by TARA PARKER-POPE
Know Thigh(self): I hate feeling my thighs touch one another. They did not touch when I was at my thinnest, yet my legs could barely support me then. This sculpture arose from that self-loathing. When I peeled the plaster off my thighs, I had to admit that they were not all that big. The process reminded me of how anorexia distorts thinking.
More than 10 million Americans suffer from anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders. And while people tend to think such problems are limited to adolescence and young adulthood, Judith Shaw knows otherwise.
A 58-year-old yoga instructor in St. Louis, Ms. Shaw says she was nearing 40 when she decided to “get healthy” after having children. Soon, diet and exercise became an obsession.
“I was looking for something to validate myself,” she told me. “Somehow, the weight loss, and getting harder and firmer and trimmer and fitter, and then getting recognized for that, was fulfilling a need.”
Experts say that while eating disorders are first diagnosed mainly in young people, more and more women are showing up at their clinics in midlife or even older. Some had eating disorders early in life and have relapsed, but a significant minority first develop symptoms in middle age. (Women with such disorders outnumber men by 10 to 1.)
Cynthia M. Bulik, director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says that though it was initially aimed at adolescents, since 2003 half of its patients have been adults.
“We’re hearing from women, no matter how old they are, that they still have to achieve this societal ideal of thinness and perfection,” she said. “Even in their 50s and 60s — and, believe it or not, beyond — women are engaging in extreme weight- and shape-control behaviors.”
Younger or older, patients tend to engage in the same destructive behaviors: restricted eating, laxative abuse, excessive exercise and binge eating. And the trigger is often a stressful transition — in a young person, perhaps going away to college or living through her parents’ divorce; in later years, having a baby, sending a child to college or going through her own divorce.
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