A couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal, journalist Julie Jargon told the story of Griffin Henry, a professional baseball player, and how he became anorexic. His story is paradigmatic, because anyone with an internet connection and an Instagram account can be mirrored in full length.
Henry is a sportsman, so it’s legitimate that by making his body his source of income he thought losing weight was a good idea. Just as the models will continue to be models and eat salads without having to account to us how much and what they eat, so sportsmen must enter into very precise parameters, and not for this they send the wrong messages, or they must necessarily get fat or be like we. The coaches had told Henry that he should run faster, and so he decided to lose weight. Unfortunately for him the ideas on how to lose weight he got them from Instagram.
There are millions of pages where we find fifteen-minute high-intensity circuit executions, complete menus of a thousand calories with very precise weights, recipes for ketogenic smoothies that seem to be made of cream, discounted peanut butter-flavored protein powders. I believe there is at least one online coach per inhabitant of the earth’s population, also thanks to the closure of gyms with the pandemic. Everything is public, everything is online, everything is for sale, including our idea of the body we wish we had. Male eating disorders exist and are on the rise, but they remain hidden until the clinical picture becomes severe. DCA has always been talked about as purely female pathologies, only in recent years, even on social media, are the stories of eating disorders experienced by children told. There are very popular Instagram pages, with infographics and motivational phrases, which on the one hand offer recipes for deceptive caramel flavored egg white puddings (caramel made with erythritol and water, zero calories), on the other they say «we are not a number Which is the mantra of all these pages. I would add that they are full of sponsors, so they monetize a food philosophy that is not a philosophy, but is only personal reporting. It’s like a Ponzi scheme, but done with the spectator’s pyramid of fears.
Anorexia is a psychiatric disease, and must be treated as such. I follow many of these pages, and I also follow many “recovery profiles”, where girls and boys talk about their eating days after a dca. With the pandemic the situation has worsened: the closure of the gyms, the difficulty of not eating out of boredom or desperation when we were in lockdown, the fixed thought of having to take 10,000 steps a day, perhaps in an apartment with other people, has expanded and multiplied disorders affecting food. Often the girls and boys in the recovery profiles disappear overnight, weeks go by, then come back saying that they had relapsed and that they didn’t want to influence anyone.
The “not wanting to influence” is the phrase I read most after “we are not the number on the scales”. Behind it there are strategies of food compensation, of restriction after eating a few more grams of rice, of covering the weekly cheat.
The truth is, we believe everything we see, because we need it. For example, I don’t think thin people who tell me about eating pizza every day really do it, I think the carbonara dishes photographed by the models are just props. I know they eat chicken breast and egg whites, but I understand that at 16 one believes it.
It is very dangerous to believe everything we see, because then we end up thinking that saying “I would like to lose a few pounds” is a speech that praises eating disorders.
