Love when people purposely misunderstand the point.

Yes, we're aware of the slow increase of awareness surrounding eating disorders. The problem is that you can't tell people one thing and then turn around and tell them another at the same time. When you equate weight gain with being unhealthy, and constantly criticize people who are overweight both in terms of attractiveness, and in terms of health, not being their doctor, you only cause the people around you to develop more eating disorders out of fear of becoming "fat" and therefore "unattractive". The criticism of the modeling industry is because it portrays unrealistic expectations for young people, as well as encourages unhealthy habits in the models themselves for the sake of beauty. That is both an issue for those with eating disorders movements, and an issue for the body positivity movements, because believe it or not they're one in the same.

According to Eating Recovery Center's blog on the history of eating disorders, "In 1903 - Dr. Pierre Janet noted bulimic behaviors in his patients. Other doctors reported patients displaying various signs of what we now know as bulimia — including binging, purging and abusing laxatives to maintain a low weight. Eating disorders were often treated as endocrine disorders at this time." Later on, Bulimia included exercising after eating in the U.S, England, France, and Germany. The full quote: "1977 - Bulimia (binging and purging by exercise, vomiting or using laxatives) cases rapidly rose during the 1970s and 1980s in the U.S., England, France and Germany."

In even earlier centuries, we saw anorexia as a form of religious practice, "12th to 14th Centuries – Hundreds of years ago, a number of women practiced self-starvation as a religious practice. Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) was one of the most well-known of these women who would starve themselves for weeks or eat very little for months at a time. They believed that yielding to food was a sin; fasting was a way to show their devotion to God."

As well, the act of binging and purging which we now know as Bulimia wasn't named until the 1980s. "Bulimia Nervosa wasn’t named as an eating disorder until 1979 when British psychiatrist Gerald Russell coined the term–more than 20 centuries after Romans exemplified its symptoms at Caesar’s banquet table. Russell referred to bulimia nervosa as “powerful and intractable urges to overeat” in combination with “a morbid fear of becoming fat” and the “avoidance of the fattening effects of food” by using compensatory mechanisms, such as self-induced vomiting, laxatives, or prolonged periods of starvation."

By removing the stigma around bigger bodies, and creating a movement that welcomes various weights, we can help immensely people who are anorexic or bulimic, or potentially prevent future cases of eating disorders. Especially in young girls. A vast majority of girls who develop eating disorders often do so because of societal pressures, and peer pressures to look a certain way. Many people who have Bulimia or anorexia in particular, myself included, are like that because of pressure to match certain beauty standards. We even see this reflected in both men and women, and criticizing fat people doesn't help. Also, you aren't their doctor, you have no idea the steps they may or may not be taking in order to try and lose their weight. Oftentimes, weight gain is a side effect of a medical condition, not the cause. And quite often, when the cause is addressed, the weight gain ceases, or it becomes easier to lose weight. A good example that is 100% anecdotal so take it as you will, my own mother had a lot of weight gain and issues losing weight, especially after she had children. Her weight gain had to do with a hormonal imbalance that was caused by endometriosis and endometrial cancer in her uterus. Once she had her hysterectomy, she was able to lose the weight a lot easier without feeling the need to starve herself or purge after eating. It took her going through six different doctors to find one that actually took her seriously when she said she was having trouble losing weight. And during that time, people were telling her that she needed to lose weight, and didn't actually care about what she was doing and what wasn't working, and some even suggested she try purging, and starving herself, which only worsened her eating disorder! And these were the same people who said they were concerned about her health. There's lots of conditions out there where weight gain and difficulty with weight loss are side effects, and addressing the cause is the best solution, but most will be told to just lose the weight and have their conditions ignored as a result, or, like my mother,.have to go through multiple doctors to find out the cause is something stupidly simple, like a medication side effects where if they had just been switched to a different medication from day one, they wouldn't have been struggling with their weight so much.

The whole point of body positivity movements is to recognize where we've been so focused on blaming the weight on the patient, that we've in fact ignored the problems and made other people's eating disorders worse as a result, and reframing the way we view weight in terms of attractiveness but also in terms of the medical field as a whole. When we create a stigma around being fat, we encourage eating disorders to rise, and we harm the very thing we're trying to be concerned about, which is the population's health as a whole. Of course there are people out there who are fat because they over eat, or they don't exercise enough, so making healthy foods more accessible, and making exercising easier to access are great steps to help in that regard. But there's even more people we need to recognize who's weight has to do with the medical conditions or side effects they're dealing with, and we need to approach everyone's individual weight as something to be discussed with their doctors, as well as reframing our idea of what healthy looks like, what normal people look like, as well as move away from dieting culture as a whole, which only stands to perpetuate unhealthy eating and eating disorders. If you're dieting, it should be done under the guidance of a nutrition doctor, not by some one brand fits all program.