This is an article I found about a Colombian media enterprise, and the title was very provocative but also extremely relevant. There is no direct English translation because it uses a lot of Spanish vocabulary. I did my best to make it as close a translation as possible.
- In t furtherhis article there is a following of young women called Catalina, Daniela and Merari and their personal experiences with their eating disorders and the first image that comes up is of Catalina measuring her wrist every morning with her other hand to see the amount of extra space that she has been able to create she had severe symptoms with running 6km at 4am and going to work out more at 5am and then not having eaten properly the night before. While she was in line at the school cafeteria, she heard some of her classmates talking about another girl and saying she got fat during the break because she had let herself go; even though this wasn’t a comment about Catalina per se, she took it to heart. After this, she starts to open up Instagram and starts seeing what is out there today, which are unreal bodies, comments, and likes that have become a form of currency, and through all of this, her illness continues to grow and become stronger.
- In Colombia, one out of 5 young people have symptoms of Ed’s as part of their day-to-day lives, and 8 out of ten never make it to a doctor’s office to get help. They call it a small epidemic because in Colombia, there is a belief that it is a stubborn childhood thing.
- For years we have been told that ED’s have nothing to do with vanity, but in reality we have to start questioning this. It is not vanity of the individual, but the author believes that it is collective vanity which has been fabricated through word of mouth but also through algorithms, publications, and comments that talk about the ideal body, which is a form of romanticizing the extreme thinness that we are seeing today. It is not just teenagers wanting to fit in; it is a world where this has become the standard to follow. Society has taught us that there is no room for bodies that look different.
- Daniela is a 23-year-old woman, and she lived the struggle because she knew most of the pictures and media out there were edited. However, she still felt she needed to meet that standard to have any worth as an individual (why is our body or our appearance part of our worth?). Merari, who is 24, remembers that at age 12, a family member, after commenting on her appearance, recommended she have a couple of cosmetic procedures done, and that she was helped at different medical institutions while she was expecting to receive help. Their concern was just your fat, even though it was a much greater problem, and this is a form of violence (however, this is something that we have normalized in Colombia; everyone has an opinion and they feel it is their job to share it; no one can just stay quiet). (Even if they think they are being nice, I had this experience when I was visiting a friend in Barranquilla, where I had never been, but we went to an event where we ran into a lot of people and friends of her mom’s, and their reaction was to tell her how thin she looked, that she looked amazing, and I could tell she felt uncomfortable; she did not want people to comment on her body, but it is our normal no matter how much we try to change it. My question is: will there ever be a point when people no longer comment on others’ bodies, or is that an impossible hope?
- The numbers about how little information is out there can be seen in the fact that less than 20% of young people who suffer through symptoms get specialized treatment. A nutritionist consultation is around 150,000 pesos, and one with a psychiatrist is 300,000; for people who actually make it out of this illness, it is a luxury. Daniela speaks about how she looked for help after having a health scare at her university but had to leave this behind because the therapy treatments were just too expensive.
- There is a law in Colombia called 2560 however there are some gaps that include this, this is a law that tries to help with mental health services however there is no direct mention of eating disorders and the help that is needed for this, there needs to be a specific focus on this (as I have said in other blog posts the treatment is the same one they give alcoholics and drug adicts) Paola who is a nutritionist said that the problem is not just social media but the fact that ones entire life is made to loose weight if you eyxcersice it is to loose weight, if you eat healthy it is to loose weight. We have made well-being an obsession about a size, and this makes it easier for people to fall into eating disorder issues. The mirror becomes an enemy that always shows us where we are not good enough, and negative thoughts about one’s body are like social media notifications that can’t be turned off. The algorithm is not your friend” (When interviewing a young girl from Colombia who is 23, she feels as if it is based on what side of the algorithm you are in and how you feed it because she feels as if her algorithm is about accepting your body, but there are other extremes; this is something to look into as well).
- One of the main questions that is posed on the inside of the article is the fact that we have the stats, we have the numbers, and the possible effects it might have on other people; however, we still try to minimize it by saying it’s life and it’s all vanity, but narratives and messages that we send out into the world such as this make things much worse and give out a message of people not needing help.
- A lot of people assume this is something that happens in one’s teenage years. It is something people think they will grow out of; however, this is not reality at all because we have created “an entire system that is obsessed culturally with impossible standards and an appearance of trends that ends up being an illness.” This leads us to ask: if we deleted a picture on Instagram because it didn’t fit the standard, we should take care of our brain the same way we take care of our size.
- The toxic fitness culture (this is a huge issue in Colombia and you can see it just by speaking to normal people it is normal for a child to do more than 3 hours of exercise a day because there is the feeding of the line that you always have to keep your body moving) this is a game no one will ever win because you are always chasing the imaginary perfect body however even though this is an issue and people understand this there is the fact that the health cares system in Colombia does not have prevention campaigns, no easy way to get early diagnosis and no teams that work in interdisciplinary ways. What should be a right to health care is turned into a luxury (this is what I have been talking about in my positionality statement because even though I have suffered with my body image and eating disorders, I have had access to pay for all the different treatments and programs, which is not something everyone has access to, and there should be different forms to make this accessible, such as it is in other countries of doctors I have spoken to).
- During this article, at the end, different things are spoken about; for example, there is the relationship between the collective and the intimate, and this is what truly makes everything uncomfortable, such as the fact that Catalina is still measuring her wrists. Daniela still remembers having passed out in the middle of her university, and Merari is still pissed off at the doctors who did not listen to her, and what is scary is that these are not rare cases; there are many more. The writer of this article wrote at the end that she was a victim of an ED, and while she understands that it’s an illness, she makes note of the fact that it is born out of vanity of wanting to fit into the standard. It is a trap to try to find the impossible.
This article really makes me think because we treat it as isolated incidents, but in reality the pressure around the body in Colombia is very strong. It is not easy to fight against, given that we are all put into this little hamster wheel where we are trying to fit into a specific body size and fit in. – This is my own experience, but I always tried to fit into the society of my town in Medellin, and I never truly could. It was a mess for my self-esteem because I was always looked at as different, but that difference is seen as bad, and in reality it is just different. Everyone tries to mask something about themselves, which is important to consider as we look at how people can break out of the mold without feeling like failures. (This is not a part of my investigation; it is just a thought that came to mind while I was reading this article).
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