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Famous People Who Had Disordered Eating
In 1979, frazzled by the grueling day-for-night schedule, Gilda left Saturday Night Live and sashayed to Broadway, where she starred in a one-woman show, Gilda Radner -- Live from New York and Jean Kerr's Lunch Hour. In spite of her successes, however, she had moments of insecurity. Obsessed with food, she became anorexic and bulimic. Loneliness also wounded her. Eventually, she overcame the disorder when she found Gene Wilder, apparently, with no psychological assistance, just the love and support of a wonderful husband.
Karen Carpenter died February 4, 1983 of heart failure caused by chronic anorexia nervosa. She was thirty-two years old. She battled with it from 1975-1983 (when she died). She went to New York at the end of 1981 for a year of treatment by a psychiatrist but the damage had apparently been done. Plus, you can't beat anorexia with an hour in a doctor's office. She remained obsessed--or trapped--by it. She was an extreme case and she fought to over come the disease throughout the last two years of her life but she couldn't or she just simply ran out of time. Her body couldn't take anymore. She'd been starving herself for seven years, using laxatives, drinking water with lemon, taking dozens of thyroid pills daily, and even throwing up.
Cass Elliot's death was initially misreported as having been caused by her choking on a sandwich. The true cause of death -- a heart attack -- was not determined until an autopsy was performed a week later, but by that time the "ham sandwich" story had become entrenched in the public's mind.
The first reports of Cass Elliot's death said that her physician had stated she "probably choked to death on a sandwich", and the next day's post-mortem reportedly "showed that she died as a result of choking on a sandwich while in bed and from inhaling her own vomit". Dr. Keith Simpson, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Elliot, found no traces of food blocking her trachea, however. Dr. Simpson and Gavin Thurston, a London coroner, determined that Elliot had succumbed to a heart attack brought about by obesity. Elliot had long been overweight -- she stood 5'5" and weighed 238 lbs., about twice the proper weight for a woman of her height and build -- and the effects of long-term obesity and several crash diets had weakened her heart to the point of failure.
The relation between all 3 of these famous and very remarkable women, is the fact that all 3 suffered at some point in their lives with eating disorders. Only one managed to overcome her disorder, but later died due to ovarian cancer. That was Gilda Radner. As I stated previously in another section of this portfolio, anorexia and bulimia are the eating disorders which get the most public sympathy, because the suffering is more apparent than someone with a binge disorder. Those who look like concentration camp victims get the mass outpourings of pity while those with binge disorders are simply seen as fat, lazy, and disgusting. The problem here is telling someone who has a binge disorder to lose weight or stop eating, and actually thinking this will motivate them to do something about it. It won't, and more often than not, adds yet more bad feelings, and contributes to the bingeing.
It is unfortunate that over 50% of the population within the United States and United Kingdom has disordered or unhealthy eating habits, yet still the NHS does remarkably little about it. There is some degree of help for anorexics and bulimics, but compulsive overeating and binge eating still runs rampant. According to the news via AOL, the headlines stated in big bold black print - "Obesity 'Increasingly Seen as Norm'". When you see things like this, you wonder why it's taking so long for someone to acknowledge there's a problem which needs to be addressed.
Eating disorders cause a plethora of other health issues that could be prevented if the disorder was addressed and dealt with accordingly. Unfortunately, the NHS doesn't seem to allocate enough importance to this growing issue. In this is the problem. Obesity has also been linked with certain types of cancer, again, which could be avoided if the binge disorders were effectively diagnosed and dealt with accordingly. According to a class handout and confirmed by Julie Cohen, children as young as 6 years old are being diagnosed with having an eating disorder. The study conducted by Swansea University found as much as 25% of children ranging in ages from 5 - 7 years wanted to be thinner, and 1 in 6 were actually dieting. With the news headlines on obesity becoming "the norm" and children as young as 5 and 6 dieting because they think they are fat, why isn't more being done to address the eating disorders issues out there?
As a person with an eating disorder, I can say with a certainty how hard it is to go through everyday life. I have had my disorder since about the age of 8 when I was in the 3rd grade. I went through many years of mental and emotional abuse from my first stepfather, which was followed up by my mother as well. At the age of 11 years, I was already taller than my mother by 3 inches, and I weighed 14 pounds (one stone) less than she did. I got comments on a regular basis by my stepfather like "save the floors, we need them tomorrow", and "you weigh as much as a young girl just graduating from high school", and even worse, "no man in his right mind would ever want a fat pig like you". My mother followed it up in my early teens with comments like "if I gain 5 pounds, I feel like a stuffed pig. I don't know how you can stand it".
To a person with a binge disorder, this is just the worst thing you can possibly do to us. Cutting remarks like those above don't motivate us to stop bingeing, or suddenly start losing mass amounts of weight. In fact, many who have this problem have dieted most of their lives, including me.. Not many out there I haven't tried. No diet out there works, with the exception of the author - they of course, make a mint at our expense and failures. Diets are grand if you want to lose a stone or two. After that, it's just a waste of time. The same may be said of going to the gym and working out.
A couple of years ago, I had a membership at a very swank gym at the Bargate which has since shut down. I went in 3 times a week and worked out for an hour and a half. I was doing the equivalent of 36 - 37 kilometers worth each time. After a couple of months of really trying hard, and watching everything I put into my mouth, there was no difference. So for those who think it's simply down to leading a sedentary life, constantly pigging away, being lazy or what have you, all I can say is the facts are presented here as *I* personally know them, and from what I have managed to find elsewhere, though I can say with a surety that I could have written the whole of this portfolio without the assistance of any website, book, or doctor. For what it's worth, I hope this helps to part the fog...
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