Conversations on campus: eating disorders
This article was first published in The Gazelle on May 9, 2015. Nearly a fifth of students on US college campuses suffer from some form of an eating ...
Oct 31, 2015
This article was first published in The Gazelle on May 9, 2015.
Nearly a fifth of students on US college campuses suffer from some form of an eating disorder during their time at university. Although no such statistics exist for NYU Abu Dhabi or other universities in the region, a lack of official numbers does not mean the issue itself is non-existent. Three NYUAD students opened up to share their stories about anorexia, bulimia and recovery both on and off campus.
“YOU HAVE YOUR LIFE IN YOUR OWN HANDS”
“In [my home country], a girl is only considered pretty if she is skinny. That just goes hand in hand,” said Victoria, who asked that her real name not be used.Leaning back against the plush chair in my living room, fingers curled around a mug of tea, she began to tell her story of bulimia. Her eating disorder, she said, had a very clear starting point; while on holiday with her parents during a school break, she inadvertently lost a couple of pounds and enjoyed the reactions she received.
“When I went back to school, my peers, for some reason, had a very easy time noticing that I had lost weight and they started making comments about how good I looked,” she said. “I had never heard that before … and I really liked it.”
Victoria went home after school that day and, with the praise of her friends still echoing in her mind, decided that she didn’t feel hungry. She embarked on a diet, focusing on eating healthily at first.
“I lost some more weight,” she recalled. “Then I started throwing up after every meal because I realized that there were some days when I was super hungry and I was eating like I used to.”
Her parents must have realized what was happening, she said, when they heard her purging after meals. At one point, her mother had to take her shopping nearly every week to buy clothes in smaller and smaller sizes. Victoria appreciated that they did not directly intervene, however, but instead supported her while making the costs of continuing clear.
“I can’t speak for all the girls and guys out there who have had an eating disorder but for me, it was about having control in my life,” Victoria said. “Bulimia and eating disorders in general make you feel very much like you are in control. You know that almost everyone out there wants to lose weight … And when you start losing weight so rapidly, you realize that you’ve got this. You have your life in your own hands.”
Eventually, however, Victoria felt that her bulimia was spiraling out of control. She knew it had to stop. Although she is very grateful that bulimia is no longer a part of her life, she said she wouldn’t take back that period of her life if she had the chance.
“If I could turn back time, I wouldn’t do anything differently,” Victoria said. “To begin with, I don’t know if I would even be here at this amazing university had it not been for bulimia and the huge jump in my GPA … and it taught me about my relationships with my friends and my parents, and with myself and my body, with academics, everything.”
“I think it’s hard to recognize that, but it’s not always such a bad thing. This sounds twisted and bad, but I really think so,” she added.
DE-GLAMORIZING ANOREXIA
Monica, who also requested that her name not be published, emphasized that she did not want to glamorize her eating disorder in any way.“Talking about it is so important because as long as you think it is glamorous and as long as you think you are doing the best thing for you — which you will think when you have an eating disorder — it’s easy to associate eating disorders with notions of beauty or control or purity, these kind of abstract ideals that really at the core of it don’t mean anything,” she said.
She painted a brutal picture of what it was like to live with an eating disorder and of how bad her anorexia became for her health and well-being.
“When I see photos of myself then, yeah, I looked vaguely presentable with enough makeup,” Monica said. “But my eyes were sallow and I looked sick. I was bruised all over. I couldn’t lay on my bed because my bones were digging into me.”
“It wasn’t pretty,” she added. “But until you start sharing those anecdotes with other women, you think that what we present on the street is what we are, which is not the case.”
Monica and I were in the library late at night, and had wandered off to find a secluded place to talk away from the florescent lights and clacking of keyboards in the common area. We eventually settled in the back, hidden amongst a row of books, and talked for more than an hour.
Monica told me that she had counted calories and restricted food since about the age of eleven, but her eating disorder worsened during the gap between high school and university. A lot was happening in her personal and home life at the time, and the drive she would have devoted to academics found its release in starvation and self-destructive behaviors. Starting university did not put an end to it, but only made it much worse.
“The ability to be anonymous in college and to pass things off as ‘Oh, I have too much work’ — which is always the case here — it made it much easier to escalate things,” she said. “When you are in that mindset, it’s the only thing that matters.”
A few weeks before the end of her freshman year, she had to take a leave of absence.
“When I had to take my medical leave, I had no idea what was happening,” said Monica. “I thought I might be kicked out of school because when you take a mental health leave, you think, ‘Do they even want me back?’”
“[That] made me freak out and clamp down even more,” she added. “Things were bad when I started in Abu Dhabi, but they were much worse when I left Abu Dhabi. I basically stopped eating.”
At some point while she was away, however, a combination of things made her aware of the dark side of anorexia and nurtured a desire to overcome it. Part of it was having a psychiatrist to push her, and another part was seeing middle-aged women who had never overcome their disordered eating.
One of the biggest pushes, though, was when she realized that she faced spending the summer in an eating disorder rehabilitation facility instead of interning in New York. Suddenly, anorexia was coming in direct and tangible conflict with her future.
“You thought this whole time that you have been reestablishing control over your life and that you are being productive, you can see your achievements on your body,” she said. “And then you realize and you’re like ‘Oh shit, I’ve kind of fucked up.’”
Recovering hasn’t been easy though, she said, and it is still something that she struggles with.
“It’s really hard, I don’t know when that mind-set is going to change … It’s been eleven years of this disease crawling on me and telling me that the only end goal is to starve. It’s basically realigning your priorities in life,” she said. “Recovery for me, and I think this is true for a lot of people, is rediscovering the things you value in yourself.”
Women have a duty to each other, Monica argued, to steer the conversation away from how we measure ourselves aesthetically.
“Women need to support each other more,” she said. “I don’t want to say that all this crash dieting and juicing is a slippery slope into eating disorders, but at the peak of my anorexia, I was unknowingly doing all the things that women’s magazines tell girls they’ll need to do to be ‘healthy.’”
MEDIA AND SOCIAL STANDARDS
Junior Emma Leathley echoed similar sentiments about the role of media and societal standards in fostering disordered eating. She was diagnosed with anorexia in high school and eventually hospitalized for it. At the height of her eating disorder, she didn’t think that she was affected by societal ideals of success and body image. Her opinion about the effects of such standards, however, has changed over time.“I perceived myself as the complete opposite of being some girl who [cared about societal pressures], I perceived myself as being more powerful and somehow better than people who fall into being victimized by those standards,” she said. “But I think that at the end of the day, no matter how different I felt from other girls about not following those standards … some combination of that standard is always lurking in the background for everyone.”
As such, Leathley said that she thinks psychiatrists and doctors do not actually get to the root of the problem. They can only mitigate the physical effects of an eating disorder.
“The problem is that [some individuals] are so success-driven that they want to force themselves into a version of what everyone says is success: in addition to being smart and academic, also being skinny and pretty,” she explained.
“Personally, I think that this is a much bigger issue than the one that the psychologists deal with. If you get rid of that, then eating disorders will go away for the most part,” she said.
Leathley also suggested that support needs to come from the ground up.
“If girls would have some sort of group awareness about this type of issue, including the very pervasive set of standards that we are raised not to see, then it would help girls’ health in a range of ways and not just with eating,” she said.
SUPPORT AT NYUAD
In terms of institution support at NYUAD, the director of the Health and Wellness Center Dr. Halah Ibrahim encouraged students to use the resources that are available.“I think it’s very important to start these kinds of conversations,” said Ibrahim. “I don’t want to say that disordered eating is a problem here, but it exists here like it exists everywhere … People should know that there are resources out there.”
She mentioned the two counselors who currently work at H&W and noted the 24-hour access to counselors in New York via phone or video call.
“One of my priorities as the new director is to increase counseling services,” Ibrahim added. “As the student population grows, Health and Wellness as a whole will also grow to be able to meet the student’s needs … We’re actively recruiting counselors.”
She said that, if all goes according to plan, more counselors will be available by the beginning of next semester and that there is talk of collaborating with the Fitness Center to bring in a nutritionist.
Beyond counseling and physicians, Dr. Ibrahim also mentioned the work done by the peer-support group REACH.
“Tina [Wadhwa] heads the Mental Health office and she is running a workshop with REACH in early May that talks about disordered eating, in addition to other things,” she said.
Senior Annamária Balogh, who is organizing the May 10 talk, described it in more detail.
“The event is not only going to be about eating disorders but an event about how to help a friend,” she said. “It’s not about trying to solve the other person’s problems, but it’s about being there and listening.”
Balogh mentioned the other issues that will be discussed, such as anxiety, eating disorders, depression and identity formation, that the organizers of REACH think are relevant and worth talking about.
“I think having an open dialogue about these things is basically the first step,” said Balogh. “If you live in a community where people experience different kinds of problems, I think the first thing to do is to educate people so that they are knowledgeable about these problems and can be supportive.”
Clare Hennig is managing editor. Email her at feedback@thegazelle.org.
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