Dieting, Eating Disorders, and Obesity in America

By Maria Rainier- Guest Blogger

I received a note in my mail box this morning that my insurance company would be raising my premium because between 2007 and 2009, the number insurance carriers in my state who received obesity surgery went up 55%.

How is it that the nation claiming the most lives to eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia (218 deaths annually by the most recent study) is also known as the fattest nation on the planet? The answer is a four-letter word.
Diet. Rather, diet-ing.

The Birth of the Dieting Nation
In a nation with a high-stress daily environment, minimal exercise, and fatty foods, the logical solution is to restrict food intake and increase exercise in order to be what the media (in bed with the diet industry) finds sexually attractive and successful. The American diet industry makes close to $40 billion annually selling pills, foods, cookbooks, how-to guides, fitness DVDs, clothing, exercise machines, and hoaxes.

These profits didn’t exist in the early 1980s before the burst of media flaunting rail-thin models with abnormally large (surgically- or Photoshop-enhanced) breasts and hunky muscle-men. Is it a coincidence that obesity became identified as an epidemic later in the ‘80s?

The Dieting Nation Gains Weight
If you approach a clinician at a treatment center for disordered eaters—commonly believed to be anorexics, bulimics, and other “skinny” eaters—they will tell you a little-known truth: dieting is the greatest trigger of eating disorders. In fact, upwards of 50% of individuals enrolled in dieting programs suffer from BED, or Binge-Eating Disorder.

The logic for this is simple: if you tell yourself you cannot have any “bad” foods (which happen to be yours and all of America’s favorite comfort foods like chocolate, ice cream, bread, pasta, and fried chicken), you will crave “bad” foods all the more. When you tell a child not to have any cookies from the jar, you will find that the child has eaten all of the cookies. Geneen Roth, Good Housekeeping columnist and renowned speaker, first felt she would have a problem with her weight when her mother refused to let her have a second creamsicles, “or you will get fat.” Thus, from age 11 to 28, she cycled through diets and innumerous eating disorders, losing and re-gaining a total of over a thousand pounds.

“Diets are so incredibly seductive because they seem like [they work at first] . . . [and] they are thrilling experiences when they work. If only I could fix myself, I could manage to stay on a diet.” The truth is, however, that they rarely work: 95-85% of people on diets gain the weight back or more within 3 years, and these failed dieters contribute to the obese population, which, in America, stands currently at 73% of our entire population of 307,006,550.

“For every diet,” Roth warns in every speech she holds or book she writes, “there is an equal and opposite binge.”

How We Pay
The consequences of obesity are often deadly: hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. The problem with eating disorder research in America, however, is that it is conducted on mostly white communities by white researchers, which feeds the myth that eating disorders are a plight of well-off, college-age Caucasian girls. The myth of African Americans and Latin Americans being immune to disordered eating not only skews statistics but blocks an individual’s road to health. Today, the media pressures people of all races and walks of life to be inhumanly slender and proportioned, fit and beautiful.

Moreover, eating disorders are not limited to “skinny” disorders; they in fact most often result in obesity. By definition, an eating disorder is any habitual kind of eating conducted not to nourish the body but to comfort or fill it, fueled by compulsion and/or emotion. If the statistic mentioned above included all eating disorders and not just “skinny” disorders, the number would be staggeringly higher than 218 deaths per year.

How to Stop
The answer is not to diet. That’s what got us here in the first place.
The answer is to eat what the body needs and desires rather than what we have trained our minds to want. Your body doesn’t feel good after eating that donut because that donut has zero nutrients in it. Your mind wants it, however, because we have trained ourselves to eat comfort foods when we need comforting. Much of Americans’ eating is fueled by compulsion. We must find what is driving our compulsion—insecurity, doubts about our jobs or marriages, stress at work, etc.—and eat to fuel rather than comfort our bodies.

Telling ourselves, “No, you can’t have that,” is the surest way to binge on it later. We must educate ourselves and our children about nutrition and make peace with our inner and bodily selves.

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching various online degree programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop