It’s National Eating Disorders Awareness week, the final week of February dedicated to providing individuals who have eating disorders with adequate resources and support.
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Dr. Stuart Murray, an associate professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine, shed light on a few common misconceptions associated with eating disorders in a post on USC’s official Instagram account.
STUART MURRAY: A really commonly held belief is that eating disorders mainly affect girls and women. And that’s not true. We know that of all the people who do have an eating disorder, about a third are boys or men.
Similar to an addiction, eating disorders affect a person’s ability to function in their daily lives. A common misbelief surrounding eating disorders is that individuals can just get over them. Dr. Murray says this is not the case.
MURRAY: Eating disorders are not just about being thinner, they’re biologically based disorders that are really wired in the brain. And it’s not a fad or a phase that folks will grow out of.
Factors like the prevalence of social media and the isolating nature of the pandemic can increase the likelihood of eating disorders for college students. Dr. Sarah Banet-Weiser says college students are particularly susceptible to developing eating disorders, for these reasons.
SARAH BANET-WEISER: With the kind of emergence of social media as being something that is almost mandatory in some ways for college students, you also are put in the position of posting images of yourself and then being judged on those images with comments and likes and followers and everything else. You can see how in that mix of all of that – control, mass media images, social media posting, presentations of self - pressures to be perfect, pressures to be authentic.
During the pandemic, people, and specifically college students, can feel like they lack control over what is happening around them. This can lead to an increased desire for a person to control their own bodies and what they eat.
BANET-WEISER: When we’re in quarantine, we’re in lockdown or when you as students are, you know, are on Zoom rather than in the classroom and missing that sociality and missing all that community. Something like having control over something, you know, even if that’s your eating practices becomes super important.
Former USC D-1 volleyball player Victoria Garrick is an advocate for mental health and body image positivity. Garrick shared her personal journey with binge eating disorder, a condition in which individuals lose control over their eating habits and fall into unusually large amounts of food consumption.
GARRICK: Binge eating disorder is three times more common than anorexia and bulimia. So it’s something that affects a lot, a lot of people. And I want to bring light to that because I know what it is like to have a binge eating disorder and be literally so ashamed that you cannot even say it out loud.
Garrick says people who have eating disorders can often fail to see and accept that they do have a mental illness.
GARRICK: 80 percent of women are disordered eaters. And what categorizes disordered eating are things that we think are normal, like, ‘Oh, I count the calories. I have guilt and shame associated with food. I’m obsessed with what I eat.’ I did all these things and it was definitely toxic. Yet I didn’t think I had a problem.
If you have an eating disorder and want to reach out to mental health professionals for aid, you can call or text the NEDA at 1-(800)-931-2377.
Story updated Feb. 24, 10 a.m.: A previous version of this story used the term “celebrates” in the headline to discuss the university’s observation of National Eating Disorders Awareness week. The written story has also been updated to reflect Annenberg Media style for medical conditions.