cute. But today, with the creation of Size Zero clothing, the message is even worse. Now the “perfect†woman is a zero - in other words, nonexistent.
Aimee, where did the anorexia begin? How old were you when you began losing or wasting?
Wasting has multiple meanings related to one’s life and body. I originally began dieting in 7th grade. I developed what is now considered true symptoms of an eating disorder in the 8th grade. That was back in the 1960s, when few were diagnosed. I was obsessive, and at 5’6â€, remained below 100 lbs until college, around age 19-20.
I was never as severe as some anorexics, near death; I maintained a weight that was too low. Like a vast majority who hover on the brink of anorexia, the real damage is psychological.
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The struggle with anorexia is a long way from the glamour of catwalks, fashion glossies and the latest diet. Two men talk about the women they love for whom ‘thin’ is a constant state of mind
It’s hard to say whether, if Grace had been bigger, I would still have found her attractive. You can never know that kind of thing. But her slimness wasn’t part of my initial attraction to her. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Slim girl - great!’ It was more about our connection. I don’t think Grace was very thin when I first met her, and I don’t think her size has really changed since then. Physically she had recovered from anorexia while at university. The psychological part is a longer recovery process and I met her during this time, when she had just moved from university to London, and was in her first week of a new job. She wasn’t comfortable with changing her environment or disrupting her control or routine; it wasn’t an easy transition for her.
But I would say she was still recovering for the first year we were together. We met at a work party - she was 23 and on the graduate scheme for an advertising agency; I was 24 and worked for a media agency in the same London building. We got talking and found we knew some of the same people. Grace called me the next day to arrange another meeting that weekend, and a month later she was my girlfriend. On our second date - over dinner in a restaurant - Grace told me: ‘There’s something you need to know. I was anorexic, but I’m better now.’ I didn’t really understand what eating disorders were all about. I don’t think I would have known at all, unless she had told me, at least not for a couple of months. I might have asked her why she needed to diet, because she was very slim, but I never thought of her as too thin. Every woman seems to be on a diet and think she is too fat! As soon as Grace told me, I was very conscious of looking out for signs that she was controlling her diet. I looked to see if she had finished her plate, but there was nothing really obvious. No one else would have noticed.
I read Grace’s book [Thin, published by Penguin, which details her experience of anorexia], and there’s a section where Grace says she felt she had to tell me this secret, even though she’d only just met me. She wrote that she didn’t want to spend too much time in the loo, because I’d probably think she was being sick. That’s exactly what I was thinking! Being sick after eating is, of course, a different eating disorder altogether, but I didn’t really know that then. For a few weeks after she told me, I kept an eye on her - seeing if she went to the toilet during a meal, that sort of thing. But as I got to know more about how Grace was actually feeling and the history of it, and how far she had come from where she was, I got less concerned. Grace has actually never binged in the time I’ve known her.
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Their views on food and body image could not be more different: Susannah Jowitt is the author of Fat, So?, which celebrates larger women. Candida Crewe wrote Eating Myself about her battle with anorexia and bulimia.
So what happened when they met?
Susannah Jowitt, 38, is 5ft 7in, weighs 14 stone and is a size 16 to 18.
She lives in West London with her husband Anthony and children Adelaide, five, and Winston, three. Susannah says: When I was 14, I nicked two pieces of bread from the middle of a new loaf of Hovis, then carefully re-sealed the bag with that fiddly piece of sticky yellow tape to escape detection.
Such extraordinary attention to detail was all in vain. My mother had counted the number of slices in the loaf and confronted me with my crime.
It was at that moment that I should have realised all was not well in our family’s Garden of Eating. How many parents count the slices in a loaf?
Such elaborate surveillance was necessary because I was, apparently, a Fat Child and needed to diet. My brother, on the other hand, was a Thin Child, so he was allowed sweets after tea (that’s how I remember it, anyway).
My parents yo-yoed between being people who loved their food (my mother was a truly great cook) and people who paid for their love of food by eating grapefruit. I inherited their greediness but, to my mother’s frustration, I missed out on the guilt gene.
Looking back at photos of myself as an adolescent, I wasn’t even particularly big - sturdy, yes, and with the same frame as my mum, who, by that time, was fat - but certainly nothing to worry about. But worry she did.
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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Many women may fail to recognize bulimia symptoms in themselves, particularly if they don’t go to the extremes of self-induced vomiting, new research suggests.
In a study of 158 women with bulimia-type eating disorders, Australian researchers found that nearly half did not acknowledge a problem with their eating. This was particularly true of those who did not vomit to control their weight.
Bulimia is widely known as a “binge-purge” eating disorder, in which a person goes through cycles of excessive eating followed by purging – through either vomiting or abusing laxatives and diuretics.
But there are also non-purging forms of bulimia, where tactics like excessive exercise or strict dieting are used to counter binge-eating episodes.
Still other people have certain symptoms of bulimia but fall short of all the criteria used to diagnose the disorder; they may fall into the category of “eating disorder not otherwise specified,” or EDNOS.
The new study, published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, focused on women with “bulimic-type” eating disorders. This included those with purging or non-purging bulimia, as well as women with EDNOS. Some women in the latter group were diagnosed with binge-eating disorder, which involves excessive eating but no purging to compensate]
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Katharine McPhee discusses her courageous decision to enter rehab for her eating disorder.
“American Idol” second-place runner-up KATHARINE McPHEE credits the hit TV series with helping her get her life on track. In the December issue of Shape magazine, currently on stands, the 22-year-old beauty talks about her decision to enter the Eating Disorder Center of California to deal with her bulimia.
“After I made it through the first round of auditions, I knew I had to get better if I was going to go all the way,” Katharine recalls in her interview. “In this way I can say the show literally saved my life.”
After discussing her bulimia with her mother, Katharine entered the program, finishing up the three-month outpatient program just days before “Idol” stopped airing the audition episodes and began focusing on the Top 24.
“The therapists asked me if I was ready to let go of bulimia, and I definitely was,” Katharine told the magazine. “Yes, I was scared, but I knew I had suffered enough.”
Growing up, Katharine had always been considered skinny. It wasn’t until she decided to try modeling and acting that food became an issue. She was only 15 years old, but casting directors kept telling the size-10 teenager to lose 10 more pounds. The end result was that she became obsessed with her weight, and when she saw a TV show about purging, it sounded like a good idea at the time.
Since leaving Eating Disorder Center of California, Katharine says she has been successful in using the tools they gave her, so that she made it all the way to the “American Idol” finals, through this past summer’s “Idol” tour and through the stress of recording her upcoming CD without suffering a relapse.
“It’s hard to eat healthy on the road, but as I learned in the center, it’s not necessarily what you eat but how much,” she says.
Young sufferers of anorexia and bulimia who try to hide their eating problems from their parents and doctors are turning to a growing number of internet chat rooms dedicated to perpetuating their illness.
A pilot study released this week of US eating disorder patients aged between 10 and 22 showed that up to a third learn new weight loss or purging methods from websites that promote eating disorders by enabling users to share tips, such as what drugs induce vomiting and what internet sites sell them.
But the study - published in the American Academy of Pediatrics’ journal Pediatrics - found that eating disorder sufferers were also learning new high-risk ways to lose weight from each other on websites aimed at helping them recover.
The survey by researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford showed a third of patients also visited pro-recovery sites and half of them learnt new weight loss and purging methods.
“Parents and physicians need to realise that the internet is essentially an unmonitored media forum,” said Rebecka Peebles, Packard Children’s adolescent medicine and eating disorder specialist and an author of the study.
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Anorexia and Bulimia are both mental illnesses that have to do with the fear of gaining weight. People with anorexia starve themselves, may ingest laxatives (so they can get rid of what may be left in their stomachs and “look skinnier”) and exercise excessively. Anorexics have a fear of gaining weight, therefore they are afraid of food and refuse to eat.
Bulimics (people with bulimia) “binge eat” and then throw up what they have already eaten. Bulimics may also exercise excessively as well.
VÃa: Mental Health.com
5. Free food from friends trying to help
4. Hey, Ghandi did it and got respect
3. Never having to say “its too warm in here†again
2. You might actually fit into a seat someday
1. Cheaper than being bulimic
VÃa: Pandeblog
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