Top 100 Quotes About Eating Disorders
#1. Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn't obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin.
Mary Pipher
#2. American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls' vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior.
Peggy Orenstein
#4. No wonder there are so many people with eating disorders.It's like this diet plan is being administered by the Gestapo.
Helen Argiro
#5. To anyone who thinks eating disorders are something rich, bored white girls do to get attention, I bid you bite me. I have frequent, intense, inappropriate outbursts of anger over the lies little girls are told about what is beautiful.
Stacy Pershall
#6. Fooling the body into thinking it's full on only a thousand calories can be difficult. The trick is to chew the food until it's pretty much liquid. This way, vomiting after burns less
J. Matthew Nespoli
#7. The more people talk about eating disorders, the more people get the real story about what they're like.
Scarlett Pomers
#9. Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses, not lifestyle choices.
Demi Lovato
#10. Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.
Germaine Greer
#11. Food can become such a point of anxiety - not because it's food, but just because you have anxiety. That's how eating disorders develop.
Vanessa Carlton
#12. Your lowest moment and life can be your best if you survive it and learn from it
Brian Cuban
#13. A look of interest, or perhaps doubt, came across his face. "Well," he said, "I'm sure your bulimia was fulfilling some need.
Kathryn Hansen
#14. The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
Marya Hornbacher
#15. During the investigation evidence of the vulnerability of women in the modelling profession was startling and models are at high risk of eating disorders.
Denise Kingsmill, Baroness Kingsmill
#16. All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.
Marya Hornbacher
#19. Eating disorders are shrouded in secrecy, and there are so many things I felt very ashamed of that I could never talk about. Even though I have fully recovered, there were still things that I needed to go through again and work through.
Portia De Rossi
#20. I don't believe you have to have eating disorders and mental illness to screw up.
Kirstie Alley
#21. I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#22. My words of encouragement for teen girls suffering with eating disorders, self-harm, anything ... is to get help. It's the most important thing you can do for yourself, and it can change your life and potentially save your life.
Demi Lovato
#23. As the helpless vampire watched the transformation, it started screaming. It was still screaming when his rows of razor sharp teeth sank into its throat.
Alan Kinross
#24. I would not encourage you to go through the sweat, blood, and tears of the recovery process only to reach some kind of mediocre state where you were just 'managing' the illness. It is possible to live without Ed.
Jenni Schaefer
#25. Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can't have it. (p. 163)
Geneen Roth
#26. I knit the afternoon away. I knit reasons for Elijah to come back. I knit apologies for Emma. I knit angry knots and slipped stitches for every mistake I ever made, and I knit wet, swollen stitches that look awful. I knit the sun down.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#27. Because I make films about eating disorders and sexual assault, people always come up to me and are like, "Are you okay?" like I'm a broken-down shell of a woman.
Jessie Kahnweiler
#28. Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn't sick; I was strong.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#29. Eating disorders, body dysmorphia and a general dissatisfaction with one's life and body seems to ail too many young people.
Carre Otis
#32. I don't just use yarn from a store. I buy old sweaters from consignment shops. The older the better, and unravel them. There are countries of women in this scarf/shawl/blanket. Soon it will be big enough to keep me warm.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#33. Eating disorders can have serious medical and psychological consequences which, left unchecked, can kill. Parents should address this issue and ask their children to discuss how they feel about themselves.
Tipper Gore
#34. In this business, there is an insane amount of pressure, spoken and unspoken, to be thin. If you look at some of the television shows, eating disorders become like a competitive thing.
Kim Raver
#35. Looking to biology to explain the low prevalence of eating disorders among men is like looking to genetics to explain why nonsmokers do not get lung cancer as often as smokers.
Susan Bordo
#36. The stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking didn't make her skinny, it made her cry.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#37. Killing yourself slowly is still killing yourself. Wanting to die is not the same as wanting to come home. Recovery is hard work. Not wanting to die is hard work.
Blythe Baird
#38. What was wrong with me? Why could I not just flip the switch and see all the brightness ahead if only I chose the correct path? Or rather, why could I see the correct path but not choose to tread upon it?
Hanne Arts
#39. Her behaviors turn her psychic pain, which she fears is not legitimate, into physical pain, which is indisputably real.
Sheila M. Reindl
#40. I need to finish this scarf/shawl/blanket thing so I can start something for Emma- a hat, maybe, or a sweater for her stuffed elephant.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#41. If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.
Naomi Wolf
#42. If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.
Bethany Pierce
#43. Eating disorders are like a gun that's formed by genetics, loaded by a culture and family ideals, and triggered by unbearable distress.
Aimee Liu
#44. Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images.
Cheri K. Erdman
#45. Eating disorders are usually nothing to do with food. Parents need to be with their child to see them through it. All the therapists in the world can't help if the parents aren't present, loving, and proactive.
Olivia Newton-John
#46. We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
Marya Hornbacher
#47. It's 2009, a Thursday night in September, and I've stopped looking for stars in the Los Angeles sky. I settle instead for the ones I see in my head when I go three or four days without eating. Same difference.
Kris Kidd
#48. Evidently, women have eating disorders, men have sex addiction. I suppose both share the same obsession: women's bodies.
Neil Strauss
#49. You hurt her by starving yourself, you hurt her with your lies, and by fighting everybody who tries to help you. Emma can only sleep a couple of hours a night now. She's haunted by nightmares of monsters that eat our whole family. They eat us slowly, she says, so we can feel their sharp teeth.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#50. I drift into the armpits of strangers, tasting their manic salt, and sleep to forget everything.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#51. So there you have it
my sorry tale. That's how something I though I controlled ended up controlling me.
Sarah Darer Littman
#52. Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.
Geneen Roth
#54. One of the most dangerous myths surrounding eating disorders is that they are a life sentence.
Lynn Crilly
#55. You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won't discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself. (p. 84)
Geneen Roth
#56. Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
Marya Hornbacher
#57. I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy ...
Laurie Halse Anderson
#58. I have a history of eating disorders but, as a mother, you think of being an example to your child. I'm so much more balanced than I was.
Geri Halliwell
#59. What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?
Amy Reed
#60. Our society's strong emphasis on dieting and self-image can sometimes lead to eating disorders. We know that more than 5 million Americans suffer from eating disorders, most of them young women.
Tipper Gore
#61. A bag of bones can slip through small cracks in a crowd effortlessly.
Kris Kidd
#62. Counting calories is not the answer, because eating is not the problem.
Anita Johnston
#63. Eating, drinking, and depression disorders are really thinking disorders.
Byron Katie
#65. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
Naomi Wolf
#66. There's a fine line between self-preservation and mummification.
Mik Everett
#67. Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they're] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.
Gloria Steinem
#68. Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.
Naomi Wolf
#69. I want them [people] to feel open and comfortable to share the messy, dirty, shameful parts of themselves. Those are the parts I wanna see. And that eating disorders aren't just about "being thin."
Jessie Kahnweiler
#70. From the newsstands a dozen models smiled up at her from a dozen magazine covers, smiled in thin-faced, high-cheekboned agreement to Kessa's new discovery. They knew the secret too. They knew thin was good, thin was strong; thin was safe.
Steven Levenkron
#71. We are all a collection of lost causes, stashed here so no one has to see just how wounded we are.
Meg Haston
#72. To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself.
Simone De Beauvoir
#73. Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.
Naomi Wolf
#74. The reason most people get eating disorders is because they want to be skinny, but they do it stupidly, and they stop eating completely - nobody knows anything about nutrition or exercise. I think it should be a separate subject in school.
Kathryn Prescott
#75. Having struggled with food issues and eating disorders myself, particularly when I was younger, I've long been interested in using it within my books.
Jane Green
#76. I failed eating, failed drinking, failed not cutting myself into shreds. Failed friendship. Failed sisterhood and daughterhood. Failed mirrors and scales and phone calls. Good thing I'm stable.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#77. I'm a food addict. I've tried everything- Weight Watchers, The South Beach, raw food, Atkins, low-fat diets. Nothing works for me." I looked at him and said, "Have you tried suffering?" He laughed out loud, as if I was joking. I wasn't joking.
Frederick Woolverton
#78. You're not dead, but you're not alive, either. You're a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You're a ghost with a beating heart. Soon you'll cross the border and be with me. I'm so stoked. I miss you wicked.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#80. Anorexia is, without doubt, a serious eating disorder, but there is a hell of a lot of mainstream disordered eating going on out there.
Emma Woolf
#81. I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You're dying.
Marya Hornbacher
#82. Maybe we choose to stay in a constant state of ignorance as a protective instinct - maybe I was just in denial. I just don't get how you can be completely in love with someone one day, and then all of a sudden you just aren't. I will never forget that day ... the day where I became numb.
Piper Caleb
#83. As the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, I represent the designers. And while we can by no means take the blame for eating disorders, we can play our part in addressing this important issue.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#84. Somewhere I read that anorexia recovery is more painful for the sufferer than actively engaging in the eating disordered behaviours
Nancy Tucker
#85. I suffered from eating disorders when I was just a kid. I did not like me or the way I looked. But back then, you could not tell anyone.
Richard Simmons
#86. I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame. I have an eating disorder.
Jena Morrow
#87. Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders.
Karen Armstrong
#88. Eating is not a crime. It's not a moral issue. It's normal. It's enjoyable. It just is.
Carrie Arnold
#89. There have been so many stories about alcoholism and drugs. Eating disorders are also a form of abuse, but rarely a theme in feature films that aren't documentaries.
Sanna Lenken
#90. I again invoke my favorite analogy for eating disorders: abusive lovers. And what do you do when someone is in an abusive relationship? You don't allow visitation rights, weekly dates. You don't put them in the vicinity of or let the abuser flirt with them. You keep them the fuck away.
Kelsey Osgood
#91. I don't need anyone else to distract me from myself anymore,
like I always thought I would.
Charlotte Eriksson
#92. To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.
Naomi Wolf
#93. If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.
Brene Brown
#94. Part of treatment for drugs and alcohol is you abstain from these, but with eating disorders you can't abstain from food so the treatment is longer than drugs and alcohol.
Carre Otis
#95. You have a history of starving yourself," he says gently.
I lift my head. I meet his gaze. "I have a history that I don't like to talk about.
Stephanie Kuehn
#97. No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.
Naomi Wolf
#98. I've memorized the best angles in the bathroom mirror from which to see how badly I've disintegrated. I truly do go from sixty to zero.
Kris Kidd
#99. It's funny. When we first started hanging out I didn't want Ashley to think I was a pig, so I was careful not to eat too much in front of her ... Now, I don't even think about it.
Natasha Friend
#100. It's hard with ballet because your aesthetic really is important. It's different from acting and from film. Nobody wants to watch somebody who is sickly thin. And it's interesting because I have danced with people who are ill, have eating disorders, and a light goes off within them.
Amanda Schull
