BodiMojo Blog

When I was in college, I had a friend who would hardly eat. At meals, she’d take half a banana, put some peanut butter on it, and take tiny bites. She wouldn’t finish it, and she wouldn’t eat anything else. She wasn’t fat. But she thought she was.

I used to say to her, “Just eat something!”

Little did I know how useless that was.

This week, I read the number one myth about eating disorders, publicized as part of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, sponsored by the Eating Recovery Center, which treats those with severe eating disorders. It’s this: People don’t choose to have eating disorders. A person with an eating disorder has a mental illness. He or she cannot “snap out of it” — which is what I wanted my friend to do. 

A chilling video on eating disorders, by Gali Slayen, shows bone-thin women and men and grim statistics:

• Over 11 million in the U.S. have an eating disorder.

• Ninety percent of those with eating disorders are women.

• Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness; between 15 and 20 percent of those who struggle with eating disorders will die.

Why do people get eating disorders? The experts say it has very little to do with food, and everything to do with control. My friend from college, I recall, was having a tough time socially. She probably felt she couldn’t control that part of her life. But she could control how much food she ate. And she did — for months.

Luckily, she moved on. Today she’s healthy. We at BodiMojo hope the same for any young people struggling with anorexia or bulimia.

– Karen Feldscher, BodiMojo project manager, is a mom with 30 years of writing and editing experience.