Eating disorders: ‘We have created a society of people who are unable to eat normally’

The UK is facing a double-barrelled health crisis. It manifests itself through weight and food, but conceals a much darker, underlying problem. Six per cent of adults have a so-called “eating disorder” (such as anorexia or bulimia). At the other end of the spectrum, 29 per cent of adults and 20 per cent of children are obese. But whether you’re about to die from malnutrition or morbid obesity, whether you’re at one end of the scale (and, indeed, scales) or the other, you are suffering from a form of disordered or anomic eating.

Adrian Brown is a specialist dietician and a research fellow at the Centre for Obesity Research, University College London. Brown helps patients who are obese and overweight make lifestyle changes to manage their body weight. This is called “body weight regulation”. Brown says 11 per cent of adolescents have “a clinically significant eating disorder”, whilst 40 per cent of UK teenage girls meet the criteria for “disordered eating”; they may not have a full-blown eating disorder, per se, but their relationship with food, weight and their bodies is difficult and dysfunctional.

All these statistics present a growing population of young people who use food (bingeing, restricting, purging) to express something about themselves. These behaviours with food are influenced or caused by a number of underlying different factors (psychological, social, familial, environmental, genetic, predisposition and more). Food becomes an exercise in distraction, eclipsing whatever is causing disordered behaviour. The consequent loss or gain of weight is a visible expression of deeper issues.