Our growing culture of disordered eating

How often do you see a mature woman with little of the natural fat that comes with healthy aging? How often do we want to believe they’re just naturally thin? How many women do you know who continue to watch their figures and restrain their appetites? This important Guardian article by Kate Hilpern discusses the recent death of a prominent professor who died of malnutrition while no one noticed that she, like growing numbers of mature women, had been suffering from disordered eating.

A lifetime of denial

On March 20, the eminent academic Rosemary Pope was found dead in her Bournemouth home. She was 49 years old, and weighed just four stone 10lbs... her heart - which, the inquest last week heard, had shrunk to the size of a child's because she had been starving herself for so long - gave out first. Pope's story isn't just tragic, it is also - on the surface, at least - shocking. How could a renowned professor with an international reputation and a PhD in psychology find herself in the grips of a condition usually labelled a young woman's disease?...And didn't anyone - her friends, family or colleagues - notice that this mature, professional woman was starving herself to death?

The reality is that Pope's story is becoming more and more common, with anorexia increasingly affecting older women. Like Pope, many of these women are extroverts who hold down good jobs and manage to survive in a very compromised state for years, even decades. "Ten years ago, there were very few women in their 30s, 40s, 50s and older who were diagnosed with anorexia. That has changed significantly, especially in the past five years," says Susan Ringwood, chief executive of Beat, the national eating disorders charity...

While this rise may be partly due to increased awareness of anorexia across all age groups, experts believe that increasing numbers of young people with anorexia are growing older with the disease, as well as a significant number of women who develop it later in life. Experts blame, at least in part, the increased pressure on older women to stay young....

The article goes on to describe the observations of family, friends and co-workers and how no one responded to the fact she was starving to death.

"Adults with anorexia can, like Rosemary Pope, be emaciated for years, but still function, and other people get used to them being like that," says Ringwood. "Add to this their heightened energy, a very driven personality and the fact that the general public still associates anorexia with adolescents and you can see how it can get missed by others. Even if people do suspect it, they often fear saying the wrong thing, or think that it might actually be cancer." Also significant is the increasingly thin line between disordered eating, which has become normalised among many women, and eating disorders. As one 42-year-old woman with anorexia puts it: "If you see an extremely thin woman on the street, you might think 'anorexic', but put a pushchair in her hands, and you think, 'overworked mum.'" Simpson, who is six stone, thinks her friends would be amazed if they discovered she suffered from anorexia....

Diana Brighouse, 53, a doctor who is married with four children and has had anorexia since she was 16... have various 'rules' about food, like never eating lunch, forbidding various foods, having to exercise a certain amount and so on." Brighouse believes people are remarkably oblivious to her illness. "The vast majority of my friends just think I'm naturally thin. I think that's largely because older women are much more clever about not drawing attention to it. While anorexic girls will cut up their half an apple and make it last a whole meal, older women are much more canny about appearing to have a plateful of food that actually only has 50 calories in it."...

In many cases, however, relations and family members of someone with anorexia are aware, but don't know how to help. Adult anorexics have the added risk of passing their food obsessions on to their children, points out Gura...

It's not because doctors are uncaring but, like the rest of us, they tend to stereotype anorexia as an adolescent problem. One woman who told her doctor she had dietary problems recalls being sent to a homeopath, whose colonic irrigation methods reduced her "to a crisp". Others are given antidepressants... [Click on title to read full article and for a photo of professor Pope.]

The article ends by asking: “Wouldn't it be fitting if Rosemary Pope's legacy was to put these women on the radar in this country and wake us all up to the changing face of anorexia?”