Says Heidi:

“You can’t look at Hollywood and blame it, you have to make up your own mind whether you want to be fit, or super skinny. You can’t blame other people.”

“It’s your own choice and if you have children, it is up to the parent to educate your children so they are healthy and they don’t go into a direction of anorexia or obesity. It is up to you as a parent, it is hard to feed children right. I deal with it on a daily basis; it is much harder to make sure they eat right.”

It’s funny, while I don’t think what Heidi is saying is controversial at all, I bet a lot of people will want to slam her for saying it. Parents are ultimately responsible for their children’s health, how can you argue with that?

Still, I guess it might rubs some people the wrong way to have a model basically blaming them for their own children’s eating habits. How dare she?

Even other models like Bridget Moynahan are blaming celebrity culture for exacerbating America’s (and the western world’s) eating disorders.

Of course, Heidi will no doubt have an army of personal trainers and dieticians to help her get back in shape. Heidi went on record recently, saying:

“It’s all cute when you’re pregnant, but once you’ve had the baby it’s not so… well, it takes time.”

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Apparently, pictures of Victoria at London Fashion Week had celebrity weight watchers all up in arms over her twiggy appearance. Victoria, considering herself a role model (and perhaps rightly so), felt the need to set the record straight:

“I appreciate there are young girls and women who look at me as a role model and it is untrue to say I do not eat and I am unhealthy…

I have a healthy diet, a healthy lifestyle and plenty of energy to run after my three energetic boys and travel the world managing my fashion business.”

With husband David ranking at the top of the list of UK celebrity role models, Victoria’s got a right to defend her image. She’s always been a little on the stick-thin side, before and after each of her pregnancies…so I’m not really sure why this sudden hubbub over her appearance.

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So all those years of holding my head over the toilet can be blamed on my mother’s master’s degree?

Not exactly — the blame isn’t put on the parents. If anything, it’s further support of a long held belief that eating disorders have a higher incidence in upper and middle class families, where parents are more likely to have furthered their education. In non-white communities, in particular, studies have also shown the incidence of eating disorders increases with education.

More interesting: the researchers also found that the girls’ own success at school was often indicative of their trouble with anorexia or bulimia. As their grades increased, so did their risk.

Again, this follows previous research on eating disorders. Those of us who throw up or deny ourselves food have often been described as more driven than classmates, with a stress on success. There’s a tendency to be competitive and to judge oneself based upon exacting (and often impossible) standards.

Put that in terms of grades, and it sounds like a positive thing. Competitive kids push themselves to get good grades, get into a good college.

Put it in terms of losing weight, and it’s anything but. Competitive kids push themselves to not eat for a full day, then a full two days. Or they (we) push themselves to throw up just a little bit more.

Should parents blame themselves on this one? As someone who’s been there, done that, no, I can’t blame my mother’s master’s degree for pushing myself to get into a good college OR to throw up nightly. But if there’s ever a sign staring you in the face that you need to pay extra attention to your kid’s well-being, here you go. Just because they’re smart in the head doesn’t mean they’re smart in the heart.

Image: CarbonNYC via Flickr

Could be helping your kids advance their disordered eating.

A look at some books written for teens that fall in the “children’s lit” category over on the New York Times‘ Well Blog hit home for me especially because I WAS one of those teen girls who, pardon the pun, but ate up the stories of teenage bulimics. I wanted to read about someone I could identify with.

But even as I read the horrors of girls whose bodies had begun to grow excess hair to make up for the lack of fat to keep them warm, of girls who landed in hospitals weighing what they did as elementary schoolers, I wasn’t consciously thinking “ooh, can’t wait until I land in a clinic for the eating disordered, wonder if my parents’ insurance will cover the costs.” What I was thinking was “interesting, she eats a brightly colored food first so when she throws up, she’ll know by the color in the toilet that she’s gotten to the bottom of her stomach contents.”

It’s why today I’m loathe to tell my daughter horror stories to scare her straight on anything. Because before you reach the awful ending, there are always the details that fascinate, that often overwhelm kids with their one-track minds, that are entirely more enticing than the sobering after-thought of a consequence.

Although I’m wary of blaming a book for a child’s struggle with an eating disorder (ninety nine times out of one hundred, the seeds for that have already been sewn), just as I scoff at the idea that a video game is solely to blame for a child’s violent tendencies, any book, movie, game, what have you, that shares intimate details of how someone navigates a dangerous path is a potential how-to manual in the hands of our kids.

It’s why I read this warning about eating disorder books as just another reason parents can’t pass the buck off onto a book, a movie, a CD. If you’re going to keep your kid from disordered eating, get wise to what it means to have an eating disorder, find out the warning signs and then TALK to your kids. Let them read books, sure, but read them yourselves so you know what’s in them. Then talk about them.

Because if all you’re doing is trying to scare your kids into being good, it isn’t going to work.

Image: UniversityofWisconsin

“They found that about 70% of the patients had suffered damage to their neurotransmitters, which help brain cells communicate with each other, had undergone subtle changes in the structure of their brains, or both.”

This finding helps to clarify a long confusion about the risk factors involved in developing anorexia, since all women are exposed to pop culture’s thin obsession, but only about four women in every thousand develop anorexia.

Researchers hope that it may be possible to treat the disease with drugs that work like antidepressants by altering brain chemistry—and to offer parents some peace of mind that their children’s eating disorders are not their fault. According to Susan Ringwood, who runs a leading charity for people suffering from eating disorders, “Parents always blame themselves when their child develops an eating disorder. But what we are learning more and more from research in this area is that some people are very vulnerable to anorexia and that is down to genetic factors and brain chemistry, and not them trying to look like celebrity models or suffering a major traumatic event early in their lives.”

Jezebel writer Hortense is certainly not the only anorexia sufferer who welcomes the news that anorexia can affect anyone, and does not necessarily say anything about one’s childhood or obsession with appearance.

Nevertheless, just as people who are prone to depression are more likely to actually become depressed when certain stress factors are present in their lives, parents and society still have a responsibility to encourage all children to have positive relationships with their bodies—a responsibility that society clearly continues to shirk.

Eventually, it may be possible to test children as young as eight to determine whether they have the anorexia-prone brain abnormality. Would you get your kids screened?

Photo: Jezebel

“Every girl should have a Barbie,” they gushed. My wife stared at them in slack-jawed, open-mouth wonder.

“What the hell?” she said, “I wanted a Barbie for years!”

If someone had taken Tiny Tim’s crutch and beaten him about his frail, twisted legs while eating all the Christmas goose, it still would have been a merrier scene than the one at our house at that moment.

My wife stewed, my in-laws beamed and I sat on the couch, staring at this plastic creature I had successfully avoided for nearly three years.

I never wanted a Barbie in the house.

Her clothes don’t bother me so much. The early Barbie wore some swinging outfits and I’ve seen some newer Barbies that sport the kind of clothes your cool, older sister might have worn while packing her belongings for college. Unlike Bratz, you have to purposefully find Slut Barbie.

Her hair, her makeup. These things are easily changed, cut, washed off, shaded — any girl can style the doll to her own liking.

Except, of course, for the body.

Barbie has an impossible body.

Now, before the great Christmas Barbie Episode of 2008, I was originally worried not that my daughter might grow to look and dress and act like Barbie. Rather, I was worried what she might do to try.

A friend’s daughter, then 7, told her mother one day that she needed to go on a diet so she could look “more like Sally” — the name she had given to her Barbie. I’m not saying Barbie is the gateway to eating disorders. But I also don’t think dieting fits into the realm of playtime. How fun is that to look at a toy and think you’re suddenly not good enough? Yay! And our friend’s daughter is not the first to bring this up. And I doubt the same emotion overcomes a girl playing with a chubby Cabbage Patch Doll.

Some young girls see Barbie, want her body and then destroy their own. After all, isn’t Barbie a model for the perfect female?

Then Barbie did in fact come into our house.

When she did, my daughter, Emmeline, picked up her new toy, examined it for a bit, played with her clothes and then eventually abandoned the thing for the two dolphin friends that came in the same pack and lent testimony to the fact that this was, indeed, the real Scuba Barbie. (Why the dolphins are wearing mascara, I don’t know — even animals have to be sexualised now, I suppose.) But at this moment, Barbie lays forgotten upstairs, buried underneath a pile of clothes.

I’m not going to throw it away or keep it from her, although now is my chance. No, it dawned on me that I, her father, probably have a lot more sway over how she will one day view herself and her body than some stupid doll. Do I really want to be the person whispering in her ear about body issues? Do I want to make such a big deal out of it that an issue heretofore unknown to her suddenly becomes a cause for serious familial discussion? (And of course a story about Iran banning Barbie didn’t help, when it left me thinking, “Great, now I’m the fucking Ayatollah of the toy box.”)

But what really sent me over the edge in the past week was when a friend of a boy said, “You’ve got Barbie to deal with, sure — but what am I going to do when my son wants a gun?”

A toy gun. I had 35 of them. Cap guns. Laser guns. Electronic talking hippy pacifist guns that fired words instead of bullets, man! And I never went on some drunken rampage and shot up the post office (although I suppose there’s still time). I was never the bully. I’ve been in all of one real fight.

It’s just a toy, I caught myself thinking.

But then what of Barbie?

This was supposed to be the side of the Smackdown in which I let loose on the dangers of letting young girls play with shapely molded plastic — how it’s only setting them on a course of crash diets and the latest fasting fads, tweenish liposuction and adolescent insecurities. But now I’ve seen the actual impact of Barbie up close and I’m not too worried. I still maintain that I’m not going to buy one (there are actually a hundred cooler dolls out there, including the freaky-eyed Victorian-era porcelain cherubs my daughter has come to love) but if another Barbie enters the house, I think I’m the last person who should be making a big deal of it.

Jillian towers over Kristen’s son — born five days before her in June of 2005. On the weeks when she’s eating like a human garbage compactor, she develops a belly that would put Buddha to shame. I wouldn’t call her petite.

But who am I to judge? I have an eating disorder.

I don’t throw up every day — not anymore. I consider myself a recovering bulimic, my habitual binging and purging quelled by feelings of fulfillment, by finding my happy place. Marriage to my husband brought an end to the daily ritual, limited my battles to a few times a year.

In pregnancy I got my comeuppance. I landed in the emergency room twice for IV fluids because of uncontrollable bouts of morning sickness. For seven months, I threw up daily even though I tried everything I could to keep food down. I was prescribed medicines reserved for cancer patients to stave off the nausea caused by chemotherapy; I crafted a diet of ice-cold milk to battle the heartburn and grease-laden grilled cheeses to soothe a sour stomach. It was like having a non-stop hangover.

I still gained 20 kilos. When I read the reports about proper weight gain being 10-or-so kilos, I wrung my hands.

I feel for mums who shame-facedly climb on the scale at the OB/GYN’s office — the women who have been eating ice cream for the past six weeks because it’s all they could keep down, the women who for the first time in their life feel like the world has accepted their size. I also feel for the mums who have never shopped outside the teen section, who are humiliated that in pregnancy they’ve stretched to an adult size small.

They may not throw up. They may not starve themselves or exercise themselves into a frenzy. But life has taken its toll on their perceptions of food, their idea of the proper weight, the proper size.

Jillian’s birth brought on the longest stretch of my adult life spent away from throwing up. I lost my baby weight the healthy way — hoisting an infant, working part-time and pure luck. But my eating disorder has been like a devil perched on my shoulder for the past three years as I’ve struggled to make the right decisions for both myself and for Jillian.

I worry constantly: Should she have another biscuit? Should I buy the organic peanut butter or the Kraft that’s on sale? Am I letting her get too fat? Am I making her too thin? When the Buddha belly pops over her jeans, I find myself filling her cups two-thirds full of water, one-third of juice rather than half and half. I exchange the jam on her sandwich for dried banana chips. I give her multi-grain rice cakes instead of cookies. On Halloween and Easter, I cringe watching her shove chocolate kisses in her mouth.

The British have just introduced a TV show dubbed Too Fat to Toddle, essentially a fat-camp approach for overweight toddlers. It sounded off the wall. Then I read the comments on the blog of London’s Daily Mail: “It is a disgrace to have let your kids get in that state in the first place!” reads one post. “I wish parents would open their eyes and quit the ‘It’s just puppy fat’ attitude,” says another.

But because of my disorder, I don’t trust what I see when I open my eyes. When I looked at myself as a teenager I thought I was obese when I was a size eight. Is my child too fat or too thin? I have no idea. The paediatrician says she’s growing just fine, but I hold my breath through every well visit until he says those words.

A report published in April 1999 by the International Journal of Eating Disorders notes that mothers who have anorexia, bulimia, or binge-eating disorders handle food issues and weight concerns differently than mothers who have never had eating disorders. But even “normal” moms, moms who groan in the mirror or keep a scale handy for the morning post-shower ritual, run a risk of passing bad habits onto their kids.

A study in published in 2003 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition warns that parents who restrict their children from eating certain foods are in essence pushing their kids to eat when they’re not hungry. “The more severe the restriction, the stronger the desire to eat prohibited foods.”

When a mother is dissatisfied with her body, daughters will learn to base their self-worth on their appearance, says Christine Gerbstadt, spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. In fact, a study published by the Association showed that girls as young as five are likely to try dieting simply because Mum has.

Yes, five-year-old girls are dieting. And not just ones at British fat camp — girls who have seen the South Beach diet book on the shelf or the Jenny Craig commercials.

The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) lists as its top causes for various disorders feelings of inadequacy or lack of control. “People with eating disorders often use food and the control of food in an attempt to compensate for feelings and emotions that may otherwise seem overwhelming,” reads one NEDA FAQ.

One day in March, when I was overwhelmed by the loss of my grandmother, Jillian caught me throwing up. I never meant her to see me like that. She burst into the bathroom without knocking and found me on the floor in front of “the potty.” She ran to wrap her arms around my neck. Her voice was full of concern as she repeated the words she’s heard so many times from me: “It’s okay. I’m sorry you don’t feel good,” and she patted my back with her little hands. I wanted the floor to swallow me whole. I didn’t deserve her.

A week later, I heard her leaning over the toilet bowl coughing, and I could tell the cough was fake. I could hear her giggling while she told my husband, “I’m sick, Daddy. Have to throw up, Daddy.”

I sank against the door in the next room. What have I done?

According to NEDA, “Eating disorders often run in families. Current research indicates that there are significant genetic contributions to eating disorders.” There’s a chance Jillian will one day have an eating disorder.

But I’m fighting.

There’s a higher risk for girls who have “cold” mothers, so I smother her with kisses. There’s a higher incidence in girls with fathers who are emotionally or physically absent, so she has lots of daddy-daughter time.

I know in my head I shouldn’t throw up for me, for the health of my teeth, my heart and the lining of my esophagus. But I know in my heart I can’t throw up — for her.

Photo: Klee McMullen