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I was chatting with one of my Multiply partners in crime tonight. It was about the cultural power that makes a beauty pageant possible.Of course, this was based on my post last night. And how I read somewhere a long time ago about when TV came into Fiji , the local young women suddenly were experiencing a rash of eating disorders. So we once again are in the classic quandary of what is beauty and what is the acceptable cost. Since I am a man of limited intelligence, I feel I am best serving the blogosphere if I generate more questions than answers.
I borrowed the title from a classic Star Trek episode. Then again all the shows in the original run were classic so it's redundancy again. Allow me to stress the point again for a second night in a row. The Little Prince is a tale about the importance of what lies within. The alternative title may as well have been "Is There in Truth No Beauty". Edhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/347637.stm (Fiji Story)
http://cornholiogogs.multiply.com/journal/item/886/Discrimination_Can_Cut_Both_Ways
http://cornholiogogs.multiply.com/journal/item/210/Its_Been_25_Years_Karen_Carpenter_The_Talent_The_Sad_Story
http://www.tv.com/star-trek/is-there-in-truth-no-beauty/episode/24943/summary.html
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Is_There_in_Truth_No_Beauty%3F_%28episode%29
http://www.pbs.org/perfectillusions/personalstories/marya.html
Marya
The first time I ever threw up, I had been hating my body, hating my body and hating my body-for years... I stopped watching TV, put down my bag of Fritos and just sort of, in this drugged stupor, walked downstairs and pulled back my braids and threw up.
This early established routine of eating until she was numb became an everyday after-school habit for Marya Hornbacher. At the age of nine, she began bingeing and purging steadily. Eventually she became so disgusted with herself, she all but stopped eating.
Marya:
You start setting goals for yourself, "I want to get down to 100, I want to get down to 90, I want to get down to 80, and it just gets lower and lower and lower. I remember looking at the scale, and it said 63 and I went, 50!"
Her parents only learned of her eating disorder when they visited her at boarding school. She was skeletally thin. At 14 years of age, she had lost 25% of her body weight. This was advanced anorexia, and her extreme medical situation needed extreme measures. Full-time treatment in a locked institution was the only option left.
As with most families, the shock of discovery hit Marya's parents hard, as did coming to terms with the role they played in her illness. They never overtly put demands on her, but to Marya they were intellectuals: successful, beautiful, talented people, and she wanted to be them. She wanted to excel and achieve, to be good enough for them. The worst thing she could imagine being was mediocre. The precocious little girl exacted perfection from herself and tried curing the discord in her home, and her parents' unhappiness.
She may have gotten sick to bring her parents together; she may have gotten sick because trying to be perfect was just too hard even for a lovely, brilliant young woman. In family therapy, Judy and Jay Hornbacher looked long and hard at their own accountability for Marya's illness.
Judy Hornbacher:
I've had people say astonishing things to me that said they would not take a look at their family dynamic. And I would say that unless you do that, you have absolutely no hope whatsoever of your child being able to get better.
Jay Hornbacher:
The best thing you can do is accept the child as that child is.
They never gave up their love and support, but Marya wasn't getting better. Despite the hospitalization, the counseling, the medication and the nutrition, Marya just wanted to die. There is no simple reason why someone decides to get better. Marya rejected all attempts at any intercession until the day at Lowe House when a little boy gave her the first hug she allowed, and told her she could have one tomorrow too.
Marya:
I made a decision that very few people make in this culture, which was to actually figure out what was wrong and fix it. I really had to go through a lot of hell to get better.
At the age of 21, Marya wrote her book, Wasted, telling the story of her life-long battle with anorexia and bulimia. This memoir has been described as "brutal and unflinching: a painful and soul-baring exploration" into Marya's own personal abyss, and of her journey back. There are no punches pulled here. Marya's intention is to shed light on the dark side of the eating disordered personality and the personal, family and cultural causes, underlying eating disorders. Her book traces her life from the first time she decides to vomit her food, to her complete collapse in college, five hospitalizations, therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and ultimately, "any sense of what it means to be normal."
Marya attended the University of Minnesota and American University, where she garnered awards in student journalism. At 18 she began traveling the United States addressing young women and men about the causes of eating disorders. After Wasted was published, she received the Women of Inspiration Award from the American Anorexia/Bulimia Association. She says the point of her book was, "how you go on with your life," but admits that the book nearly killed her. After a relapse in 1994, after completing Wasted, she resumed her fight against her eating disorder.
Epilogue
From a television interview with Marya:
The function of an eating disorder for a lot of people and for a certain extent of time, is to become numb. When you reach a certain nadir of numbness, it's called despair. It just feels horrific and then you have to climb your way back up and that whole process of climbing, that is a lifetime. That isn't just recovering from an eating disorder, that's learning how to be a grown up. It's learning how to live in the body you have and in the life that you have.
Marya is fortunate to be here. She had been told she would never get this far, but she took hold of her life. Over ten years of therapy and incredible determination, she is, as she says, the closest thing to being recovered.
When she talked her way out of Lowe House treatment center, it was a turning point, she knew she could get better, but also knew she could never diet again; like an alcoholic, she could never go back to that way of conducting her life. A big part of her still says she was never there, never in that condition. But she knows it was her and to be a wholly integrated being, she can no longer be one of those women constantly at war with her body.
She deplores our culture which doesn't seem to want answers, which doesn't want to change. "And you can't change an entire culture, you can only change yourself." Her advice to anyone suffering with an eating disorder? "Get into therapy. Start working on yourself. Read."
Marya continues her career as a freelance editor and writer. She writes for Minneapolis-St. Paul Magazine, is the winner of the White Award for Best Feature Story of 1993 for Wasted, her first book, and presently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband. She is at work writing her second book, a novel. It is about the nature of loss and acceptance seen through the eyes of a six-year old girl whose father has died. Set in a little town in Minnesota, in the early 1970's, a time and place where the Vietnam war still seemed far away; it is a story of finding redemption, in the small corners of the world.
For more information about Wasted and Marya Hornbacher, visit: www.fireandwater.com and the health section, where you can read more about her book, and e-mail Marya.
Here are some of Marya's book recommendations:
* The Body Betrayed: A Deeper Understanding of Women, Eating Disorders, and Treatment, by Kathryn J. Zerbe
* The Body Project, by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
* Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, by Suzan Bordo
* Appetites, by Carolyn Knapp (to be published May 2003)
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Marya
Marya
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...I had been hating my body, hating my body and hating my body-for years. And since I was four or five, was the first time I remember deciding that I was fat.
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�2003 KCTS Television. Al
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/347637.stm
TV brings eating disorders to Fiji'
The traditional Fijian form is a "robust, well-muscled body"
Fiji, a nation that has traditionally cherished the fuller figure, has been struck by an outbreak of eating disorders since the arrival of television in 1995, a study has shown.
The BBC's James Westhead: The concept of dieting was unknown in Fiji
Researchers from Harvard say the western images and values transmitted via the medium has led to an increase in disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.
Anne Becker, an anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, has studied Fijian eating habits since 1988.
[ image: Anne Becker: Alarming proportion of teenagers on diets]
Anne Becker: Alarming proportion of teenagers on diets
She compared the arrival of television with the arrival of British explorers in the last century.
"What I hope is that this isn't like the 19th century, when the British came to Fiji and brought the measles with them. It was a tremendous plague," she said.
"One could speculate that in the 20th century, television is another pathogen exporting Western images and values," she said.
'Programming influences teens'
Fiji has one television station, which broadcasts programmes from the UK, US and New Zealand such as Seinfeld, ER, Melrose Place and Xena: Warrior Princess.
[ image: Programmes full of slim role models may have an effect]
Programmes full of slim role models may have an effect
In 1998 - 38 months after the station went on air - Ms Becker conducted a survey of teenage girls and found that 74% of them felt they were "too big or fat".
Ms Becker said there had been a sharp rise in indicators of disordered eating, such as induced vomiting.
She said 15% of the girls reported they had vomited to control weight.
The traditional Fijian preference for the build of both sexes has been a "robust, well-muscled body" for both sexes, she said.
Ranadi Johnston - who holds the Miss Fiji beauty queen title, said slim women were tradionally seen as weak.
"People are always telling me to put on weight," she said.
'Major impact'
The impact of television on a Pacific island that has only had electricity since 1985 was significant, she said, as adolescent girls became more aware of Western ideals of beauty.
Ranadi Johnston: "People keep telling me to put on weight"
"Nobody was dieting in Fiji 10 years ago," Ms Becker said. "An alarmingly high percentage of adolescents are dieting now."
She said a study showed that a higher proportion of adolescents in Fiji were dieting than in Massachusetts.
"The teenagers see TV as a model for how one gets by in the modern world. They believe the shows depict reality."
Many groups say the world-wide increase in eating disorders is down to the prevalence of images equating a slim figure with beauty.
But some doctors have questioned whether such disorders are caused by culture or are transmitted from generation to generation in genes.
A study on the Caribbean island of Curacao, where fat is considered attractive, found the incidence of anorexia was equal to that in Europe.
Link to television images
Nicky Bryant, chief executive of the Eating Disorders Association, said Ms Becker's study had implications for everyone.
Nicky Bryant: There is a relationship between media images and eating disorders
"Research has shown there is a relationship between television and the development of an eating disorder, although there are many other factors," she said.
"With low self-esteem - which is associated with eating disorders - people will be trying to assume a low body weight or a slim image, which can lead to an eating disorder."
She advised anyone who was concerned about an eating disorder to contact the association or see their GP.
"The earlier an eating disorder is detected, the better is the chance of recovery," she said.
[ image: Nicky Bryant: Implications for all]
Nicky Bryant: Implications for all
A 1993 World Health Organisation report found that the Fiji suffered extremes of nutritional problems.
It said: "Obesity is an emerging health problem, which can be presently observed in children.
"However, under-nutrition has been around for over a decade and still exists with 15 percent of children under the age of five having a weight and age ratio below international standards.
"Fijian babies are undernourished at an early stage, while malnutrition in Indo-Fijian children appears at a later stage."
Ms Becker presented her findings at the American Psychiatric Association in Washington on Wednesday.
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