Created from her own struggles with negative body obsession and eating disorders, Sarah Maria has written a book offering insights and information for others who are searching for answers.
Negative Body Obsession
Suite 101: You chose to focus upon negative body image. How come that topic as opposed to having an eating disorder or some other related topic?
Sarah Maria: In my experience, Negative Body Obsession, or NBO, is at the core of many people’s lives, including those with eating disorders. NBO is a cultural epidemic, with an estimated 80-90% of women, and a growing number of men, disliking their physical appearance. Almost everyone with an eating disorder has some form of NBO. Yet, not every person with NBO has an eating disorder. People who have eating disorders can heal much more rapidly and completely when they realize the Negative Body Obsession in their lives and work to eliminate this, instead of being focused exclusively on food.
Yet, there is another group of people who do not have a specific eating disorder, who still dislike their bodies and suffer from negative thoughts, beliefs, and feelings about themselves. They often feel very stuck because traditional eating disorder services seem not to apply specifically to them. I wanted this book to reach those people who might not have an official “disorder” yet are still suffering.
There are also many great and helpful books available that focus exclusively on eating disorders. I wanted to help people who are struggling without duplicating the existing literature. This, combined with a desire to cast as wide a net as possible and help whoever might be struggling with their body, led to the creation of this book.
Sarah's Early Struggle With Food
Suite 101: What about your own struggles - your eating disorders. How long did you struggle with them?
Sarah Maria:My struggle with food began when I was 14 years old, a sophomore in high school. There was a girl in my class who lost a lot of weight between our freshman and sophomore year of school. She was not overweight to begin with, but I remember thinking she looked good, having lost weight. I then remember that she was chosen as the captain of the basketball team. I wanted to be captain and was broken-hearted that I was not chosen. In an instant, I made a devastating connection: she was popular, if I lost weight, I would be popular, too. This realization was almost instantaneous, and not even that conscious. It is only in retrospect that I see it so clearly. Sadly, it turned out that she had anorexia and was practically hospitalized and needed to take time off from school.
Once I made this connection, I decided to go on a 500-calorie-per-day diet to lose weight. I didn’t know anything about nutrition. I just knew I wanted to lose weight. I began waking up at 5:30 am to run, ate 500-calories-per-day, and played sports for two hours in the afternoon. I lost a lot of weight quickly, and since I wasn’t overweight to begin with, I became very thin. I found myself losing energy and slowly isolating myself from all social activity. The most important thing in my life became being thin. When I finally relaxed my diet after a number of months, I found myself binging. I later discovered that this was a most natural by-product of self-starvation. I would binge and then be overwhelmed with fear that I might gain weight. I thought that if I gained weight, I would die. Gaining weight literally made me want to commit suicide. There was nothing worse in the whole world to me at the time.
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