Pure Food Life

The Invisible Competition and Constant Search for Thinness In The Disordered Eating Mind of Modern Society

It never ceases to amaze me.  The way it they pull you in with their false promises; their lies.  They offer us glimpses of hope and success, tips, tricks, and other individual’s obscured stories of success and of sufferance.  Advertisement adds, diet books, magazines, magazine articles, candid pictures of celebrities and glossy airbrushed pictures of perfection alike.  They all pull us in by the strands of our heart, by plucking the loosely wound harp strings of our self consciousness and imperfections. 

More concretely what I am speaking of is the way images of beauty, thinness and articles about how to obtain these ideals pull all females in to reading them.   Women all over the country are constantly searching for that magical answer, what will finally make them skinny and feel good about themselves.   For many years of my life my nerves would jump when my eyes met the words in an article or advertisement that mentioned weight loss, or thin, and how to get there.  I see other women every day scratching at the multifaceted and saturated media market searching for the promises of weight loss.  With every article that we read we think to ourselves, this could finally be it, this could finally be the answer; the key to my success and “shrink-ability”.  This notion can go even farther beyond in girls with disordered eating or who are on the path to developing disordered eating patterns.  Everywhere they turn they see someone thinner than them.   It could be some girl on the street, the latest skinny celebrity, or a girl that they know with an eating disorder.  They are constantly wondering, what does she do and how does she do it.  If I find out her secret maybe I’ll look like her too.  From this search stems a darker seeded stalk; that of competition, girls are always trying to compete with one another to be the best.  On the most primitive level, we are striving to be the best looking.  In the case of eating disordered individuals that goal is to be the thinnest, the sickest, and the one with the most control: the “strongest.”

The problem that none of us women realize, on all levels from the average house wife who compares herself to other mother’s breast size at a PTA meeting to the sickly girls in eating disorder clinics who compare the size of their thighs to their fellow patients, that this competition is an illusion.  The competition is fake it is not real.  We do not see ourselves for what we really are.   We somehow have managed to allow our eyes to spin a story that does not parallel reality by constantly picking on ourselves and degrading our efforts.  We see what we want to see, what we believe is there but really is not.  It is sad really the way we torture ourselves.  But we cannot help it!  That is what women say.  That this has been embedded into their brains and they cannot stop even if they wanted to.  Stopping is certainly very hard indeed, but it is possible.  By realigning with nature and cleansing our bodies by following a more natural diet we can embody the thinness that we desire and see the world with a mental clarity that escaped us as childhood slid into adolescence and adulthood.

While the process I have described above is very slow, in fact it is still a process that I am in the midst of myself, the best advice I can give to anyone who is trying is this; to stop looking.   While we cannot rewire our internal programming over night we can sometimes manage to stop triggering it into action.  We can do this by not engaging in the behaviors that encourage this competitive comparison.  A.K.A.  We can stop picking up ever damned magazine we see.  Stop looking at ourselves in every reflective surface on the street.   And to stop obsessing about what we wear each day.  If it fit in the store and it still closes chances are it still fits now you don’t have to examine it.  Doing this is an exercise; to avoid competition is a muscle that we must build.  At first this muscle may be weak but before you know it you will be able to avoid the triggering elements of society by simply not focusing on your body but on what your body allows you to see in your world.  Even if it’s just one mirror that you don’t look in or one pair of tight jeans that you don’t try on for any good reason, you will stop the self degradation just that much, for that five minutes of the day.  In good time this will increase and aid you in your natural path to wellness.  When we look at others and compare, it can make us doubt ourselves and our efforts, making us deviate from our life generating habits which further lengthens the time it takes for us to reach our emotional and physical goals.  So what I am saying is that by keeping your eyes forward, you can keep your mind moving forward too.