Will John Prescott re-shape eating disorders debate?

When I heard the news that John Prescott, the former deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has admitted in his memoirs to suffering from bulimia, I found myself unsurprised. Prescott’s weight has long been the subject of satire, but the more I discover about eating disorders the more convinced I am that serious obesity has less to do with the body than the mind. Why shouldn’t Prescott suffer from an eating disorder? He has all the classic characteristics; he’s an over-achiever, under a lot of pressure and has a serious weight problem. However not being young, thin and female he has challenged our simplistic view of what an eating disorder is and means.

Prescott admits that he doesn’t fulfil the eating disorder stereotype, saying “People normally associate it with young women - anorexic girls, models trying to keep their weight down, or women in stressful situations, like Princess Diana”. It is for this very reason that his revelation is so important. As Diana herself said fifteen years ago in her 1993 eating disorders speech, “many would like to believe that Eating Disorders are merely an expression of female vanity”. To understand eating disorders we must first accept that they aren’t ever just about fitting into a dress, or being like a picture in a magazine, even if some people find these to be triggers that unleash a deeper and more complex self-loathing.

Anorexia, the more famous sister of bulimia and binge eating, has had more press because it is, on a superficial level, easier to understand and, crucially, easier to identify. However, the portrayal of anorexia in the media has only gone further to skew the understanding of eating disorders and their causes. ‘Size zero’ is an unhelpful catchphrase, because it reduces our understanding of anorexia to the level of a fashion dilemma.

As Laurie Penny’s article for the brilliant feminist website The F-Word points out, “Anorexia is a complex psychological disorder, often stemming from deep, long-standing self-esteem issues and triggered by specific personal trauma. […] The ‘size zero’ myth reduces anorexia to a frivolous pique of silly little girls who aren’t clever or mature enough to take proper care of themselves”.

While I commend anything that highlights the prevalence of eating disorders in society, I can’t help but notice that the ‘skinny shock pictures!’ approach of magazines like Heat focus on rich, successful women and portray eating disorders as the reserve of glamorous, airhead females. Whilst spending time in the murky world of pro ana/mia (anorexia/bulimia) chartrooms last year, I learned that for a lot of people eating disorders go hand in hand with personality disorders and/or depression, or are a response to abuse. If you want evidence that eating disorders go beyond a simplistic desire to be thin, just look at an anorexic’s loss of perspective driving them to lose more and more weight, moving to a lower and lower target weight until they reach a point where, even if they desperately want to eat in order to stay alive, their problem has become so intense they are simply unable to consume food. That has nothing to do with fitting into a size eight frock.

Although women do make up the majority, around one in 10 of the UK's 60,000 people reported as suffering from eating disorders are men. The fetishization of women’s bodies is partly responsible for the female focused eating disorder debate, because women’s bodies are seen as up for grabs, sexually and in terms of comment and judgment. On some level the focus on anorexia has been connected with the associations made between glamour, death and violence against women. Could it be that the media culture that brought us the crime scene victims photo shoot on Americas Next Top Model is the same media culture that illustrates the eating disorders debate with pictures of gorgeous emaciated teenagers staring out from sunken eyes that seem to say ‘fuck me, I’m so sexy I’m almost dead’? We are yet to rid our culture of the destructive heroin chic, where ill, thin and dependant are all sexy. Maybe bulimia and over-eating would get greater press coverage if we had an equivalent gluttony glam…

Having found myself increasingly offended by the ‘who ate all the pies’ analysis of bulimia and binge eating, I hope I don’t have to throw my radio out of the window in rage when satirists get their hands on Prescott’s confession. One common mistake is the idea that serious eating disorders have some kind of a weight limit. Many sufferers of bulimia actually gain weight, but still prevails the dangerous myth that to have an eating disorder you must be thin. This perception needs to change if we are ever to help the people who wake up late for work, with swollen faces, burst blood vessels under their eyes, sore throats, chest pain and faster heart rates after a night of binging and vomiting, only to think they don’t have the right to seek help for their problem, because they aren’t underweight.

Many will have heard the joke, ‘I'm half a bulimic – I eat a lot but I don't throw up’ (recently causing controversy when it was bafflingly cracked by the Trade Minister Lord Jones in an after dinner speech), and the bizarre offhand comments people make about wishing they had bulimia so they could eat what ever they desired. John Prescott’s comments in The Times of London are therefore understandable, "I've never confessed it before. Out of shame, I suppose, or embarrassment”. The misconception that bulimia is in some way to do with greed must be dispelled. If someone eats to the point of physical pain, barely tasting the food they are consuming, they are not doing so for pleasure. If somebody engages in this kind of behavior for twenty years without them losing weight, it cannot be misconstrued some kind of stupid quest for attractiveness.

The truth is that very quickly one learns that binging and purging has no purpose; it will not change your body or the way you feel about it. Obviously every sufferer acts with different motivations, but the addictive nature of destructive behaviors makes the bulimic cycle hard to break free from. In a world still so ignorant about a condition that can consume peoples lives, I can only hope John Prescott’s brave decision to go public will finally make us realize that it will take much more than banning size zero models at The London Fashion Week to seriously address the silent eating disorders epidemic.

- by Anna Beecher

This entry was posted by Neil Keating, on Monday, 21 April 2008. You can leave your response.