We all know that there are eating disorders on campus. Watch girls stroll into the bathrooms in the Marketplace, Bryan Center, etc. after dinner, alone, making sure no one else is in there. We see the girls in the Marketplace pick around their salads or avoid the dining halls entirely. We watch the refills of black coffee, Diet Coke, water. There is the occasional binge from the vending machine late at night when hunger finally takes control.
In the gym we see the same girls repeatedly. And we are those girls. I was definitely one of those 70 pound girls about four years ago. Eat as little as you can, exercise as much as you can.
An hour on the elliptical machine in the morning, an hour on the treadmill before dinner. Have to work off those 600 calories from the day. Think about what you will be eating tomorrow think about how you'll fit in exercise.
It is alarming and depressing, and it is time to start delving further into the issue and examining the societal implications of such an incredible amount of eating disorders, beyond the common analyses.
We discuss them as the result of perfectionist young women striving for control over another aspect of their lives, and attribute the reason for the powerful desire to be thin to the many images and messages that are fed to us every day. I am not trying to discount this interpretation, but as a whole, eating disorders are much more complex.
Eating disorders exist so widely because of our society of mass production and consumption. We are becoming more trained to always work towards some abstract notion of success and perfection, and this success is often measured by how much we are able to consume based on our finances. Yes, we all think of success as happiness as well, but few will deny that this happiness also depends upon our work towards the production of services and goods, and the consumption of these products, including food.
We find ourselves in a situation in which we have all brands and types of food in excessive quantities at our disposal, but we need to keep tight control of what we eat. While our society is mentally encouraging our bodies to shrink, we are fed huge portions of processed sugar and fat. We are taught to clean our plates as children, and then taught to leave food on our plates as a diet tactic. So we react. We'll eat one meal a day. We'll eat protein bars for meals.
Eating is no longer just ingesting food when we are hungry. It is now the structured mass consumption of excessively produced goods. We as a society are working so hard to afford living and to keep the economy producing these goods for our consumption, that we look to products for pleasure.
Instead of simple sensory enjoyment and a means of survival, eating is a way for us to fulfill an empty space in our lives. We also use food to escape our work, and it is justified because we need to eat. We check the clock 100 times to see if it is time for our scheduled lunch hour, and suddenly eating is the high point of our work-intensive and stressful days. Food no longer is a means to live happily and healthy, rather it has become the end, the pleasure in life itself.
Our eating habits reflect the fact that we treat food as any other mass-produced object in our lives. Paired with the objectification of women's bodies, eating becomes a focal point of consumption and avoidance, and leads to disorders. Women must look perfect, eat perfect and be on a path of "happy" financial success all at once.
This leads to the contradiction of individuals who eat food primarily based on calories and portion size and not on taste or how much she wants a particular food. Young women who are living in a society that demands their perfection in school, work and appearance easily enter into a cycle of disordered eating.
The acculturation of disordered eating habits into what we consider normal eating habits does not help. Many of us will not think twice when a friend, or we ourselves, skip a meal because we will be drinking that night, and we all know about the calories in alcohol. Or the gallons of Diet Coke that we drink, refill after refill, bottle after bottle. There are no calories in it, so we may as well drink it in bulk, because there isn't much else we can have that much of without feeling guilty for extra calories.
We drink it just as we use all other products that we think are in an endless supply.
The control over food, something so natural and basic, is lost because everything from the food itself to the time when we are supposed to be eating is manufactured for us.
Some try to regain some semblance of control by spending nearly all of their free time thinking about food in some context, and suddenly it is always looming in the backs of our heads.
Of course, we are also fed images of anorexic women every day, we hear about diets on the news,and if "low fat" is added to a box of cookies it will almost immediately sell.
All which are inherent symptoms of a culture obsessed with weight, but the problem with eating disorders is deeper than that, it is more intrinsic in the web of our consumer culture.
Emily LaDue is a Trinity sophomore. Her column appears every other Wednesday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.