Eating disorders and the industry that supports them make me sick....

The French model Isabelle Caro (28) died from anorexia related complications in November last year after suffering with the condition for 15 years. Luisel Ramos, a model from Uruguay, died at the age of 22 in 2006 from the same disease. A few months later her 18 year old sister, also a model, died of a heart attack believed to be related to an eating disorder. In that same year Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston (21) also died from the disease.  In 2007 Hila Elmalich, an Israeli model also died from complications associated with anorexia.

The size zero debate seems to have fallen off the radar in recent times, but the issues remain.

I suffered with anorexia during my teens and bulimia for most of my twenties, so I know something of what it was like for these women – although growing up in a country town in the West of Ireland doesn’t come close to working in an industry where being painfully underweight is a pre-requisite, and where starving is endemic. Having an eating disorder is almost a given for these women: not just incidental, but expected.

I’ve always had a difficult relationship with my body and with food – what woman hasn’t you may ask? It does seem to go with the territory of being female.

Raised by a mother who had lived through World War II, you could say I was raised on a diet of food made up largely of starch and lard. Not finishing everything on my plate was not an option, and pudding was served up after every meal – apple crumble and cream, trifle, jelly and ice-cream – it was enough to make an Atkins diet-enthusiast slit their wrists in self-loathing and disgust.

I managed to avoid any real effects from this stodgy diet until I reached my early teens, by which time it took its physical toll. Although far from obese, I started to hate how I looked and despair as to how I could possibly change it.

I wanted to be thin and was willing to do whatever it took to get there, and so I started to force myself to vomit after eating. It was surprisingly effective and I began losing weight almost immediately.

It's now widely accepted that eating disorders are often a response to a sense of powerlessness: the slow dwindling of one's weight over weeks and months is seductive, and for the first time in my life I could see a direct cause and effect played out on my own body. I felt deliciously in control.

Stepping on to the scales each morning (after a pee, pjs off, hair slides out) was exhilarating and addictive as the pounds fell away.

As the body slowly emaciates, a strong feeling of resolve kicks in, a tightening of rules, a rigid and almost militant obsession with food which (for me) disappeared in seconds as soon an opportunity to binge presented itself.

But this isn’t a tragic account, sad-faced and posing for Chat magazine. the eating disorder that ensued made me who I am (for better or worse), and although I try not to have regrets, I do regret the opportunities missed, potential unfulfilled, risks not taken as the eating disorder overwhelmed my life for 14 years.

Eating disorders are slightly taboo – particularly bulimia. Anorexia has a hint of glamor and elicits envy and awe - who hasn’t looked at a photo of Posh Spice and exclaimed ‘oh god she’s so thin, it's disgusting!’ rapidly followed by - ‘I wish I could look like that'.

Bulimia is the darker, embarrassing sister which nobody likes to admit to; who wants to own up to hours spent gorging at the door of the fridge, followed by fifteen minutes spent choking over a toilet bowl? Bulimia doesn’t engender envy, rather disgust.  I used to refer to it as ‘failed anorexia’ as that is exactly how it felt.

Having spent a couple of years as a successful anorectic – in other words, with weight headed in a downward spiral, I was eventually hauled off to a psychiatric hospital where I was placed on a programme for Eating disorders. In a way I was relieved.

At 5 foot 6 and well under seven stone I was the fatty of the group. What strikes me about that now is that I was pretty much the same size and weight as many of the women working in Hollywood today, and yet it was sufficient to have me committed. Think about that for a moment. The other women on the programme were painfully thin - it hurt to look at the slow articulation of their joints as they moved - and many of them had been in and out of similar treatment programmes for years and had the dull-eyed demeanour of the institutionalised.

Compared to these other women I felt like a total fraud (I already weighed in at their target weights) and battled the programme every step of the way, behaving like the naughty school-child that I was.

Like Rachel in Marian Keyes book ‘Rachel’s holiday’,  when I first arrived at the hospital I was rather hoping for a private room and an extensive menu which could then be eschewed; Possibly private yoga sessions and a masseuse. Instead I found myself sharing a ward with women who muttered to themselves - angry and desperate - cut their arms with razors, spoke endlessly and breathlessly about themselves - as only someone with years of therapy can - or sat, rocking back and forth, staring ahead of themselves all day long. In a way I relished the otherness of the situation, never really pausing to think that I myself might be in real physical or mental trouble.

Languishing in self pity I spent my days reading long novels and writing in my diary; it felt a bit like a holiday since I made no attempt to work with any of the professionals who were dealing with my case. They tried the touchy feely approach - self-love mantras combined with music and movement in front of mirrors, which frankly embarrassed me - but I would refuse to take part, causing so much disruption to the other girls I was eventually excluded from these activities.

As my friends celebrated the end of the exams and went out and got drunk, I spent my days being force-fed and blind-weighed. I was starring in my very own made-for-TV movie as a tragic heroine, misunderstood and wasting away like a self-obsessed Ophelia.

Although undeniably sick, I believed I was in control of it; what I didn’t realise was that by this time it most definitely controlled me. But as I saw it, relinquishing this little piece of autonomy was by now unthinkable for me. If I wasn't anorexic, how else could I explain my bad exam results and lack of achievement? How could I justify the couple of wasted years devoted to this obsession?

I was eventually released when it occurred to everyone involved that I had absolutely no interest in recovery. During the two months in hospital I did gain some weight and never really lost it again, although the bulimia remained for many years.

My school principal refused me a place back in my old school - I was too much trouble - so I was forced to attend a little school in the depths of the country to repeat my exams, where I was told by my well-meaning but ultimately idiotic new principal that wearing short-skirts in the cold would give me fat legs: I took to wearing tights. Between starving and stuffing, I just about scraped through the repeat exams and landed a place in college through what was a turbulent couple of years.

I ambled on under this cloud for another decade or so and it wasn’t until the nine-year-old girl made her appearance that I finally left that chapter of my life behind. Because of the rapidity of the onset of my condition, and the equally rapid departure from it, I eventually concluded that rather than truly suffering with the condition. I was in many ways imitating the anorexic behaviourisms initially, and it was only when the hunger kicked in that the remainder of the symptoms presented themselves, as they would to anyone who is eating less than they should (read the Ancel Keys experiment at the University of Minnesota if you don't believe me). But that is to stray from the main point of this post.

But nothing has changed since then: take a glance through any popular women’s magazine and you’ll find a handbook for a successful eating disorder. Just leafing through anything from a weekly gossip mag such as Heat to a middle-class glossy such as Red, you'll find a similar theme running throughout: a page devoted to female celebs who’ve ‘piled it on’ i.e., appear to look like normal women. Next you’ll inevitably find your z-list soap star who’s just lost 4 stone, posing grotesquely in a bikini - stomach sucked in, with a headline screaming- 'I've never felt so sexy!'

Move on and the next page will promise you can ‘get that bikini body in 2 weeks!’ followed by lo-cal recipes and tips on how to eat less. Where once I used to obsessively buy these magazines, I now avoid them like the plague as they’re filled with misinformation and encourage self- analysis, self-criticism and self-hatred.

Professional, intelligent women I know regularly go on these mad diets involving nothing but pineapples for four days; revolting powdered milkshakes like slim fast; cabbage soup diet; or other equally anti-social regimes. Some of these women earn six figure salaries and yet their self -esteem remains entirely bound to what the scales say.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that weight gain and weight loss are a matter of simple mathematics – eat more than you use = fat, use more than you eat= thin. There's no mystery but the multi-billion dollar diet industry has convinced us that it is.

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf in ‘The Beauty Myth’ argues that eating disorders are ultimately a male conspiracy to keep women weak, preoccupied and unlikely to involve themselves in matters of policy, arguing that ‘beauty’ is:"the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact".

I think she’s on to something: In my most candid moments I could admit to myself that my eating disorder somehow shielded me from expectation - those of others and of my own. It dulls the senses and breaks down personal goals into the manageable bite size units of pounds and ounces. A woman who is obsessed with her weight, size and appearance has set her own expectational boundaries and according to Wolf, research shows that most women would rather lose 10lbs than any other achievement. How depressing is that?

My generation of women were told we could ‘have it all’ – but what about those of us who thought that having it all was too much of a burden? A retreat into the child-like, dependent state of anorexia ensures that having it all is momentarily off the table: 'Dieting makes women think of themselves as sick, religious babies' writes Wolf.


The likes of Isabelle Caro, who was the subject of an anti-anorexic campaign in 2007, reveals the hypocrisy of the fashion industry. When Donatella Versace's daughter, Allegra, was hospitalised for anorexia in 2007, it should have been a wake-up call for the famous fashion designer, but astonishingly it didn't stop her from using stick-thin models to showcase her designs.

A series of photographs of Caro (by the famous photographer Toscani), one of which showed an open wound on her tailbone, shocked the fashion world but it also kept her employed within that industry until her death. She was even a judge on France's next top model. In other words, the industry that made her sick employed her to ensure she stayed that way. In any other industry she would have been unemployable, gently urged to go home and get help; in short, treated for what she was; not a fashion icon but a very sick woman.

Bodywhys: Irish Eating disorders association