Unfortunately, there is more to say about bulimia, binging and purging, and the connection (or not) between severe, life-threatening eating disorders and the obesity epidemic that has, over the past few decades, inexorably overtaken large segments of humanity.
We have seen how individuals who are into binging and purging, or binging without purging, or purging only, have all kinds of unusual traits (such as being unable to see their mirror reflections accurately) and unconventional ideas (like a longing for non-existence.)
They quote slogans like “Why am I not dead yet” (without a question mark, which makes it sound more like a declaration of intent.)
In this realm of knowledge, it seems as if every answer spawns more questions:
— Why do many eating disorder victims declare themselves as having a very real death wish?
— Is that self-hatred related to the culture’s disgust in regard to obesity?
— Does the effort to end childhood obesity drive the tendency toward anorexia and bulimia?
— Does the same impulse to self-harm which drives the kids who starve themselves, also motivate the kids who seem determined to eat themselves into an early grave?
— Do both of those conditions stem from the same root cause?
— Do people in both those camps see themselves as doing these aberrant behaviors for the same reasons, even though the end results are radically different?
— Do they perceive themselves as doing for different reasons the harmful behaviors that culminate in identical results?
Here is a tough one: In light of the widespread concern over both childhood and adult obesity, what are we to make of the fact that services and institutions are much more likely to cater to severely underweight anorexics than any other type of eating-disordered patient? Anorexia accounts for only less than 10% of eating disorder sufferers, and even among anorexics, the majority are not in the life-threatened category.
Is it the glamour? Perhaps coaxing a person of waif-like thinness to partake of nourishment is aesthetically more appealing than convincing a tub-of-lard-proportioned individual to stop eating so much.
As for victims of the unglamorous disorder known as binge eating, the writer Róisín points out that due to societal fatphobia and other factors, it seems that the medical profession “does not view them as worthy of resources.” There are pragmatic and political aspects. Róisín goes on to say,
Whilst crime is treated as the problem in and of itself, instead of as a result of poverty and state abandonment, eating disorders are similarly seen as the primary issue to solve, instead of a symptom of a wider problem… By applying a universal approach to a complex mental illness, treatment perpetuates the very problem it professes to be solving… We cannot rely on getting rid of an eating disorder whilst coping with the same circumstances that enabled the illness to develop in the first place…
The issue has been contemplated from even more doctrinaire points of view. Alice Weinreb writes of how “second-wave feminists… analyzed anorexia and bulimia as a way to articulate the dangers posed by postwar consumer capitalism for girls and women”:
The analysis hinged upon the paradoxical meaning of consumption in postwar capitalism, which was the cause of and symbolized by the deadly self-denial of the anorexic and the irrational gorging and purging of the bulimic. Eating disorders thus expressed the gendered and destructive impacts of late-modern capitalism on the female body, combining the demand for unbridled consumption and individual empowerment with expectations of female self-denial and physical smallness.
So, there is a lot going on. As previously noted, one trait that people who binge tend to share is a total lack of discrimination. Food preferences have nothing to do with it. They will consume whatever happens to be available, regardless of quality; and whether they like it, or even hate it, is irrelevant. Basically, no food is off-limits, When the urge to stuff themselves hits, all bets are off. Of what help, then, is any advice to identify “problem foods” and describe strategies to avoid them — when literally any food is a problem food to these individuals?
Here is a matter that parents would prefer not to think about. It harks back to Tom Jones, an entertainment film made more than 60 years ago, which included a “lusty dining scene” that attracted considerable attention and comment at the time. One reviewer referenced the “lascivious meal, a lusty marriage of food and sex.”
Critic Wook Kim wrote, “The dinner begins innocently enough, but their furtive glances soon turn into almost incandescent gazing: even a village fool can see where this is going.”
The question is… but what has this to do with the contemporary child who consumes a whole package of cookies in one sitting?
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Tom Jones (1963) – Lusty Dining,” YouTube.com, undated
Source: “Of Lust, Ladies, And Lobsters,” NPR.org, 08/06/09
Source: “Top Ten Memorable Movie Eating Scenes,” TIME.com, 01/05/12
Image by Jean Louis Mazieres/Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
FAQs and Media Requests: 
