I’d like to draw your attention to how the word “diet” includes the word “die”. Yes, I know that “diet” can simply mean the food you eat, but I’m talking about when “diet” means restricting your intake, generally as a means of weight-loss.
This post was inspired by some personal experiences I/people close to me have been facing, and it was triggered by this article that I read: http://nedic.ca/blog/when-society-becomes-biggest-loser.
Now I’m sure many of you have heard of the show “The Biggest Loser,” and I’m sure many of you have also heard of the fairly recent controversy over one winner who, well, lost too much weight.
Let’s take a critical look at this situation. A woman loses over half her body weight, and becomes too thin, so we all freak out. However, The Biggest Loser is filled with people losing that amount of weight. But as long as they aren’t too skinny, society sees all that weight loss as healthy. In fact, society is usually proud of people for taking unrealistic measures to lose their fat.
Essentially, we praise people for using behaviours that, on another individual, we would call an eating disorder. If someone at a higher weight starves themselves, dramatically cuts back on calories, or over-exercises, we look up to that and see it as an achievement. We see it as being healthy. Yet an overwhelming number of people are suffering from eating disorders characterized by these same behaviours.
What’s more, we don’t even look down upon severely-emaciated bodies. I’ll give you two reasons why I say this: 1) modelling agencies have been known to recruit outside eating disorder clinics, and 2) I have met multiple people who have been told they’re looking great shortly before starting intensive (even inpatient) eating disorder treatment.
I could ramble on about this for hours, so I think I’ll draw this post to a close. I’d like to leave you with one last message. It’s something I read on Tumblr: (one of the most misunderstood concepts is…) “Eating disorders are a mental illness, not a weight range.”
So let’s stop praising people for engaging in unhealthy behaviours to meet society’s unhealthy (and unrealistic) beauty ideal.
If you or someone you know is suffering from an eating disorder, please get help.
If you or someone you know is engaging in unhealthy dieting or other behaviours, please think again.
