Eating Disorders and Fashion Aren’t Always Codependent

Let’s make a general disclaimer because anything sensitive a.k.a people who don’t read and jump to ultimate conclusions require one of these:

I speak only on behalf of myself, which is all I really can do.

I also don’t pretend that there isn’t an obvious issue within the fashion industry about weight and image. I just think we like to entitle the blame to somewhere else in order to de-cathect from it and not filter towards the deeper issue.

Ugh, I know this is going to get so “on a very real episode of Lifetime” but that’s due to so many cultural misconceptions that are beyond my control. Though I don’t think you need to read my personal narrative as there are so many other stories carbon copied as mine (and probably better articulated), but it just adds insight to my overall idea:




I have an eating disorder. I say this in the present tense because like an alcoholic, it doesn’t ever go away. It’s something I encounter on a daily basis in one form or another but I am healthy, I manage my food intake and general perspective on life to the best of my ability. I have never been formally diagnosed but considering I was exactly 75 pounds my freshman and sophomore year of high school and that number is the only persistent memory that never changes, you can go ahead and take my word for it. I had a “home court advantage” so to speak on hiding it; I’m already genetically predisposed to being very thin so even though many people scrutinized whether I was sure that was true.

At first it was a routine or a subconscious habit that developed more and more specifically, sometime around 5th grade. I couldn’t bring myself to eat more than little bites in front of people, in my sense of logic it was perceived as showing weakness like smiling is for animals. I weighed myself every day and even though the scale was broken so only significant weight alterations would register, I agonized over its approval of substantial changes. I wore oversized clothes to hide my lithe form, my arms looked frail and brittle like a paper snowflake about to catch the wind. It’s an addiction, where the end is almost attainable and never attained. When I looked down all I could see were imperfections in my grasp to be smoothed out, my ribcage a sight of relief that I was motivated to achieve something and that thing being within my jurisdiction.

Image via Fan Pop

Food had blurred the line between reward and punishment, it complimented my habits that my tastes in food were of the low carb variety. For all the times I was starving, there were moments I didn’t miss eating at all. It was a system I was no longer subjugated by, nourishment had become a foreign, decorative practice that didn’t apply to me. Then there were the times I was on the verge of tears because I was just so hungry. I remember a time I binge ate a stick of pepperoni and an Entenmann's chocolate cake, I ended up on my bathroom floor sobbing uncontrollably to the point I still twinge with mourning when I recall it. Or when I got a 75 on my 93 average report card, I disciplined myself by not eating for three days. But none of those days I have memory of because they were completely automatic.

Gif via Tumblr

Yet I never had any desire to look like or be a model. I never envied Fiona Apple or any woman of the gaunt prototype nor did I pay attention to them. I was actually too small to fit any of the clothes I wanted to wear; I didn’t get out of children’s clothes until at least my junior year of high school. I actually looked down on women who aspired to look this way because that’s what pop culture taught me. Television made these girls seem immature and vapid, caught up in their own fantasy of what “society” dictated for them and swayed by boys who started noticing them. I was constantly teased and put under a microscope for what I looked like, the only girls who envied me in passing were those who were already popular for being the opposite of what I represented. I wore a baggy corset that flopped and sagged as a “fashion statement” to which I still have no idea what the hell I was talking about. In the way that people and especially children need that one thing they’re known for, their marketing gimmick so to speak, I had something that was all my own. This identity, though insignificant in terms of talent, beauty or intelligence, was at least something I owned outright.

On the one hand, I don’t know other people who had similar circumstances as I did. But I think at the core of it like a lot of mental illness and anxieties deal with a deeper philosophical issue, even further down than low self-esteem. Though my assumption it’s more a Western issue, a fear of losing control of one’s self and abyss of death. The leap may seem wide and rather preposterous, but for me it makes absolute sense that by organizing the body in life we control our faculties and our decline. For some this can take place in exercising, excelling in school, for myself it was within my own body. In classic Greek philosophy (or just the philosophers themselves), aside from women inevitably as inferior, they were supposed to be incredibly attached to the physical as a mother of the earth. An inability to connect to the physical body as a part one’s self is becoming increasingly more recognized within developing culture and technology. Susan Bordo gives a much more rich explanation of body politics than I can at this point (I’m pretty sure my brain has melted within the last 2 years), but we reflect and feed into the culture of this overtly thin female body.

Image via Rosworms
She's played bulimic at least twice if not more.

Whenever there’s a televised representation of eating disorders, it’s always incredibly embarrassing. It’s the superficial blond cheerleader complex (Glee, Popular, other not Ryan Murphy “satire” associated shows) and they always garble the same speech about society and the media trying to force women to be thinner when their assumed ironic position of intellectual authority has equally the same effect of that which they judge. Another problem would be that these are always a special episode on Blossom, they never last or are discussed as an ongoing issue than one episode other than a dated Ally McBeal punchline; even the short-lived “Starved” on FX was not beyond this. When I was a kid, The Famous Jett Jackson and Lizzie McGuire had special episodes on bulimia but there wasn’t a resolution of ongoing therapy, it was just stress and tight jeans that worked themselves out never to be mentioned again. Starved (though an pretty lame show to be fair to the public) barely made the first season because it made it an ongoing premise.



I think the only time I’ve ever related to character struggling with anorexia/bulimia is Cassie from Skins. Rather than spewing out diatribe about thinking for yourself and not caring about the opinion of others, she was neither popular nor socially accepted (or even liked all that much), but her complicated home life and striving for a sense of self were main contributors. The only time I’ve ever been deeply personally offended was a girl in a feminist film class who fancied herself a psych major for skimming through some books, that tried to tell our class her theory on eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder as trying to take away a woman’s natural curves in order to elevate herself to the stature and power of a man in society. That not only invalidated me as a woman but my whole experience.

I don’t condone eating disorders or offer a solution to accuse any one person, but when people make these unfounded and vague, ignorant arguments that the fashion industry and media are the ones to be burned at stake for it is completely mind numbing. It is true, models are not about valued individuals, they’re walking clothes hangers. But they aren’t marketed as having better, more glamorous lives, they fit the mold to show off the clothing. Even on America’s Next Top Model, they may be going to Greece but you know what? They’re crying in the bathroom because they got a haircut or have to wear a spider on their face. I also admit, thin models tend to make clothes, especially high fashion clothes look better because they drape easily and create a universal shape that doesn’t have to contend to an individual. That’s not a great motto for people as human beings but to sell clothes, a human mannequin works.

I’m not sure what my conclusion for this is. I guess people have to be trusted to make discerning decisions, maybe not by serious ones of the law because I don’t want to see a show called Teen Car Accidents on MTV, but if anything we have to change our mindsets communally. Or I blame everything, I don’t know. I will say I got better, on my own actually (which I also place another disclaimer that this was lucky and often requires support of others) and don’t try to misplace blame or even use the word blame in the same vocabulary of my experiences. I'm at a point where I'm learning to love cuisine and trying restaurants, even having better control of my body in a non-destructive practice. I can’t at this venture think of a non-trite way to say that fashion celebrates the body and mind if you let it.


This is the most I'll say "I" and "me" in an entry, I hope.