Eating disorders a 'public health crisis'

"I kept telling myself that 'everything will be OK when you're thin,'" said Marya Hornbacher, author of Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia to a packed house in a Higgins lecture hall on Thursday evening.

In an effort to raise awareness concerning eating disorders, Hornbacher was invited to BC to read excerpts from her Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir as a part of the NAWCHE (National Association for Women in Catholic Higher Education) speaker series.

Published in 1998 and nominated for the prestigious literary award in nonfiction the same year, Wasted employs Hornbacher's own life experiences to explore the biological, psychological, and social causes of varying forms of eating disorders.

Hornbacher's affliction with both anorexia and bulimia reached its climax while she was an undergrad at Georgetown University, when she was rushed to the hospital with a recorded weight of 52 pounds. She had been battling the eating disorders since she was 5 years old, when she first insisted on dieting.

As a result, by the ripe age of 9, her battle fully ensued. Once she was successful in skipping a meal and inducing bulimia for the first time, she realized it was something she could do again.

Soon these actions became habitual for the prepubescent; it was harder for her to find her way back to normalcy.

"I took the knowledge of being thin and losing weight in college as being progress," said Hornbacher against cultural and media pressures encouraging both men and women to be thin.

Unlike other addictions like alcoholism or drug addictions, society in America praises those who lose weight. Being fit and slender usually connotes a wealthy, successful, and happy life. On the other hand, obesity implies weakness, failure, and poverty.

Thus, like the majority of dieting Americans today, Hornbacher said she felt triumphant each time she lost a significant amount of weight.

Once she attended college, Hornbacher described her physical appearance as monstrous. After starving herself for most of her life and resorting to substituting food with three to six pots of coffee a day, the college student was astoundingly skeletal.

"I began to measure things in absence, not presence," said Hornbacher of the fact that she had barely any flesh to cover gapes between her legs, fingers, and ribs. By the time she had reached 67 pounds, she began binging.

"Your feel like you are possessed, on speed, or in a constant battle with your body, and losing," she said, describing the experience of making the transfer from refusing to eat to practically engulfing mass quantities of food.

She continued to binge, even when she started to cough up blood into a Kleenex. When her body fell to 61 pounds, she began to take laxatives, which was futile since there was nothing in her body except water and blood.

After passing out in a subway station in Washington, D.C., Hornbacher was hospitalized permanently. After a prognosis forecasting only a week to live, many thought Hornbacher would not be able to survive given her terribly frail condition.

The afflicted student's recovery was extremely slow, and it was not just a matter of deciding to eat. Throughout her life, she had rejected the notion of eating; it was always nonnegotiable.

"I had to build a self from scratch. For me, eating was frightening and would cause me to cease to exist. I had to condition myself to change a way of thought I had all my life," said Hornbacher.

She had to start considering food as a pleasure and as something that the body can really enjoy, instead of looking at it as a formidable enemy.

More than 80 percent of American women are dissatisfied with their bodies, and in worrying about diet and exercise, they are trying to fix something that is not necessarily broken.

Fifty billion dollars are spent annually in the dieting industry, which urges consumers to seek physical perfection. In her book, Hornbacher wants to show that eating disorders themselves are not the problems associated with extreme dieting.

The problem stems from constant, everlasting obsession with thinness, fitness, and the "perfect body."

More than 10 million Americans are plagued with different types of eating disorders; 10 percent of these people die, and only 40 percent recover successfully.

According to Hornbacher, eating disorders are not so much a personal phase as they are a public health crisis.

Eating disorders can be incredibly difficult to diagnose since their symptoms and causes differ drastically from case to case. The media has always been an easy scapegoat for the prevalence of eating disorders.

It is true that cultural pressures are incredibly detrimental to living a healthy lifestyle. However, "the media didn't clear my plate," said Hornbacher. So many other factors like personality, background, chemical makeup, and a determined free will can cause one to succumb to eating disorders.

Hornbacher proposes that the initial change must come from within ourselves. "We need to stop using self abuse as an outlet to take out the stresses of life. There is so much more to life than worrying about dieting. We can save ourselves from living half a life," said Hornbacher.