The recently published article entitled “Redefining Anorexia” challenges readers to expand their understanding of the causes behind the eating disorder. Indeed, as the author suggests, the roots of anorexia reach far beyond our cultural obsession with body image. The overwhelming urge for control, the obsession with being the “best” – these, too, are crucial components of the development of anorexia that often go unaddressed.
Yet perhaps the problem is not our lack of understanding of what it means to be anorexic, but rather a deeply engrained societal reverence for the sort of obsessive self-control that leads to disordered eating. It makes sense, from an evolutionary perspective, that we value those members of society who can temper their impulses in favor of maintaining order. And while most of us can agree that an obsession with body image is unhealthy, the line between an unhealthy and an admirable amount of self-control is a much finer one to walk.
The entertainment industry stands as a particularly vivid reflection of this fetishizing of self-discipline. “Portrayals of Overweight and Obese Individuals on Commercial Television,” published in 2003 by the American Journal of Public Health, examines the differences between the portrayals of thin and overweight characters on prime time television. Overweight actors were more likely to be eating, less likely to be active or help with tasks, and less likely to be engaged in romantic relationships than their thinner co-stars. Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of the correlation between weight and personality can be found on the hit TV show Friends. One of the characters, Monica, finds social, professional, and romantic success after her transformation from “Fat Monica” – portrayed as a gluttonous, isolated young woman – to the thin Monica who exhibits self-control to the point of obsession. “Fat Monica” is only one example of the media’s personification of our culture’s stereotypes of obesity, stereotypes that strongly associate laziness and a lack of self-restraint with being overweight.
As damaging as these representations of obesity are, the portrayals of thin characters on mainstream television are just as powerful. The media has long been accused of “idealizing” thin individuals, with a disproportionate number of below-average weight women cast in lead roles and the vast underrepresentation of overweight and obese characters. In addition, numerous analyses of primetime television series have proven that slender actors have more positive characteristics than their obese counterparts. For example, the American Journal of Public Health’s 2003 study found that 92% of thin or average-weight women were judged to be attractive, while less than half of overweight women were so characterized. The analysis also found that thinner characters were significantly more likely to be romantically involved and have positive interactions than their heavier co-stars, and were overall portrayed as more successful, more desirable, and happier than their heavier colleagues. It is within these often-subtle contrasts between characters of varying weights that the “thin ideal” arises, enforcing an implicit association between a person’s weight and her professional and personal success.
Repeated exposure to this “thin ideal” – the portrayal of underweight characters as more successful than overweight characters – leads viewers implicitly to equate thinness with success. The media also affects our understanding of the relationship between self-control and weight. Indeed, thin and successful female leads are rarely shown eating, and many of these characters, such as Friends’ Monica or Grace from Will and Grace, exhibit an arguably neurotic need for control. This behavior pattern, typical of thin TV stars, exists in stark contrast to the depiction of overweight characters’ often-gluttonous food consumption and impulsivity. This portrayal of thin women with extreme levels of control has a two-pronged effect. First, the self-control exhibited by slender, female leads is exactly the sort of self-control that, in its extreme, results in achieving and maintaining the ultra-thin body type we have come to accept as the standard of beauty. Secondly, the dominant image of this successful, thin, self-control-exhibiting female leads to the audience’s formation of a relationship between a woman’s self-discipline and her weight, and a relationship between her weight and her achievements.
Following this logic, then, the restraint exhibited by thin characters, whether it be through dieting explicitly or an infrequent consumption of food, must be the same expression of self-control that helped her to achieve success. Of course, this logic is flawed – being overweight does not translate into failure and misery, being thin does not guarantee success and contentedness, and self-control is not a characteristic exhibited by all thin or by all successful people. Yet the media’s portrayal of just such characters is so prominent that we simply fail to recognize the fallacy in our beliefs. Instead, the idea that a person’s self-control is directly related both to her appearance and her consequential achievement has become so deeply entrenched in our society that we view it as accepted truth.
Thus, the problem is not that our society doesn’t understand the relationship between the desire to maintain control and disordered eating, but that we tend to admire such a display of self-control due to its cultural association with success. This tendency holds true only to an extent, of course; those who begin to appear visibly unhealthy also draw criticism. Yet there is exists the subconscious idolization of the sort of discipline necessary to go an entire day without eating, or to spend three hours on the elliptical. If such self-control does not otherwise interfere with a person’s success – they maintain their grades, and their relationships, and continue to appear healthy – then disordered eating is considered to be more a strength than a disorder at all.
Indeed, a 2008 study conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that nearly three quarters of American women between the ages of 25 and 45 report disordered eating patterns or symptoms consistent with eating disorders such as anorexia. This national obsession with weight loss and dieting is further evidenced by the “lose weight FAST” message plastered across magazine covers every month, covers that feature a celebrity whom we must either admire after their impressive weight loss, or shame following any sort of weight gain.
While it can certainly be an admirable quality, we too often fail to recognize the dangers that can result from the excessive pursuit of self-control. Yes, we must acknowledge the role that a need for control plays in fostering eating disorders. But we must also, as a society, learn to recognize that discipline is so much more than a perceived path to success, and its effects can be as detrimental to our health as a profoundly distorted body image.
My anorexia never interfered with my academic success. It never interfered with my personal life. And in the nine years that I’ve suffered from it, people took notice in my disordered eating only when my BMI began to drop significantly below normal. As long as I maintained a “normal” weight, my avoidance of lunch and my extreme dedication to exercise were the subject of admiration. It was not that I or others failed to recognize the symptoms of anorexia, but that we refused to associate that brand of discipline with the negative connotation of an eating disorder. Just as my academic discipline was respected, so was my self-control at the dinner table. And until we, as a society, start to recognize the implications of an obsessive pursuit of control, we will never be able to properly address the increasing prevalence of anorexia and disordered eating.