Psychiatrists Erszula Kelley and Richard Best spent time with faculty and students Thursday in the Women’s Center at noon to lead a discussion on body image and eating disorders.
Kelley, the medical director of the Eating Disorders Program at the Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, said individuals are not born with body images but develop such mind frames as they grow.
The sense of self starts to develop over time, Kelley said. As infants, individuals do not care about counting calories because people are not born with body images. As people age, however, that image is created usually based on other people’s opinions, not the individual’s.
“As we grow we start hearing things about ourselves,” Kelley said. “For anyone that significantly stands out, it may cause anxiety because as social beings we prefer to be alike than to be different.”
Magazines, television, movies and advertising also help to fuel people’s anxieties and poor body images. The scariest part is that most people are so accustomed to seeing these images that they do not realize how distorted their own body image has become, Kelley said.
“Companies project images in a way that’s very appealing for us,” Kelley said. “They make you believe that if you have this product then you’ll be as happy as this person looks. We are so used to this that often times we don’t even know where our beliefs come from.”
Being chubby during childhood, having a mother who had an eating disorder during pregnancy, sexual abuse or just the psychological makeup of an individual can all be risk factors associated with eating disorders, Kelley said.
Some personality traits associated with anorexia are perfectionism, harm avoidance and attention to detail. While Kelley said these traits generally allow success for most people, for anorexics they become more obsessive than helpful.
“Imagine you have a little girl and she’s making a sign and she keeps writing and erasing and trying to get it perfect,” Kelley said. “She is so upset if she doesn’t get it just right. That kind of perfection is now obssesiveness and isn’t a good sign.”
On the opposite spectrum of eating disorders, some people binge on food in an effort to comfort themselves. Like other eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, Janet White, an advanced associated in development at SMU, believes habits from childhood can lead to disorders in adults.
“Most kids that I knew growing up, myself included, were always told you need to eat everything on your plate because there’s people starving in the world,” White said. “That gets psychologically placed in their head and then they feel like they’ve always got to finish everything.”
No matter what type of eating disorder an individual has, Psychiatrist and director of Psychiatric Services at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas Richard Best said the cause is always the same.
“Many people think it’s about food, but it isn’t,” Best said. “It’s about control.”
Which is why individuals should be very careful when approaching someone who they feel may have an eating disorder said Kelley.
“If you have an eating disorder, what you do with food is your secret and it’s a very powerful secret,” Kelley said.
By approaching someone who has such a secret, Best said, an individual may become quite sensitive because they may feel as though they are losing control.
“It might be perceived as though you are taking away their one strong trait that they believe they’re really good at,” Best said. “It’s a very intimate secret and how many folks do you guys share intimate things about yourself with? It’s probably a very small number.”
The best way to discuss an eating disorder with someone is to bring it up as gently as possible, listen and try to be as understanding as possible, Kelley said.
Those who know someone who needs treatment for an eating disorder or who has any questions concerning eating disorders can call the Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas’ Eating Disorders Program at 1-800-411-7081.
