The body you’re in: What does an eating disorder look like?

The body you’re in: What does an eating disorder look like?

Have you heard the one about the guy with flu who managed to get off the sofa for a £10 note?

No. Of course you haven’t.

Because the saying goes that the guy with ‘real flu’ can’t get off the sofa for the sodding £10 note.

He’d probably struggle to pick up a £50 for that matter, because he’d be so darned wrung out, his feet wouldn’t shift from their horizontal position of his sick bed.

Why am I making this point?

Because I want to raise the issue of what we ‘think’ we know about one extreme of illness or sickness, to another.

When it comes to colds and flu, we relate a scene like the above, to try and capture the difference between someone who has a mere sniffle, and someone who is bed-bound with severe malaise and is full-on struck by flu.

When it comes to an eating disorder then, how do you tell a ‘sick’ person from another?

How do you know, by looks alone, whether that person has anorexia nervosa, or doesn’t?

How do you know whether that young women is skinny through deliberate food deprivation, or through pure circumstance?

How do you know whether that guy has bulimia, or suffers with binge eating disorder?

Truth is – you don’t. Certainly not by looks alone.

And yet, we as a society seem to be fixated on ‘believing’ that we DO know when someone has anorexia or is someone with an eating disorder.

Chuck an image search into the internet for the words ‘eating disorder’ and I can almost guarantee you’re going to be greeted by countless images of visible ribs, scrawny bodies and emaciated frames.

But even if you were to try to argue that anorexia nervosa – of the full list of eating disorders which exist – is the one more commonly associated with being exceptionally underweight and malnourished, can you really be sure that one person’s body is ‘skinny’ enough (or not) so as to be referred to as anorexic?

One of the major shifts which is needed in our social comprehension of eating disorders, is for professionals and non-professionals alike, to recognise that a person with an eating disorder may not visibly reflect their condition as obviously as another.

As the Health At Every Size movement stresses quite rightly, a person with an eating disorder doesn’t have to be in a particular shape of body, and certainly doesn’t have to be weighing in at a particular ‘number’ to be living an unhealthy and unhappy relationship with food.

My concern is that while we maintain our belief that we know what a person with an eating disorder looks like (typically, the white and skinny and female, picture is that which will jump to mind for most) we avoid tackling the enormity of the issue around just how many people are struggling with their behaviours and life-restrictive illness.

I’d ask every single person to think carefully and considerately before judging whether one person has an eating disorder, based solely on their body shape or size.

I’d also stress to professionals to be very mindful of jumping to your pre-conditioned assumptions the moment a patient crosses your threshold.

Sure, you need some level of judgment around the level of ‘poorliness’ that that person may be experiencing with eating disorder behaviours, but isn’t it time the analysis went beyond glancing at the skinniness of a body and perhaps jumping to conclusions based on very tired BMI theories?

Everyone with an eating disorder has an individual story. Let’s treat all those battling their demons and behaviours with equality of consideration.

We owe one another that much at least.