Anyone seen the HBO documentary “Thin”? It isn’t easy to watch the entire thing. I talked with a friend who didn’t understand the women’s’ mentality about thinness. But he is a guy. Men also have anorexia and bulimia but in far fewer numbers. The documentary didn’t show men. I understand their mentality. I fully understand the one exercise where a young woman has to draw her body on a large sheet of paper. Now she draws a very masculine looking body, which I wouldn’t, but the body is nearly twice her size. I suspect mine might be too. I recognized in high school that what I saw in the mirror was not an accurate representation of my body. I swear that mirrors add 20 pounds. I prefer to rely on photographs and plate glass windows for more accurate images.

While I never have starved myself or purged, I do see a very distorted image of my body. In reality, I’m quite thin, and I find it easy to maintain. I wonder if all women do to some extent since the ideal now is very thin. While watching the documentary, I was surprised to see that some of the women didn’t seem any thinner than most actresses. Today’s actresses and models are considered the ideal body types. What message are we sending when the ideal body type is 10-20 pounds too thin?

The documentary also reminded me of a conversation I had with my mother about my grandmother. My mother has always had a weight problem. I remember never wanting to be heavy like my mother. I got lucky—I got my father’s thin genes. My mother doesn’t even have to eat much, so her weight problem is due to other factors (not overeating). My grandmother has always been quite thin. She’s short (5’) and a size 8 usually. My mother was always put on a diet by her mother. She remembers summers where she was only allowed about 500 calories a day and got to 125 pounds at 5’10”. Apparently that wasn’t thin enough for her mother. That’s rail thin for someone so tall. Recently, my grandmother’s advice to her daughter (my mother) was to “just throw up.” I guess that is what she does and has done most of her life. So it wasn’t until my grandmother was 85 that we learned that she has been bulimic all her life. She has quite the appetite. I have no idea how she eats as much as she does. I asked if she often went to the bathroom immediately after eating. Yes. Did she spend a long time in there? Yes. While she didn’t do it after every meal, she did it often enough. I can’t believe that after all those years that no one suspected or became concerned. My grandmother talks about it like it is completely normal.

At 87, my grandmother still worries about her weight. She’s never quite thin enough. When her sister was dying of cancer and got terribly thin, my grandmother started losing weight quickly as well. See, grandma was always the thinnest of all the sisters. So as her sister got thinner and thinner, so did my grandmother. After her sister died, grandma needed to add 15 pounds to her small, thin frame.

Technorati: Thin, body image, anorexia, bulimia