Evidence versus Experience

As my blog research has continued, my desire for answers concerning this difference, or whatever you wish to call it, continues to grow. I no longer want a better understanding of why women engage in this practice, I need a better understanding. What does it do for them, and how does it allow them to see themselves? What is it they truly see behind the bones jutting from their skin?

In my efforts to find deeper understanding, I came across a certified nutrionalist who earned her PHD from Colombia University. Of course it was great to learn the perspective of a nutritionalist, but it was even greater to learn that of a nutritionalist who once allowed herself to be a part of the disease. Yes, the woman who graduated from Colombia University was also anorexic for the first three years of her undergraduate schooling. Ironically, her infatuation with anorexia directed her towards psychology and anthropology and ultimately resulted in her PHD and career in nutrition. As she was so willing to share with me some of her deepest secrets, I must respect her wishes to remain anonymous. The interview that I thought was going to bring me dry scientific reasoning actually brought me to greater understand this psychological mystery.

The first thing she made clear was that at any point someone with an underlying self-hate can become an anorexic. They need not be aware of their psychological discord in order to feel a need for control in their lives. “For the most part,” she said, “anorexia results from a very deep need to feel perfect or accepted. It results from self-esteem issues, most likely originating from a dysfunctional family, but not just your average dysfunction, it is very particular.” It was at this point in the interview where the nutritionalist I was speaking to turned into a real person; a person with experience. She said, “My mother was a control freak. She wasn’t a very nurturing mother, and she was very focused and driven on task orientation…emotions were never important to her. You are usually lacking a good mother when you have anorexia. You know, one that is nurturing.” When she came back from college, she said, her mother told her she was getting pudgy. The once state-ranked athlete was turning “fat.” She didn’t know about dieting, or eating foods with high nutritional value, so in college she ate like she did when she was a competing athlete. How her mother told her she was pudgy is still a mystery to me. She weighed 118 pounds and was 5’4”. Those are extremely close to my dimensions, and to think of myself, as being fat seems completely ridiculous. But even with the body of a healthy 19-year old, this woman was starting to see herself as obese. She actually looked in the mirror and saw fat. She poked at the curves in her body and saw hate. She hated herself.