Eating Disorders Today

Does Advertising Affect Eating Disorders?

A recent Hubpages blog raised the question: Does advertising affect eating disorders?

In my opinion, much of current advertising promotes both tiny size fashion in clothes and huge portion size in food. It's an impossible combination many people strive to integrate. 

A person vulnerable to eating disorders will strive to come up with a solution that allows her (or him!) to fit into tiny clothes and eat huge portions of food at the same time.  This person can become terribly ensnared by an eating disorder. 

But something worse exists.  Advertising that pushes people to be small and eat large supports eating disorder thinking and behavior.  The continual onslaught of emaciation, body surgery, and diet publicity actually convinces many people that the lifestyle being portrayed is normal. 

Such media portrayal validates starvation, cutting behaviors and binge and purge cycles.  Plus, this portrayal can delay recovery work.  If a person with an eating disorder is subjected to a barrage of images and messages celebrating the symptoms of her illness, she may believe she is living well and wisely and will not seek treatment. 

This is a cultural phenomenon that is tragic.  It contributes to people taking pride in their illness, proselytizing eating disorders, destroying their health, ruining relationships and, in far too many cases, shortening their lives.

What kind of influence does advertising and media portrayal of fashion, beauty and diet have on you? I welcome your thoughts and feelings.

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com

Facing Unseen Physical Problems caused by Eating Disorders

* "Obviously, my body doesn't believe a word my brain is saying."  Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes Collection

       The osteoporosis aspect of eating disorders doesn't seem to be a concern to people in the throes of their eating disorder. 

       Osteoporosis doesn't hurt and doesn't show.  Tooth enamel loss, hair loss, weight gain or loss, skin eruptions all show. The visual is what gets a woman's attention. Unfortunately she tries to correct the  visual without addressing the deep cause of her troubles, her eating disorder.

       The unseen damage remains out of awareness for a while: osteoporosis, esophagus tearing, electrolyte imbalance, risk to heart, dizziness from blood sugar imbalance, organ damage, hormonal disruption and the impairment of judgment based on lack of sleep and lack of proper nourishment.

       The unpleasant reality is that reality won't go away.  Any acting out of any eating disorder serves to numb a person's  feelings and dim her awareness of what is going on around her.

       But turning off awareness does not mean turning off the fact.  Living in a state of oblivion doesn't halt the damage being done. 

        Oblivion needs to fail as soon as possible. 

       That failure and the vision of what is actually happening to her body is a terrible shock and brings up terrific anxiety.  The challenge is to not use that anxiety as a trigger to binge or purge or starve or exercise to bone breaking lengths.

       The challenge is to use that fear and anxiety, that glimpse of reality, to address the eating disorder realistically and start working with a mental health professional who specializes in eating disorder treatment. The challenge is to get even more awareness and get her healing work underway. 

* quote from Calvin and Hobbes, p. 7 Scientific Progress Goes "Boink", by Bill Watterson, Andrews and McMeel Press, 1991.

http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Progress-Goes-Boink-Collection/dp/0836218787

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com

Eating Disorder In-patient and Residential Treatment

     A worried mother called me this morning, concerned that she had not yet received my eating disorder in-patient/residential treatment program list. http://www.poppink.com/list.html

     I was on vacation in Maui with my family and couldn't send the list until today.

     The mother, in the Midwest, is deeply concerned about her 25 year old daughter on the east coast who is a compulsive overeater and obese. They are both looking for an in-patient program that will get her started in recovery.  Well, actually, I think they hope that checking into the best program they can find will result in cure. 

     I'm always concerned when someone says that "some kind of support might be needed after" a residential treatment experience.  To me this phrase reflects a naive hope that a person can go away ill, come back cured and the burden of the illness will be lifted off everyone involved.

     This fantasy simply must be dispelled so that unnecessary disappointment and feelings of failure don't delay or even destroy positive moves toward recovery that are being made.  Residential treatment can help people get on the recovery path.  After residential treatment people with eating disorders still have to walk that path, or climb or crawl or, as 12-step says, "trudge" their way to recovery.

     When you know you are working toward progress, even when you are backsliding a bit, you can keep your energy directed on the healing task in front of you.  You might feel frustrated at times.  Who doesn't?  But you can handle feelings of frustration. We've all had lots of practice with that.

     When you know that in-patient is a first, not a last step you can be less hard on yourself.  You can ease into the program and do the best you can.  You don't have to feel a sense of failure at all.  By putting yourself in a healing environment you are making yourself a winner.  When that healing environment becomes your own inner self, your recovery becomes more solid. The transition between in-patient treatment and solid inner recovery is usually long term psychotherapy. 

     How long is long?  It's long enough to make that internal healing environment in you as solid as can be. It's long enough for you to have solid practice and experience in living a healthy life in a new way without needing bulimia or anorexia or a binge or a cutting or starving episode to get through. It's long enough to guide you, support you, ease you, escort you to a healthy life. 

           Please remember, the search for something "perfect", the desire to find the "perfect" program, the urge to reach the "perfect" size or be the "perfect" person in any way at all is a symptom of an eating disorder.  We humans are not designed to be "perfect".  Our design is that of a human being with all our flaws and contradictions. There's something wonderful about being like a kaleidoscope, an endless colorful variety of perspectives, intact and whole.

     I hope with all my heart that the woman who called this morning and her 25 year old daughter who is locked into her own mind and body by her eating disorder, can find the help and the direction they both need to get relief from their suffering and find their eating disorder recovery path.

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA                       bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com