Eating disorders quietly plague black communities

Although white women were once thought to be the sole group battling eating disorders, over the past few years, reports of eating disorders among minorities — particularly African-Americans — have increased. Stephanie Covington Armstrong, an African-American woman, shares her struggles with bulimia with theGrio. Raised in Brooklyn, NY, Covington said she grew up poor and dealt with a series of issues that impacted her childhood, including poor eating habits, low self-esteem, and rape. She believes these traumas led to her eating disorder. “I started thinking that something was wrong with me… that I wasn’t lovable… and that I was damaged,” she said. “So the way that I was able to kind of calm those fears was with food. My eating would push down all of those fears, and my eating disorder pushed over the edge.” Covington emphasized that the eating disorder gradually took over her entire life. “My eating disorder was like a slow build,” she said. “I definitely had issues with food and disordered eating. I dieted. I exercised. I took laxatives, Dexatrim, slim fast, but I was never overweight. I just always wanted to have some control around my food.” At the height of her struggle, she said she suffered in isolation and silence because she felt ashamed of not living up to the “strong black woman” archetype. “I think that in the African-American community secrets are normal,” she said. “I was told that African-Americans don’t have eating disorders and I had family members and friends who would say to me ‘just go to church’ or ‘just don’t talk about it.’” This advice made Covington’s disorder worse. “It was really isolating because I didn’t feel that I could go to anyone to talk about it, and I think that really contributed to my keeping it closeted.” Before she could heal, Covington realized that she had to step outside of her fear of revealing her illness to the African-American community. She finally sought help and recovered with therapy and with the help of the National Eating Disorders Association. There is also this Clementine eating disorder treatment program for adolescents in St Louis. As she sought help, she wrote a book about her experiences to help others — particularly African-Americans — who were also struggling with eating disorders. “I had nowhere to go because no one had ever written about black girls having issues with food, so I felt like I had to write my [own] book,” she said. After releasing her book called Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat, Covington said that numerous African-Americans contacted her through her website to seek advice about their personal struggle with eating disorders. Additionally, many thanked her for sharing her story. “People whom I have known for years — like my best friend’s sister and my friends — opened up to me that they had had eating disorders for years,” she said. “I get so many stories and a lot of them coming from African-Americans.” Dr. Ira Sacker, who is an eating disorders specialist and visiting professor at the Langone New York University Hospital and Medical Center, said that he has seen people of every age and race suffering with eating disorders. “Eating disorders do not discriminate. They affect all cultures, genders, socioeconomic groups and ages,” Dr. Sacker told theGrio. “Eating disorders are a spectrum from anorexia nervosa on one end to binge eating and compulsive overeating disorders on the other end.” Sacker, who authored the book Dying to be Thin and more recently, Regaining Your Self: Understanding and Conquering the Eating Disorder Identity, said that the number of those suffering from eating disorders has increased exponentially. “It used to be 20 females to one male, but now it is approximately six females to one male,” he said. “Eating disorders have the greatest morbidity and mortality of all mental disorders.” Though relatively little research has been conducted on eating disorders among different ethnicities, National Eating Disorders Association Chief Executive Officer Lynn Grefe said that the research that exists shows that minorities have eating disorders at almost the same rate as whites. “I’m frustrated, because we know that minority populations have eating disorders, and we know that they basically have them at the same rate as the Caucasian population,” Grefe said. “However, they are under-reported and they are under-diagnosed. So why is it that we just can’t get them to come forward?” Grefe said that the reports show that people are embarrassed and feel that eating disorders do not exist in their particular culture and, as such, cannot broach the topic. “However, it’s sad,” Grefe said, “because they are not getting diagnosed, and therefore, they’re not getting the help that they need.” Additionally, Grefe said that cost is another limitation to reaching out for help. Many African-Americans are unable to afford treatment for their eating disorder without insurance. Since many minorities — especially African-Americans — are not seeking help for their eating disorders, the exact statistics on the prevalence of eating disorders are limited. “Our numbers are almost nonexistent,” Grefe said. “I’m not sure why no one is really looking into this and it concerns us greatly, because we hear it through the grape vine and we hear it through our national help line that minorities have eating disorders.” Within the last few years, some research has actually revealed that more African-Americans, specifically, suffer from bulimia than whites. In 2009, economists conducted a research study over ten years involving more than 2,300 school-age girls in California, Ohio and Washington, D.C. During the study, researchers interviewed the nine and ten-year-old girls annually about their eating habits, body image, and psychological issues, such as depression. At the end of the study, results revealed that the black teenagers were 50 percent more likely than white teenagers to exhibit bulimic behavior, such as binging and purging. Additionally, teens from low-income families were 153 percent more likely to be bulimic than girls from wealthy families. “Although anorexia is more prone toward the Caucasian race for whatever reason, we do know that blacks have binging disorders; we know that they have bulimia; we know that that they are using laxatives, and doing unhealthy behaviors,” Grefe said. Twelve-year-old dancer Eden Sannaa Duncan-Smith told theGrio that she has noticed her African-American friends developing eating disorders. “There are many gymnasts at my school and sometimes they think that they are not skinny enough, so they stop,” Duncan-Smith said. “They don’t eat in public, or they just don’t eat at all and they get really pale after a while. They do this so that they can be skinnier, but they are not really fat at all. I just think it’s amazing how children my age are thinking about how they look at such a young age.” She also emphasized that many of her African-American peers have low self-esteem. “They are the ones that are insecure a lot,” she said. “There are girls at my school who are very insecure, because others tell them that they are not good enough, and they really take that to heart. The African-Americans especially take it to heart since they are always being told how people in their past weren’t good enough.” African-American women are not the only ones who suffer from eating disorders, experts say, men—particularly African-Americans— do also. Yet, many men and boys do not seek treatment options for eating disorders because they do not want to be categorized as having a “woman’s disease.” Dr. Barbara Kent Lawrence has researched and written two books on eating disorders titled The Hungry I: A Work Book for Partners of Men with Eating Disorders and Bitter Ice: A Memoir of Love, Food, and Obsession. From her research, she has found that boys and men — particularly African-American men — often get drawn into eating disorders through athletics. (more…)

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