How some say a ‘culture of perfection’ has created a breeding ground for eating

Estimated read time: 11-12 minutes

SALT LAKE CITY — When employees at a local eating disorder clinic asked a teenage resident why she was refusing to eat, the teen lifted up her shirt and pointed at her stomach.

“I would rather die than have tummy rolls,” she said.

Christine Parks, a care technician who witnessed the interaction at Utah’s Center for Change, has gone through recovery for eating disorders and felt flooded with emotion — and protectiveness.

She knew that the girl’s statement was not an exaggeration. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, and they are impacting teenage girls now more than ever.

Experts say that since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there have been documented increases in eating disorders in the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe and the Middle East.

According to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last week, emergency room visits for eating disorders doubled among 12- to 17-year-old girls nationwide since the pandemic began. And those are just the cases that are life-threatening enough to warrant emergency admission during a pandemic.

The National Eating Disorders Association has reported a 107% increase in calls to their help line since March 2020.

Researchers have found a number of potential reasons for the growing number of eating disorder cases, including having to eat meals in front of others, having less-structured meal times, exercising at home using videos on social media and apps, video conferencing and increases in stress levels.

Multiple studies have shown that the heightened attention to weight gain on social media during lockdown led people to increase their physical activity to an excessive level out of fear. One 2021 study from the University of Connecticut Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that over 50% of teenagers saw social media content that stigmatized weight gain during that time period.

Although no organizations are quantifying exactly how many eating disorder cases there are in Utah, the demand for treatment has skyrocketed since 2020.

“Every person I know is full or has a waitlist and has closed their waitlists, including dietitians and people working at hospitals. I have colleagues who prefer not to treat eating disorders, and it’s not an option anymore,” said Dr. Corinne Hannan, a psychologist specializing in eating disorders and assistant clinical professor at Brigham Young University.

“From my chair, it’s not showing any decline. Quite the opposite,” she added.

A culture of perfection

When a former college track athlete, who asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, arrived at the Utah university a couple of years ago, she noticed a pattern in the people around her that she said she didn’t see nearly as often in her home state.

She said it was completely normal for her friends and teammates to eat foods they deemed unhealthy or fattening and then compensate by “running it off” for miles and miles or exercising excessively. In fact, she said this behavior was rewarded and encouraged. She said her coach at the time even told her to lose 3 to 5 pounds, even though she was regularly exercising and lifting weights.

Excessive or compulsive exercise as a form of purging is also known as anorexia athletica or exercise bulimia, but it is not a recognized clinical eating disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. However, the National Eating Disorder Association website states that compulsive exercise can be a symptom of disordered eating or a recognized eating disorder, and the symptom itself can lead to bone density loss, loss of menstrual cycle in women, and other severe medical conditions, some of which can be life-threatening.

Hannan explained that it was impossible to find data on how many Utahns are dealing with eating disorders because the data does not exist. There’s not enough research being done and not enough funding for researchers to pursue it.

The former athlete’s mother, Michelle, who runs an international Facebook group for family members of people with eating disorders, expressed that another problem gathering this data is that everyone has different definitions of what recovery means. So local treatment centers, which go largely unregulated, might not report accurate recovery rates.

Every person interviewed for this story mentioned a culture of toxic perfectionism that applies to appearance.

Hannan speculated that the high rates of perfectionism she sees in clients and students in Utah occur because of an association with physical perfection and religious…