Blame it on their friends! (Don’t we always?) But wait, it’s not that simple.

In all of my writing about my struggles with anorexia, orthorexia and general bad-self-image-exia, I have come to notice something interesting. Particularly something interesting about you. Every time I write about eating disorders or the pressure to be thin, the majority of you sympathize right along with me but there are always a few – and probably more in the lurkers section, Hi Guys!!! – that seem to have no idea what I’m talking about.

Allie, commenting on Functional Anorexia, sums up the oft repeated sentiment:

Man. I read things like this and wondered how in the world I made it through my teenage years having relatively little idea about eating disorders, or worrying about being thinner.

Frankly, I was as baffled too. For me, the culture of thin was omnipresent growing up. I can’t remember ever not caring about my weight. Most of my friends were subsumed in the same way. And yet it was different for some of you. I think I might have an answer.

Goths, Preps, Mods, Jocks, Stoners, Slackers and Beanie Baby Collectors
According to a new study from the Children’s National Medical Center in D.C., which peer group a girl most identifies with greatly influences her body image attitudes and dieting behaviors. So you can call your mom and say “I told you so” – apparently it IS that important who you sat next to in the cafeteria.

Want to know the group most at risk for disordered eating? I’ll wait for you to write down your guesses. You will be surprised. Cheerleaders with their tiny skirts and high-flying tricks? Nope. Cross country runners who are known for their litheness and speed? No again. The Perfect Girls who wore only Abercrombie & Fitch (or Girbauds in my day) and shopped for a living? No, no, no.

This may be one of the saddest sentences I have ever had to write: the girls most at risk for low self esteem and disordered eating were the girls who associated with no group. The loners. The losers. The outcasts. It makes sense in a slit-my-wrists kind of way. Because what better way to try and fit in to a culture that rejects you then to embrace their predominant ideal?

The next most likely group to be disordered were the ones who identified themselves as “alternatives,” meaning those who put themselves outside the mainstream as “non-conformists” which at my school meant the artsy kids, the drama kids (who were also stoners), the hippie kids (who were also stoners), the skaters (who were also stoners), the straight-edgers (who would beat you up if you were a stoner), the punks (who loved stoners) and the goths (who avoided drugs because it might take the edge of their pain).


Me? I started in the former group (the loners) and moved to the latter (the goths). No wonder I was messed up! I picked the two worst groups to be in as far as body image was concerned – which I would have heartily denied at the time despite the fact that many of my friends were active cutters and/or spent a lot of time listening to The Cure. Not to mention the alcoholics. Let’s just say I’ve heard more than my fair share of bad poetry.

The Others
Girls who identified as “Jocks”, had relatively few body image or dieting problems, seemingly unconcerned about their weight. Hard to be a State champion sprinter if you’re listless, weak and cold all the time. (But add a side order of eyeliner and you’ve got Emo to go!)

The “Burnouts,” defined as the girls who “skipped school and often got into trouble” provided the only moment of humor in this study by recognizing that while their peers probably highly valued beauty and thinness, they couldn’t be bothered to care. Probably because they had other things to worry about. Like juvie.

Conclusions
The part that I found most fascinating about this research was that it didn’t matter which group the girls actually fell into but only which group they most identified themselves with. So the Homecoming Queen might end up bingeing and purging in the locker room despite her popularity because she identifies herself as a loner while the geek with head gear might actually graduate with her self esteem intact because she has three really awesome friends and knows it.
It tells me that we need to be paying a lot more attention to how girls define themselves and less to how they define each other. We need to be looking less at how they stare at celebrities and more at what they see when they look in the mirror.

And we need to get more of our girls in sports. (But not gymnastics or figure skating. But that’s another story for another day.)

23 Comments

  1. It’s funny that you said you can relate to be on my second post at MDA, and I come here and read this – and I can relate to you.

    I had been a loner (or a self-proclaimed one) even during elementary school. I always considered myself an artist. By 7th grade I was in baggy black Dickies and with “Midnight Blue” hair coloring, during research projects on Kurt Cobain. 8th grade I was in the principal’s office, being told that I Cannot Wear a Trench Coat Because It Makes People Uncomfortable. A few of my fellow black-loving friends and I crashed the school dance in protest, by showing up in full “goth” make-ups, and moshing into the most popular girls at school.

    I remember I quit eating breakfast and lunch around that time, 20-30lbs fell off like an old pair of jeans.

    Unlike the ‘goths’ in your entry, I did find drugs to take the edge off my pain, and how lovely – it created more pain! But at the time, it was just what I needed. A combination of binge drinking and methamphetamine and another 40lbs fell off. I also found myself in a psychiatric hospital at age 15, 5150ed due to public insanity and solicitation. Whoops. But that’s another story.

  2. Ugh, too many typos to try and explain… “be” should be “me,” “during” should be doing, “make-ups” shouldn’t have an S, so on and so forth. That’s what I get for not proff-reading (just kidding.)

  3. Cara, cara, cara – are you my long lost twin?? And I must know the rest of this 5150 story!!

  4. i never really dieted – oh sure, i went on fitness kicks, but never anything related to a strict diet, per se. weirdly enough, i’ve always had a “meh” body image – not in love with the way i look, but i didn’t despise me enough to change, either.

    ironically, it took me working at a gym to make my self-image go down the toilet.

    that being said, i never was one of the “popular” kids – i’m too “real”/honest for them – always have been. i have, however, always had a few tight, close friends.

    i also noticed that most of the girls who had eating disorders (some you could tell; some you couldn’t) were either popular and desperately had to be part of the in-crowd … and also the ones who despised me since i saw right through them and, yes, a few of the goths. not all, though.

  5. I’m not sure if the prevelance of eating disorders is a very modern thing in the UK, but me and my two best girl friends are the only three people I know EVER (well, in real life) to have had an eating disorder. At my school it was completely unheard of, yet my best bud and me would frequently skip meals to lose weight. We never got REALLY sick… but the seeds were planted for us in our twenties when we both became anorexic, both as a result of bad things happening elsewhere in our lives. It was an old comfort blanket that we dragged out when things got bad – and it still is, to an extent.

    I think our case proves that eating disorders are not always a result of social conditioning – it’s something much deeper about female self-worth, that’s basically as old as the hills. We didn’t need to be surrounded by skinny peers to want to diet – we just did it for the kick of being in control at a highly out-of-control time of life.

    Interestingly, we were both in two very different groups – she was sporty and popular – always in the thick of things, and I was a loner and then “the cool kid in that band” – always on the periphery.

    TA x

  6. Interesting!
    I was a classic, loner to stoner via drama freaks/punk/goth. Joy Division anyone?

    I was also anorexic and cut myself before anyone talked about that kind of thing and even I didn’t know what the hell that was all about. Makes it isn’t to believe that the whole disordered eating is about something so much bigger than fatness, thinness or BMI

  7. Crabby McSlacker

    I was a geek, and hung out with the “brains.” We were profoundly unpopular but also knew, at least on good days, that there was a life for us past high school if we could just get through it.

    I was pretty lucky not care too much about food and weight issues, though I wasn’t entirely immune. I was pretty active in sports (which was no popularity-booster for a girl back in the ’70’s) so could eat crap without putting on much weight. Had I been less active or more naturally chubby I’m sure I would have been more messed up about it.

    It’s funny, the study results seem so counter-intuitive it makes me wonder if they’re wrong. I just know those cheerleaders were obsessing about their weight more than the “artsy” crowd.

  8. I was a jock primarily, but didn’t hang out with the jocks. I floated between the nerds, student council (vice president of the student body, baby!), punks, skaters, and soccer players. So while I didn’t belong to any specific group, I never was a loner either. Maybe that is why I escaped high school with my self image in tact.

    Its interesting, though, that it’s more what group you identify with than what group you appear to be in. I knew several jock gals with eating disorders, but they considered themselves in the “in” crowd first, and jocks second.

  9. It’s funny you should write a post about this because I was thinking about the same thing the other day. Why wasn’t I wrapped up in self-loathing in high school? I was never a jock, but definitely particpated in any sports that they would let you without having to try out. I also hung out with the nerds, and definitely some stoners my senior year. I remember in 10th grade the guys on my swim team would buy me two lunches every day because they thought it was so cool that a girl ate two lunches. In my defense I was swimming every day and going through a growth spurt.

    In hindsight, my self-loathing didn’t start until college where I experimented with drugs and noticed that I was losing weight but just didn’t really “care” about myself…that was definitely my lowest point.

    Being treated for depression and ADHD really helped me get my old happy-go-lucky self back. Now my drug of choice is running, and I don’t even have to do that every day to reap the benefits. I focus on eating healthy and taking it easy on myself.

  10. I wore flannel shirts (men’s XXL tall from Sears, so stylin’) to hide my widening ass, Nirvana t-shirts, men’s jean’s & Doc Martens, kept a 4.0 GPA, and would punch anyone that mocked me loud enough to for me to hear (can we say butch?). I think it’s safe to say I didn’t fit in with any one particular group. Despite my crappy self-esteem and outsider status, looking back I hung out with a wide variety of kids at various times-stoners, geeks, drama kids, band nerds, jocks; I just think I didn’t feel totally accepted by any of them, hence the comfort in cookies, soda & donuts. I wonder how much was just in my head? Maybe I was more accepted than I realized.

  11. ALL if your stories just break my heart. I can’t imagine going through what some of you have. Let alone watching my children. My heart breaks for a society that allows this to happen to it’s children.

    If any of you have children or plan on it, you have to read the book “Hold Onto Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers”, by Neufeld and Mate.

    The authors argue that the existence of a “youth culture” is a new phenomenon in the history of human development and that our learning processes are designed to be developed in attached, mentoring type relationships, not peer based relationships. Also talks about how a sense of identity needs to be established BEFORE the group identity is established and that the youth culture robs children of their own identity. Fascinating stuff.

    At least read the reviews from Amazon. I’m convinced the deterioration of familial attachments is the root of this epidemic.

    Lori

  12. The Lethological Reader

    I floated between a couple groups – I was mostly a nerd, especially later in high school, though I did have friends in the low-GPA, loads-of-alcohol group. I knew a bunch of people I could be friendly with. But looking back on it, I was more of a loner. After school hours, I rarely hung out with friends (except sometimes on the phone), and I had major self esteem issues (I wore big plaid shirts because I thought I was huge, but which made me look falsely huge) and had trouble talking to people I wasn’t comfortable around (especially guys).

    Considering that, and the fact that my mother would give me a look whenever I’d take more than a modest share of dessert, I’m amazed I didn’t come out with more issues than I did. I did overeat sometimes (eating a whole bag of mint milanos in one afternoon), and I feel like I was rarely hungry. But given that I was really a loner, it did help that my parents really encouraged me to be independent and not rely on what other people thought of me (so I we worried about it, but didn’t actually follow through with massive dieting to fit into a cultural image).

  13. Interesting study. Probably a tangent, but I remember crying the day I quit gymnastics when I was 16 because I was so torn. I didn’t want to go anymore because I wanted a life instead of working out 30 hours a week, but I thought I’d get fat if I quit so I didn’t want to. Other than that, I was probably the normal “eat lots of junk food with my friends because that’s what teenagers do” type person and I never really had a label, I did sports, hung with everyone from the honors crowd to the popular kids to the burnouts, dyed my hair weird colors and wore crazy clothes, was on the yearbook staff, physics club, partied a lot, and smoked outside off school property during breaks. I had my toe in many different pools of water. 🙂

    It was only in college when I went through a really hard breakup that I lost weight due to not eating (I would buy a couple boxes of crackers and live on those and coffee for a week). I saw the weight drop off, my ex get jealous, got attention from the other boys and I felt on top of the world. Thankfully I didn’t keep eating like that once I was happy and on top of the world again…

    I guess all I can do is thank my hatred of being hungry and detest of throwing up for keeping me out of danger in my formative years, because I did always want to lose weight – from about age 13 on if not younger, first to be better at sports, then just to look like I did when I was fitter and did sports. When I get obsessed about something – I really get obsessed. For some reason, I never really put the pieces together of how to do it , either in a healthy or non-healthy way until a year and a half ago, and that is how you gain 145 lbs in a decade!

  14. I’d like to see how strongly those correlations hold after the girls get out of school and into the “real world.” I personally know a few of the girls who would have self-identified as “jocks” during school (and had the attendant self-confidence and healthy self-image), but have fallen into unhealthy eating & behaviors since graduating and being removed from that group and atmosphere.

  15. That’s really interesting! And come to think of it, people don’t usually seem to be so concerned with these issues when they FEEL loved and surrounded by friends and family… its generally at times when you feel lonely that those problems become prominent.

  16. I love your blog!

    My sister is 15 and, thank heavens, into sports. I really struggled with self-image and was convinced I was fat and ugly (now looking back, I realize I was quite skinny). I’m so vigilant in how I talk with her about health and body image, and so far she seems extremely positive about her body and shows no signs of disordered eating. I am thankful beyond words. Your blog entry also gives me a newfound appreciation for her love of volleyball and track.

  17. I think I mostly identified myself as a “choir person”. Sometimes a wanna-be hippy or wanna-be nerd (I didn’t think I was smart enough to be a nerd, but most of my friends were).

    For the most part, I had an awesome group of friends, and while we weren’t in the popular group, there were enough of us that we felt pretty good about ourselves.

    I wasn’t too into sports in high school, although I ran track one year. I think I had a pretty good basis in athletics though- I played soccer and was in gymnastics growing up (thankfully I quit gymnastics before my size was ever an issue- I was tiny)

    Interesting study. Makes me kind of glad I don’t have any girls. What do studies say about boys and body image?

  18. every gym's nightmare

    weird. i beat an eating disorder as well, but i was a straight A, popular, sporty, perfectionist. i was friends with every type of group (except the gangsters. well, i was friends with some of them)

    that study goes against everything i have ever heard: its usually the type A middle class girls that get the EDs. or thats what Ive always read/been told. i know that it didnt have anything to do with my friends or anything, it was the situation i was raised in, but if you think about it, those with no friends or “identity” seem to be the most self destructive, ie. using drugs, or cutting, etc. i guess it makes sense…

    im rambling

  19. Hi Charlotte, Thanks for your post on fitness Sounds good, love to get more from you,

    Thxs,
    Adirian

  20. I was mainly a nerd in high school (hi, fellow nerds), but don’t remember really be concerned about my weight. Of course that was sooo long ago. I was definitely a late bloomer, so was pretty stick-like (much to my dismay) until about
    11th grade, when I did develop somewhat. I know some girls did have issues with eating disorders, but I don’t recall it was talked about much.

  21. Interesting research, but it makes sense since teen are at that “searching for identity” age.
    But feeling accepted, loved, beautiful probably plays an even bigger part.

  22. In high school, i just graduated, i would associate myself with the academic-jock-nice-kids. I still struggled with mild anorexia my sophomore year- while playing hard-core volleyball(13+hrs/week). I was at the peak of my athletic career at that point. It makes me really curious about the other athletes… I was able to hide it pretty well.

    I’ve heard that it can be bad in college sports. I’m planning on talking to the nutritionist as soon as I get to kstate since I’ll still be needing to lose a bit of weight all the while being a Div 1 athlete. I’m still concerned…

  23. Oh, I was so the loner, I had like 3 friends in high school who were great but always considered myself the outcast. In the 5th grade I was openly rejected by my peers (as evidenced by a note in my desk saying I was fat and unlikable, and my “friends ditching me) and the teasing continued until I changed schools in high school and lost some weight (and prayed to God that I’d become anorexic when I grew up…be careful what you pray/wish for kiddies). I was at my most “loner-ish” when I went to college, I literally had no friends or social support (one reason that the loners may be at the most risk for EDs and other issues, social support is the number one indictor/predictor of mental illness, or so my psyc degree tells me).
    I was/am most healthy now, as apart of a strong knit team (cross country, no less). Although there are seriously only 3 girls who are truly ok with themselves only 3 actually have something close to a full blown EDs. Leaving 10 other girls who have the “normative discontent” that our culture give us women.
    I like your research posts. I LOVE psychology research, and miss doing it. But at least I can still read it. 🙂