Banning Thin
An interesting article (link is fixed now) on how Europe is trying to control the glorification of overly thin women. I suppose there is some risk that promoting CR there would be against the law! The goal is to curb eating disorders and save lives.
I have no personal experience with anorexia and bulimia. In fact, I am really confused about the concept mentioned in the article of people purposely eating foods that they plan to throw up later. It just seems illogical to me. I can see losing control and eating something that you shouldn't have and then making yourself throw it up - in panic, so to speak. But, planning to do that ahead of time? I just don't understand what's going on there.
This is one of the challenges of CR - keeping it separate from eating disorders. Some people (non-CR people) seem to be convinced that CR is an eating disorder - a form or "orthorexia". I think this is the wrong way to look at it. There are obsessive compulsive people who focus their O-C on eating. But, it's not the eating behavior that's the disorder - it's the O-C. It seems pretty silly to me to create a long list of disorders for each thing that people obsess on - when the issue is really the tendency to obsess. My level of obession with CR is below the level many presumably normal people expend on their hobbies or interests. I spend less time on CR, doing it or thinking about it, than a lot of women spend of hair, make-up and nails. How this could be a disease, I cannot imagine.
posted by Mary Robinson @ 10:09 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Hi Mary,
wrong link! (just found out grass types in Austin ;-) )
Long-time reader here...
There is one major distinction that most people fail to think about when suggesting that adhering to CRON signals an eating disorder.
It is this: an eating disorder impairs or destroys one's quality of life and/or health. That is what makes it a disorder.
Adherence to CR makes most of its practitioners happier and healthier. It tends to increase quality of life and quality of health.
There ARE some practitioners who are very much socially isolated by their eating practices, and who experience grave psychological misery if they go off plan for one meal or even one bite. Their rigidity may make it difficult or impossible for them to do things that they enjoy, like visiting friends and family, traveling, eating food that they themselves have not directly purchased and prepared. They may be too thin, and susceptible to pneumonia or stress fractures. In the case when quality of life is low, or quality of health is low, it's clear that there is an eating disorder.
People who plan to binge and then vomit tend to get a drug-like effect from the binging -- it's not that different from a drug user's decision to shoot up or smoke. I can attest that I have been in a state where I explicitly planned to buy and consume enormous quantities of refined carbohydrates, and could not stop thinking about them during the day at work until I had a chance to go to the store. Sometimes it really is simply just a total loss of control, however.
The vomiting is just an attempt to have your cake and vomit it too -- you can experience the opiate-like high, or stress relief, that the binge brings, and can then "undo" your mistake by vomiting. Many bulimics experience a feeling of overwhelming shame and self-loathing after a binge, in the way that some alcoholics do after recovering from a day of overindulgence. Vomiting helps relieve some of that.
Food can have very strong drug-like effects. An alcoholic or a heroin addict can potentially quit his/her drug of choice for good. A bulimic or binge eater cannot. The cycle is very hard to break.
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