It was around the time she began undergoing intense treatment for her eating disorder that senior Anna Poss said she realized she never wanted anyone else to go through what she was going through. After the physical symptoms started to wear on her, she said that she couldn’t live the way she was living anymore.
“I didn’t feel that I was sick even though I really was,” she said. “I had to hit rock bottom for that to happen.”
Now, for the second year in a row, Poss is chairing this week’s Eating Disorder Awareness Week, a series of events that reach out to those who suffer from eating disorders as well as those who suffer from poor body image.
For the last two years, Poss took part in one of the week’s more popular events, the survival panel, which features Saint Louis University students who share their stories of treatment and recovery.
“Eating disorders affect all of us,” she said. “It’s a lot more common than people know.”
Poss added that she has been approached by people suffering from eating disorders who sought treatment after attending a past EDAW event.
“We know that we’re making a difference on the SLU campus,” she said.
Poss said that eating disorders on a college campus are “very common. The college lifestyle can be very unhealthy.”
Claudia Charles, a therapist at Student Health and Counseling Services who deals with patients suffering from eating disorders, agreed that eating disorders are “definitely something we’re dealing with.” Typically, patients are women, but Charles said affected men are on the rise.
Due to efforts to heighten awareness, “people are more willing to start getting help,” she said. To handle such cases, SLU has therapists and a dietician who can make referrals in some cases.
She said most patients “usually have already been struggling with it at high school” and cited the media as a troublesome trigger, a point that was expanded on during this week’s EDAW events.
Paaige Turner, a professor in the department of communication, will deliver a multimedia address on the media’s effect on self-esteem and body image today at 7 p.m. in DuBourg Room 157.
Turner and Colleen McEntee, who earned her Master’s in communication at SLU, will illustrate the unattainable perfection of airbrushing during the presentation. Turner said tools like airbrushing advocate the worship of an unattainable goal.
“They’re not even real. You have no hope of being that body,” she said.
Actresses like Kate Winslet or Jessica Simpson illustrate the media’s skewed view of acceptable body types, Turner said.
She added that actresses labeled as thin realistically fall into the anorexic category, while normally thin women are called “curvy” and women of average weight are described as “overweight.”
“There’s only one perfect body type . it’s the anorexic body,” Turner said, comparing photos of an acceptably thin Jessica Simpson with the body of an anorexic woman.
Turner said that she meets at least one woman who suffers from bulimia every semester, calling it “much more of a hidden disorder” because “you see them eat.”
Turner said that she believes the issue of eating disorders is indicative of a broader social issue, noting that people can have an “unhealthy relationship” with food, while not classified as an eating disorder, is destructive. She cited her own unhealthy relationship with food in her youth.
“I remember in college giving someone my meal card so I couldn’t eat,” she said.
“[A woman might think], ‘I don’t have an eating disorder because I’m not throwing up, I’m still menstruating, I have enough body fat to function.’ . That leaves them not recognizing that they still have an unhealthy relationship with food and their bodies,” she said.
Kat Patke contributed to this article.
