Things That An Eating Disorder Is Not

1.A fear of fatness
2. A diet
3. A choice
4. Stupid
5. Caused by Western media
6. Caused by beauty ideals
7. A new phenomenon
8. Understood
9. Anyone’s fault
10. Incurable
11. Easy
12. Sustainable
13. Irrational
14. A metaphor
15. Internalized fatphobia
16. Prejudiced
17. For white girls
18. A phase
19. Identifiable by size
20. Isolated from family/friends/society
21. Identical to any other eating disorder
22. Useless
23. About anyone else but the sufferer (and potentially close friends/family members whose emotions are deeply enmeshed)
24. For young people
25. For women
26. A ploy for attention
27. Trivial
28. Motivated by someone else’s body
29. Motivated by the sufferer’s body
30. Seriously, not about bodies
31. Isolated from other trauma/emotional issues that the sufferer might have
32. Fun
33. Shallow
34. Simple
35. Definable
36. Caused by any one thing
37. Entirely genetic
38. Entirely socialized
39. Making a statement (except possibly “help!” or “I can’t handle life!”)
40. About you
41. An epidemic
42. Getting more common (hey guess what more awareness does? Leads to more diagnoses!)
43. For you
44. To please men
45. To make women submissive
46. Weakness or powerlessness
47. A problem for you to fix
48. Something you get to define
49. An identity
50. A talking point or pawn for your theories about society
51. Manipulative
52. Blackmail
53. Seriously, still not about you
54. Gender roles taken to the extreme
55. Not really a problem
56. All in your head
57. Solved by “just eating” (or really by eating at all…that’s an important piece but really doesn’t fix the disorder)
58. A lifestyle
59. A fashion choice
60. Limited to anorexia and bulimia
61. Limited by your location, age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, education, or really anything else
62. The same as “wishing you were skinnier”
62. The same as weight discrimination
63. The same as skipping lunch that one time
64. Self-control
65. Submitting to patriarchal beauty ideals

Things that an eating disorder is:
1. A potentially deadly disease that is unique to each individual who has it.