ED's Are An Illness.

“Usually when we think about violence, we think about interpersonal forms of violence, such as attempted murder or homicide, assault and battery, rape and sexual assault, robbery, kidnapping, and torture. Rarely do we think of suicide, anorexia, and self-flagellation, or of verbal abuse, threats, and intimidation as the forms of interpersonal violence. More significantly, we usually ignore, deny or accept other forms of institutional and structural violence that provide context of most of the personal violence that occurs.”

— Gregg L. Barak, Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding, Page 4.





"For far too long, people suffering from this disorder have had to deal with the theory that this is all societal, that somehow they choose to have anorexia, or parents have had to deal with the blame placed on them because somehow their parenting style caused this. Now, they know that they really need to go against the tide of their biology to overcome this."

— Cynthia Bulik





"Genes load the gun, and environment pulls the trigger. These people who are genetically disposed to anorexia nervosa may be more sensitive to those environmental triggers, like dieting after seeing a fashion magazine."

— Cynthia M. Bulik





"It disturbs me how aggressively some of these web sites promote anorexia as a lifestyle choice, and how intricately they scheme to subvert the efforts of families and treatment providers trying to save the lives of those with anorexia ... Press coverage of these sites often completely ignores the reality that anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness – up to 20%. This is a life and death matter that families and individuals facing eating disorders must recognize."

— PR Newswire





“Lori is the perfect example of how you can't tell someone walking down the street has bulimia. She doesn't look like she has any problem at all, and that is what most look like.”

— Laurel Guccione





"When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look. When a woman gets up people look, then if they like what they see, they listen."

— Pauline Frederick





"If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community."

— Unknown





"You know as well as I do it's not about what you look like, or your job, or how successful you are. It's about having people in your life that you love and who love you... that's all that matters."

— Meredith Grey (Grey’s Anatomy)





"The stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking didn't make her skinny, it made her cry."

— Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)





"By very slow degrees, and with frequent relapses, that alarmed and grieved my friend, I recovered."

— Mary Shelley (from Frankenstein)





"The young man punched my statistics into his keyboard and pinched my arm with clippers wired to the testing machine. In a moment, the computer spit out my results. "Only ten percent body fat! Unbelievably healthy. The average for a woman your age is twenty-five percent. Fantastic! You're this week's blue ribbon winner."
I stared at him in disbelief. Winner? Healthy? Fantastic? I glanced around at the other customers in the store, some of whom had congregated to watch my testing, and I felt embarrassed by his praise. And then I felt furious. Furious at this man and at the society that programmed him for their ignorant approbation of my illness and suffering.
"I am dying of anorexia," I whispered. "Don't congratulate me."

— From the poignant essay, "The Body Politic", by Abra Fortune Chernik; in Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, edited by Barbara Findlan; Seal Press, 1995





"To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in one's self."

— Simone de Beauvoir