Accourding to the experts.

I just want to say that the criteria one needs to meet to be diagnosed with an eating disorder is ridiculous if you remember that an eating disorder is first and fore most a disease of the mind. You have to 15% under weight, on most ocassions, to be diagnosed with an eating disorder. This makes it so easy for someone with the problem to deny it to themselves it almost is laughable. I don’t know about anyone else but I would have been alot easier to help when I wasn’t 15% underweight, by the time I’d reached that stage I didn’t want anyone’s help. I was so far gone my mother’s crying couldn’t convince me to eat the tea spoon of oat meal she’d offer every morning.

Whats more disturbing is, of the 70 million people in the world with eating disorders, 10-20% of them are going to die and the majority from suicide. So that’s about 7-14 million people who are going to die because of a mental disease that you can be told you don’t actually have because you don’t physically “fit in”. Which is ironic since I’m quite sure there are one or more people out there with eating disorders who feel like they don’t physically “fit in” in the normal sense of the word either. So you don’t really “fit in” anywhere do you now? Thats really enough to drive the best of us to commit suicide. Are minds are killing us but someone with an clipboard and a scale can turn to us and say “sorry, you’re only 10% underweight- better luck next time”.

Which also has to make you wonder, how many people are dead right now because of un-diagnosed eating disorders? Or more specifically, how many people are dead right now who were told they didn’t have an eating disorder? I’m telling you right now, if you’re starving your self or purging you can be 60lbs or 200lbs but you still have an eating disorder no matter what your doctor tells you. I’m sick and tired of the term “wannarexic” being used when I girl is “technically” over weight. I’ll have you know that more recovered anorexics end up over weight than you can poke a stick at (unfortuntley one of the top 10 reasons I refuse to recover).

I’ve actually lost track of where I was going with this, which is unfortunate because I think I was really onto something, but basically I think that they need to seriously consider changing the criteria for diagnosing someone with an eating disorders. Considering “early detection” is considered the best way to beat just about every illness they sure have made it hard for it to be detected early and pretty damn easy for it to be denied by even the person who has it. Its just so…illogical for a mental disease to be defined by the physical symptoms.

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