I starved, but not because of the media

Last week Vogue announced that they would no longer use ‘too skinny’ models. Being someone who suffered from anorexia for five years I should perhaps have been delighted with this…but was I? No: quite frankly I was livid and I was hurt. No matter how many pictures they removed from their magazines, they could not give me back all those years I lost to the cruel illness. In fact, even if those pictures had not even been published in the first place I still would not have had my adolescence.Because anorexia is not caused by the media.No – it is the media who starves the world of the truth of anorexia.At 16 I was in hospital: I was critically underweight, severely malnourished and terrified… and not once in my life had I even bought a glossy mag. Yet I walked through school and hospital, blinded by the anorexia and surrounded by people who assumed I simply had a desire to be as thin as the models in magazines. How can she want to be that skinny? She’s being ridiculous she should just eat. Doesn’t she know all those pictures are airbrushed anyway?
My brother died when I was two and a half years old.I was severely bullied for 14 years.I was living with 16 years of suppressed grief, anxiety, confusion and a scuppered emotional development. I had no self-esteem, I was filled with self-loathing, I felt worthless, I believed I was a mistake – not as good as everybody else. All I wanted was to be happy, so I decided to be thin because I believed it would make everything ok. Almost overnight, food became associated in my mind with worthlessness, guilt and depression, whilst losing weight gave me a kick as I believed every pound lost brought me one step closer to that happiness. As I lost weight, my body began to shut down and thinking required too much energy, so it was abandoned. My brain sealed all meanings into what it could last remember: food was bad, no food was good. As clear as black and white. I did not have the energy to reason against it; I knew my goal: to be happy and to leave the worthlessness behind.That is why I was ill, that is why I was infertile for so long: not because I was envious of Victoria Beckham, but because I had a lifetime of trauma to acknowledge and feel.I have found this article difficult to write, as while on the one hand I want to stress that it is not the media which causes anorexia, I am not for one moment excusing them. Of course it is wrong that they are using underweight models, but isn’t that just common sense? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the beauty industry of a first world country should be promoting healthy models rather than those who are suffering from hair loss, memory loss, infertility, osteoporosis, chronic fatigue and heart failure because of their low weight?So where does the media come in?Even though I had not touched a glossy mag in my life, the legacy from the magazines penetrates girls, women and guys everywhere. I may not have seen the most recent Vogue, but I was attending school every day where society’s belief that thinness equates to happiness penetrated the very seams. So when I yearned to be free of the trauma and grief that had been my life ever since I could remember, I chose thinness.My therapist once presented me with lots of cut outs of women from magazines and asked me to sort them into two piles: underweight and healthy. With ease I quickly sorted the piles… 46: 4 – healthy: underweight. My therapist then re-sorted them: 3: 47 – healthy: underweight. How wrong I was. She taught me how to recognise if someone was underweight: a gap between the tops of their legs where flesh should be, arms like twigs in winter, hip bones visible. Pretty much all the women illustrated then. How is this beautiful??! Magazines are effectively brochures of infertile women with osteoporosis who would collapse if made to walk anywhere. The media does not cause anorexia, it illustrates it.Believing that thin models cause eating disorders is like believing that reducing the price of fruit and veg cures cancer. It may make one life one percent easier but it’s not going to solve anything. I starved because I believed it would take away my pain, not because I wanted to be stick thin. So let’s just use our common sense: only use healthy models, and work to understand the truth of eating disorders: the abuse, hurt and grief behind the starving eyes. They are hungry for a life they can call their own, not to headline Vogue.