Tag Archives: dieting

When Eating Disorders Meet Eating Requirements

Debbie says:

For a person who doesn’t have diabetes, I know a fair amount about it. My partner has Type II diabetes, and so do a number of my close friends. For myself, I have been “pre-diabetic” (a term defined by your blood sugar numbers) for over eight years now, which makes the “pre” a little suspicious. My best friend for part of grade school was a Type 1 diabetic.

What I know about eating disorders is more academic. Although I have occasionally indulged in what people might call “binge” eating, I have never been anorexic, or bulimic. I’ve never been a serious dieter, though I’ve done a reasonably good job of controlling my carbohydrate intake since my blood sugar numbers started to go up in 2007. At the same time, the work I’ve done with Laurie both for our books and here at Body Impolitic has made me very aware of eating disorders, both from the personal story and the scientific data perspectives.

So I was struck by Bryce Covert’s excellent essay, “I Thought I Was Over My Body Issues, until I Got Diabetes.”

When I found out I had Type 1 diabetes, I had just finished eating a slice of pound cake. I still had powdered sugar stuck to my fingertips when the phone rang.

In the months before that phone call, I had become insatiably hungry. I would finish eating an entire meal — something as filling as pad Thai or Indian curry — and instantly want to eat the same thing all over again. This unending hunger would have brought me guilt and pain if it had struck in my teenage years or early 20s. I would have wrestled it into the back of my mind and denied it what it called out for. But by 30, I had ended that battle and agreed to give my body what it told me it wanted. And it had lately been telling me it wanted everything.

Almost without exception, this is how stories of getting over eating disorders and food-related body dysphoria end. “I gave my body what it told me it wanted.” Covert is clearly living in the culture’s body/mind division, which I theoretically believe is not the best for us, and which I find myself falling into all the time. More to the point, she had figured out that what she ate wasn’t a war, or a contest, or a secret test: it was just food.

Then there’s a quick medical stereotyping story. Despite extreme thirst, atypical hunger, and inexplicable weight loss,

… the doctor told me unequivocally that I didn’t have diabetes, despite a nurse’s suspicions. You’re too old, she said. You’re not sick enough. You’re not overweight.

“Too old” refers to Type 1 diabetes, which is generally diagnosed before a person is 20. As a quick oversimplified distinction, Type 1 is primarily about the body’s inability to produce its own insulin, and Type 2 is primarily about the body’s resistance to its own insulin. I know someone who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in her early 30s, which is “too young” to expect a Type 2 diagnosis (which shows up in your 40s or beyond). She wasn’t thin, which perhaps made it take longer to confirm that she really had Type 1. These things happen; doctors should probably not be unequivocal, and yet it’s easy for doctors, like the rest of us, to confuse stereotypes with certainties.

Covert’s relationship with dieting started when she was 12, and her belly began to bulge.

I wanted to have power over what my body looked like. I found that power in strictly controlling what went inside it. It was often, if not always, misinformed. I decided the best way to eat fewer calories was to eat less food. I would deny myself whatever I thought I shouldn’t have with the discipline of a monk. I spent one memorable day holed up in my bedroom abstaining from everything — from the moment I woke up until dinnertime — so that I could eat the unknown calories in the Chinese takeout my family ordered every Friday evening guilt-free. But the delivery that night came hours late, at which point I was close to fainting. … What I lost in strength (and pounds — the only other time I’ve been below 100 was one particularly austere summer during high school) I felt I gained in control. I didn’t care about giving my body what it needed. I cared about making my body look the way I needed it to.

That’s the key to eating disorders as I understand them; they are about control. The calorie intake, the size of the stomach, the curve under the chin–those are the outward manifestations. But in the life of a young girl with so many pressures on her to look, act and feel certain ways, and so few areas where she can make her own choices, control is irresistible. If our culture venerated size, these same girls would be counting calories with a view toward increasing them as much as possible.

So Covert worked for over a decade on this control, and then worked at least equally hard to let go, eat what she wanted, with the most valuable kind of success there is.

I began to feel something akin to what I felt as a kid: that my body was a means to an end and not the end itself.

Then, diagnosis.

… a Type 1 diabetic has to become her own pancreas. I’ve marched into another full-on struggle against myself, assuming the job of an organ that can no longer function because my body is trying to destroy it. This requires dictatorial discipline. For every given amount of carbohydrates I eat — which can be found in foods ranging from sugar to bread to beans to even milk, and which then turns to sugar in the body — I inject myself with a corresponding dose of insulin. I compute in quantities of 15: For every 15 grams of carbohydrate, I need one dose of insulin.

Aside from her own story, which is still unresolved, Covert connects the dots: girls and diets, women and auto-immune disorders, body hatred and the desire for control.

The whole thing leaves me wondering: if girls and women weren’t judged by our looks to such an extreme extent, would we have the same auto-immune disorder numbers that men do? Is there some kind of subtle, unexplored link between our pre-pubescent focus on our bodies and our adult risks? Covert doesn’t take her musing this far, but I suspect she’s asking herself the same questions.

Long Overdue Links

Debbie says

So the site was down, and various things happened, and we’ve been posting a little less frequently than usual, and the links have been piling up like nobody’s business. I’m going to trim off some of the old ones from the list, but this will still get long …

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This will come as no surprise to many regular readers here, but the visuals are powerful, and apply in slightly less dramatic ways to so many of us:

The current World’s Strongest Man, Brian [Shaw] is 6’9″ and 420 pounds, and traveling can be a bit more difficult for him than it is for the average person. Especially when you fly commercial.

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You can read a lot of Internet without finding news as good as this:

Arunachalam Muruganantham was horrified to learn that his wife (in a rural area in Southern India) couldn’t afford decent menstrual pads and was using soiled rags. It got worse when he found out that other women were using even less hygienic substances. He went to great lengths to study the issue…

Four-and-a-half years later, he succeeded in creating a low-cost method for the production of sanitary towels. The process involves four simple steps. First, a machine similar to a kitchen grinder breaks down the hard cellulose into fluffy material, which is packed into rectangular cakes with another machine.

The cakes are then wrapped in non-woven cloth and disinfected in an ultraviolet treatment unit. The whole process can be learned in an hour.

Muruganantham’s goal was to create user-friendly technology. The mission was not just to increase the use of sanitary pads, but also to create jobs for rural women – women like his mother. Following her husband’s death in a road accident, Muruganantham’s mother had had to sell everything she owned and get a job as a farm labourer, but earning $1 a day wasn’t enough to support four children. That’s why, at the age of 14, Muruganantham had left school to find work.

The machines are kept deliberately simple and skeletal so that they can be maintained by the women themselves. “It looks like the Wright brothers’ first flight,” he says. The first model was mostly made of wood, and when he showed it to the Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, in Madras, scientists were sceptical – how was this man going to compete against multinationals?

You have to love this man:

“Imagine, I got patent rights to the only machine in the world to make low-cost sanitary napkins – a hot-cake product,” he says. “Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty – everything happens because of ignorance.”

He believes that big business is parasitic, like a mosquito, whereas he prefers the lighter touch, like that of a butterfly. “A butterfly can suck honey from the flower without damaging it,” he says.

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It’s no longer Black History Month (I’m in the camp that believes we need twelve months of that every year), but it’s not too late to be horrified by how racism and fatphobia can go hand in hand as co-opting partners:

"Celebrate Black History Month: 1-800-GET-THIN"

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It’s no longer National Eating Disorders Week either, but it never hurts to have good resources on this difficult topic.

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And then, there’s sex: A surprising number of my current links group under the subject of sexuality. First, I don’t know when I’ve read a better or more thoughtful article than Rich Juzwiak’s piece on Truvada, barebacking, and safe sex:

For those, like me, who were unaware of or uneducated about Truvada, it is an antitretroviral cocktail that was approved in 2012 for pre-exposure HIV prophylaxis (PrEP):

For some—say barebacking enthusiasts, sex workers, or people in serodiscordant couples (in which one person is HIV positive and the other is negative)—Truvada is a no-brainer. There are plenty of us, though, who occupy a gray area, in which barebacking isn’t exactly a lifestyle, and in which contracting HIV doesn’t exactly seem like an inevitability. For those of us in that group, the kind of introspection that Truvada requires is hard.

The understanding that I might benefit from using Truvada dawned on me slowly, like I was stuck permanently at 6 a.m. for a few months. It was other guys who helped prompt my decision, like the ones I had the sense not to fuck raw when they assumed that’s what we’d be doing on first meeting, or the ones who tried to fuck me bare so casually, it was like they were going in there to check their mail. It was the guy who told me, “Yes, I’m negative—I was tested in February,” in October. It was the guy that I hooked up with who then proposed a threesome via text: “My friend said he wants to fuck raw.” This was a few texts after I told him, “I play safe,” and he said, “Yeah, me too.” A few texts later, he admitted he’d already fucked raw with our prospective third.

And it was the condoms that have come off or broken during sex, rendering that session raw anyway.

Juzwiak combines his own experience and thoughts with careful statistics, analysis of the ethical/moral questions involved, consideration of the drug’s long-term side effects, the meaning of “barebacking” in a heterosexual context,” and more. Read the whole thing.

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I was pleased to see the work of Terri Conley, re-examining the differences between men and women in hook-up culture. Conley directs the Stigmatized Sexualities Lab (how cool is it that that exists!) at the University of Michigan:

“I like to look beyond conducting research that confirms existing stereotypes,” Conley told the Cut over the phone last week. “These gender differences that everyone knows exist, and they know they’ll always exist and they’re biological — when I started pressing on them I found that a lot of those assumptions hadn’t really been tested.”

… We have a paper under review that says there are no differences between men and women if you control for two factors: pleasure, which we define as how capable they perceive their partner to be, and stigma, which we define as someone believing you’re a bad person for engaging in casual sex. I like to think of my research as trying to rule out alternative explanations in a way that evolutionary psychology doesn’t bother to do.

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I don’t agree with everything Claire Dederer says in this article on women, sex, and writing about sex, but I like how she’s breaking down the questions and thinking about things. She’s at her best when she’s writing about herself (and, not surprisingly, at her worst when she generalizes from her own experience to what’s true about “women”):

Hell, I wanted to be having sex. I liked sex. Didn’t I? Well, actually, I was never quite sure. Growing up in a world where the adults were busy trying to find themselves and the kids roamed unsupervised, I loved the adventure of sex, and I loved the attention, and sometimes it felt great. But did I want it enough? How good did it truly feel? Was I doing it only because the other person wanted to? My desire was real, I could feel it there at the core of the experience, but if I let myself, I could also feel doubt braided tightly with the desire. As a middle-aged married person, I’m still, you know, very pro-sex, but even now that’s how it is with me. Second thoughts come right on the heels of first thoughts, and am I really supposed to be having thoughts during sex anyway?

Her analyses of Anais Nin and Erica Jong, later in the article, are also worth reading.

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Finally for the sex section (say that three times fast), Grace Annam, not writing so much about sex as about sexual organs:

Hi, it’s us. Trans women who use bathrooms.

We know that you’re not comfortable sharing a bathroom with us, even though all the nakedness happens behind a stall door.

… We get it. There’s that penis in the room, and the whole entourage that can come along with those goddamn things.

We get it. Because when we go to the bathroom, there’s a penis in the room, too. Every time.

It’s right there in the stall with us.

She goes on to discuss trans women’s relationships with their own penises, a topic that is almost never addressed. And she does it without stereotyping or assuming that all trans women are the same. Here’s her unforgettable ending:

So we’d like to go to the bathroom, just like you. Ideally, we’d like to do it alone, but if we must have company, in that vulnerable moment, sitting over cold water with our pants down or skirt up, holding our clothes so that they don’t touch the floor (because, gah, ew)… we would like that experience to be gentle and brief, rather than nasty, brutish, and possibly followed by a stint in the hospital or the morgue.

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Finally, here’s a bit of black, sex worker, and American history that I didn’t know, very timely for this week.

1942 photo of Mardi Gras baby dolls

Calling your lover “baby” had just become part of the English language. Meanwhile, actual baby dolls, the toy, were rare. By dressing up this way, they flouted both gender and race rules. Women were largely excluded from masking for Mardi Gras and African Americans were still living under Jim Crow. Black women, by virtue of being both Black and female, were particularly devalued, sex workers ever more so. Asserting themselves as baby dolls, then, was a way of arguing that they were worth something.