Hunger Pains Excerpt

Overeating is as much about psychology as it is about biology – many people eat, or drastically control their eating patterns, to soothe emotional problems. Clinically speaking, 65% of women have eating disorders, but as Mary Pipher, Ph.D. asserts in Hunger Pains: The Modern Women’s Tragic Quest for Thinness, “recent psychological research indicates that virtually all women are ashamed of what they consider inferior bodies. Women also distort their body images – 90 percent of all women overestimate their own body size. Most try to control their eating and consider themselves fat.” The eating disorder reality is not about just about who has one, but that every woman, and increasingly men, all have their own uniquely disordered eating because of our culture’s intense pressures to control our weight and body composition. Eating disorders are clinically diagnosed when these common attitudes and behaviors reach an extreme level.

Pipher continues, “We are living in a culture that promotes a monolithic, relentless ideal of beauty that is quite literally just short of starvation for most women. For so many of us, thinness equals attraction, which equals value. This formula has created a generation of women whose behavior is self-destructive and whose thinking about themselves is punishing. To be a woman is to have a body image problem. For women, harmful eating patterns are becoming the norm. Women diagnosed as bulimic or anorexic are merely the extremes on a universal continuum.”
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