Cultural Challenges to Eating Disorder Recovery
Challenging Cultural Messages
Our culture sends unhealthy messages to the public. We are told to buy things we don’t want or need. We are told to look a certain way which encourages us to buy products and services regardless of health consequences.
We are told to borrow so we can pay for products and services with money we don’t have. We are told what to want and how to look like what someone else wants regardless of our genuine personal values and beliefs.
Vulnerability to Negative Messages
Eventually, if you are vulnerable, lonely, frightened, insecure, laden with self-doubt mixed with naiveté you may succumb to these cultural messages.
If you have an eating disorder, you have succumbed far more than you realize because the eating disorder will create a distortion in your thinking and perception. You will be living a life dictated by cultural messages supported by economics and power rather than by the values of your authentic self.
Eating Disorder Recovery Despite Destructive Messages
Recovery from an eating disorder is difficult, arduous and requires commitment as well as time and resources. Add to that, the great challenge of rising up from under the barrage of cultural forces that encourage eating disorder symptoms, and you get a glimpse of the courage and stability required to get well.
If you are healthy you eat and drink what supports your life. You weigh the amount that allows you to be healthy, flexible, and strong, child bearing and long lived. You wear what feels and looks good to you and does not cause your body harm. You use your resources (like time, money, energy) in ways that sustain your life and do not deplete your reserves or cause you anxiety.
Finally, you invest yourself with full commitment into a life that honors your heart, your soul, your talents and gifts to live your life your way based on your authentic self.
In a life like that, contrary to many cultural dictates to women, an eating disorder cannot exist.
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You are so right, cultural conditioning has so much to do with the way we think and the way we view ourselves. We in India are obsessed with the color of our skin (my last blog post was on this very subject) in more or less the same way that Americans are obsessed about being thin or a certain weight or a certain size. These can indeed be destructive!
Sexy at any Size’s last blog post..Regressive Advertizing: Fair & Lovely!