Day 121: Harriet Brown (author and guest blogger)

Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown.  ISBN: 9780061725470 (advanced reader copy, publishes in September 2010).

Six years ago, I thought I knew all about eating disorders. They were, I thought, what rich white girls did when they wanted attention, when their families were neglectful, or abusive, or otherwise dysfunctional. They were distasteful to me, eating disorders, and I felt judgmental about them. They represented a failure of parenting in my mind. But my family was neither neglectful nor abusive, and so my daughters were never going to get an eating disorder.

Wrong on all counts.

When my 14-year-old daughter, Kitty, began to get anxious and obsessed, I did wonder briefly if she could have an eating disorder. She was thin, but she’d always been thin. She hadn’t lost a lot of weight, and she wasn’t throwing up or using laxatives. And, well, we just weren’t that kind of family. Both our kids were fairly outspoken about what they needed, and my husband and I were pretty responsive parents. There’s always room for improvement when it comes to parenting, but it seemed like we were doing OK.

But Kitty was diagnosed with anorexia, and thus began our family’s long trip to the nightmare world of eating disorders. My husband and other daughter and I watched as Kitty became sicker and sicker, and we had no idea how to help her. Neither, it seemed, did the doctors who treated her. “Don’t be the food police, Mom,” one therapist told me. I was supposed to sit at the table and watch my bright, precocious, funny, outgoing daughter diminish into a haunted, angry shadow of herself. I was supposed to watch the light dwindle in her eyes, her hands turn into claws, her flesh become bone, and—what? Talk about the weather?

As a journalist, I’m used to looking for answers. And so I looked, all that spring, and what I found shocked me:
• Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness; 20 percent of all anorexia sufferers die from the disease—half from malnutrition, half from suicide.
• Recovery statistics were grim: maybe 30 to 40 percent of all sufferers recovered; many stayed chronically ill for the rest of their lives.
• No one knows exactly what causes anorexia, and so . . .
• There’s little to no consensus about how to treat it.
• With treatment, the average length of illness is 5 to 7 years. With treatment.

I used my journalist’s instincts to dig deeper, and discovered the one evidence-based treatment for anorexia in teens. We used it to help our daughter get well.  Over the next 18 months or so, as our daughter recovered—slowly, painfully, courageously—I began talking to other families who were going through the same process. I kept bumping up against the fact that there’s been very little research on anorexia and bulimia. One big reason is that most families who go through it are shamed into thinking it’s all their fault. And families who are shamed don’t push for more research, better treatments, better answers. They suffer and cope in silence.

So I wrote this book, Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia, to help break the silence. I wrote it to help the lucky families, the ones who will never have to go through this themselves but who know someone with an eating disorder. (Most people do, whether they’re aware of it or not.) I wrote the book to pull together the scientific evidence as I saw it and push forward a research agenda on these illnesses. Most of all, I wrote the book so families would know they had a choice about treatment, and so they would not feel so alone.

Harriet Brown is an assistant professor of magazine journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in Syracuse, NY. She writes often for the New York Times and other magazines and newspapers. She blogs about food, eating, and body image at Feed Me!, harrietbrown.blogspot.com. For a list of upcoming stops on her book tour, visit harrietbrown.com.


*Photo Credit: © Jamie Young.

Day 120: Brave Girl Eating

Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown.  ISBN: 9780061725470 (advanced reader copy, publishes in September 2010).

"You don't deserve to eat.  You're weak, unworthy.  You are disgusting.  You don't deserve to live."  Page 2.

This is something that goes through the minds of anorexics.  What you might not know is that they are not unknown to fat people, at the very least not to this fat person.  Of course the reaction is often very different.  Oh sure, I try to eat small portions and eat healthy.  I try to avoid fast food and even restaurants.  I work out, sometimes obsessively.  But then I get to the point where I feel so bad about myself, I never lose the weight, and so something in my brain tells me, "You're disgusting and you'll always be disgusting.  Even if you lose the weight, you will still be gross, you might as well eat.  You should eat until you can't eat anymore, because at least if you're fat they'll hate you for that and not because you're who you are."

I don't even really want to be thin.  At my smallest I was 170 and a size 14.  That was acceptable to me.  I've always been pretty muscular, so even when I was that thin I was always hungry, probably because I wasn't getting enough protein to maintain my muscle mass.  I really just want to be a size where I can feel like other people don't think I'm as disgusting as I feel I am.

It's really not a matter of willpower.  I can tell you right now, willpower will not help in this situation.  Thin/normal people don't seem to get that.  Overeating in most cases is a compulsion.  Once I start eating, I have a very hard time stopping until I am full.  I eat slowly and this helps, but unfortunately I still have to eat to survive.  If I could give up food altogether, as much as I love the act and process of eating and the socialization usually associated with it, I would give it up to be healthy.  But it's not like alcohol where I could give it up and never touch a drop again if I had to.  Biologically I am required to eat food and consume calories, so I'm stuck in this cycle and there's this almost endless feeling of guilt associated with eating.  As a fat person, I feel like I'm not allowed to eat at all, because every bite I put into my mouth is judged by someone else.

These are the feelings I have on my worst days.  Generally, I'm a pretty happy person and I do actually like myself.  It took me a while to get there, but I am happy.  These thoughts only pop up when I'm at my worst, when I'm actively trying to lose weight (which is the main reason why dieting is so unpleasant).  Somehow I think if the self-loathing thoughts didn't occur so often during dieting I would be able to lose and keep the weight off easier.  Anyway, I'm disabling comments on this one, because trust me, I've heard it all before.

Day 119: Brave Girl Eating

Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown.  ISBN: 9780061725470 (advanced reader copy, publishes in September 2010).

I'm not putting the cover where I normally do because I want to show you a little something that makes me slightly ill.

Okay.  Here it is:

Yup.  Nothing like having a book cover for anorexia piggy back off of a book about creepy, emotionally abusive stalker vampires.  I accept that the apple image is pretty common thanks to some artist figuring that it must've been an apple that was the forbidden fruit.  But if you think about the foods that an anorexic would find forbidden, I don't think apples are high on the list given that they're mostly comprised of cellulose.*  And if she's a brave girl eating, I think I would have found the cover more compelling if we could see her face and if she had a loaded fork (maybe with spaghetti that's turning into snakes, that would really represent anorexia to me).  This is so passive; the headless girl is offering us the food when she should be confronting her fear and eating it herself.

The whole point of this book is to supposedly humanize one particular family and their struggle with anorexia.  Why would you have such a bland cover as this?  Whereas the point of having photographs and videos of people with their heads cut out of the frame is to encourage feelings of anonymity.  We don't know these people, we've never known them, and even if we do there's no way to recognize them so they could be anyone.  Somehow I don't think that was the message that Brown was trying to convey.

For some reason these two covers in conjunction made me think of a webcomic strip I saw recently, I'm actually just going to link to it because it's a full panel: Sucks to Be Weegie.**

Yeah, that's about right.  This is the message my brain is hammering into my head between these two books.  If I want a super hot overly obsessive boyfriend who probably thinks I'm interchangeable with any other girl then I apparently need to be as skinny as possible.  Love that message.  I know I'm seeing things that aren't there, but I wish, wish, wish that publishers would think about more than "This cover will make my book sell" when they select cover art.

I wish our culture wasn't obsessed with deadly thinness, or with sparkly vampires.  I wonder how many girls are starving themselves (physically, emotionally, from actual healthy relationships or potential relationships) because they're waiting for their Edward.  And really Meyer is all about the emotional anorexia.  She's teaching girls not to have feelings or thoughts for anyone but Edward, who is obviously not good for us (you can argue with me, but a hoard of hungry vampires and a vampire tooth cesarean say otherwise).  We can love the things that are bad for us, but that doesn't mean we need to or should accept them into our lives.

*Added 7/27/2010.  One of my readers brought it to my attention that all foods are forbidden.  I specifically had in mind the passages in the book where Kitty would bargain with her parents to purchase or buy food that would not assist with her recovery so that even when she was eating, it wasn't "as bad."  I did not mean to imply that anorexics are thin because they only eat healthy food or any other nonsense.  I recognize it as the legitimate and terrible disease that it is.
**The rest of Kevin Bolk's work can be found on his deviant art page.