Spoiled brats and eating disorders

I guess I have always bought the theory that girls with eating disorders are afflicted with something beyond their control. The scales fell from my eyes when I watched a lenghty documentary about the affliction last week. The program followed a group of girls in a treatment program for several months and it revealed a bunch of spoiled brats who took delight in breaking all the rules, forming evil cliques, laughing at the staff behind their backs and generally defying every effort to help them. What really threw me was the naivite of the well-meaning staff, who didn't seem to realize that these girls were having them on at every turn. There were tearful scenes in group therapy where girls cried and passed around the "support" baton, taking turns saying how badly they wanted to get better. Mostly these were big lies. Once the sessions ended, many of them laughed at the sincere efforts staff were making to help them.

Of course, it didn't help that the professional staff and custodians were all fat slobs! How could these girls relate to fatties -- regardless of how many degrees they had? And how could they relate to the head honcho, a fat male psychiatrist?! There is no way a girl who thinks being morbidly skeletal is the height of beauty and control can think a fat woman, who never passed a donut she didn't ravish, could help or even remotely understand the obsession. I began to ponder how different this "treatment" approach was from AA, for example, where all the staff are recovering alcoholics and buy none of the BS the patients serve up. In that scenario, they've been there, done. In this group home it was "us" -- the superior, perfect thin people -- versus "them" the inferior, fat losers. There is no way that will work. These girls needed their butts kicked by recovering eating disordered women, but instead they got hugs and break after break when they were caught throwing out food, smoking, lying and purging. The scenes of the girls finishing a meal and then going to their rooms to purge were sickening.

Here they were, being molly-coddled in a luxury resort setting paid for by either their long-suffering and weeping parents or by insurance coverage and none of them wanted to be there. When a few got kicked out, after repeated warnings and tearful "support" sessions, it seemed to them a badge of courage and supreme superiority -- "I was so thin-obsessed I escaped and you have to stay here because you aren't as clever as I." It was the tearful parents I felt sorry for, as they begged the staff to keep their daughter there. Cameras followed the girls who left. Two went out for a dinner of nachos and junk and then we watched them back in their homes head straight for the toilet to..........well, you know.

I have a little inkling about that mentality because I used to be rail thin and obsessed with avoiding food. I used to enjoy feeling superior when I walked into a room and was the thinest person there. I don't think I was anorexic and I certainly was not bulimic, but I did everything I could to stay thin. I was jerked out of this one day by my daughter who as a toddler stood beside me, holding my hand as I looked in the mirror and said, "You know Mummy, you're like those people who look in the mirror and think they're too fat, but they're really, really skinny." She must have been no more than five at the time and I realized that she was trying to support me. Then and there I decided to dump the obsession. That was about 25 years ago and the pounds have crept on, but I don't care. As long as I am healthy and exercise, I don't care about the weight. Now I am actually afraid of dieting, having known so many people who have shed a lot of weight and then put it all back on and then some. The body knows when you are trying to starve it and it won't have it.