By: Anika Gurijala
Edited by Raghvi Sethi
“My worst days in recovery are my best days in relapse” says Kate Le Page, recovering from anorexia nervosa since 1998. Women and Society. Specifically, women and eating disorders.
You’ve been sitting in your room contemplating whether to go outside. Your head tells you to suck it up and just go take a walk, but your heart says otherwise. Your heart tells you there are people watching you and judging you.
Am I too fat? Am I too skinny? Or am I just right?
The truth is you won’t know. You won’t know because people have different definitions of skinny, fat and just right. The opinions of different people will never average out to the societally structured views on a woman’s body. According to such standards, she has to be perfect and curvy. She has to be proportionate, but she cannot try too hard. Her weight can’t be over a specific number, and it can’t be too less. It has to be just right. As mentioned before, the “just right” scale varies from person to person, but the very center of the scale was the unanimous decision made by society to be called…just right. Studies have shown that the ideal weight for a woman would be 110 to 140 pounds.
But it isn’t fair. Lines on graphs and numbers in the center of the charts are the numbers that society has made up to be considered correct. A healthy woman, a correct woman, a perfect, just right woman, falls in that range. However, in reality there is no right or wrong. But what about the other side of the societal scale that no one addresses? That is where eating disorders come into play.
People struggle. Women struggle. It isn’t bad. Numbers on the package of a Chips Ahoy cookie box don’t make a woman a woman. Numbers on a chart after assessing societal views that never match up, do not make a woman a woman. Strength makes a woman a woman. And strength only comes from a weakness—whether that weakness may be bulimia or anorexia—there is underlying strength embedded in it. Pratap Sharan and A. Shyam Sundar, two graduates from All India Institute of Medical Science, explain “the overvaluation of slimness, which is commonly seen in Western females, is considered to be an important contributory factor in the pathogenesis of eating disorders.” This study comes from an evaluation of women themselves that suffer from the indecisive opinions of society. This study is honest. It explains how Indian women face eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia because of the high value that Western society puts on skinniness. To simply end this, do not put a label on a woman because of an average or median of a number. She is balanced either way and will remain balanced on her road to recovery—which only starts when she drowns out the painful din of what we call a society.
REFERENCES
Sampson, Stacy. “Average weight for women: Healthy and ideal ranges.” Medical News Today, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321003. Accessed 2 October 2023.
Sharan, Pratap. “Eating disorders in women - PMC.” NCBI, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4539873/. Accessed 2 October 2023.
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