This upcoming week is National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Often, themed awareness weeks can have a tendency to be overlooked, and though they serve a purpose to be educational, there may still be targets that are unreached or unclear. With something as serious and imminent as eating disorders, I can only hope that this serves as some small effort to help people understand more about the epidemic not only of eating disorders in our country, but also the negative stigma attached to it that we should be making a concerted effort to try and get rid of.

What this sort of awareness means is not simply to try and understand what it is to have an eating disorder (which may not be fully possible for those of us who have never experienced it), but what to look for, as eating disorders aren't always so easily recognized. The three most common are anorexia nervosa (aggressive limitation of food consumption or self-starvation), bulimia nervosa (binge-eating followed by forced vomiting), and binge eating disorder (loss of control of food consumption limit).

We often may think only to look out for dramatic weight loss and specifically noticing someone is not eating, but there are a variety of other signs that may make it more helpful to look out for, such as drastic weight changes, compulsory eating habits (both overeating and fasting), ritualistic eating patterns (i.e., cutting up food very small and pushing it around their plate, hiding food, counting how many times they chew), and general signs of depression.

It is important to remember that anyone can have an eating disorder -- any age, any gender (both binaries and non-binaries) -- and that eating disorders are mental illnesses. It's not a matter of just someone not liking their weight, rather it is a series of irregular hormone functions or imbalances in the same way that any other mental illness functions. While issues of self-esteem and pressures in an individual's environment are contributing factors, eating disorders, at their core, are illnesses, and it is our responsibility to understand them and treat them with the same level of seriousness and compassion that we would any other illness.

No one chooses to have an eating disorder, and when we stigmatize them, we can decrease the chances of someone being able to seek help with their eating disorder. That is why this week, our awareness, attention, and education to this epidemic are especially important. Of course past week, we should be continuing our support to those suffering from eating disorders.

This week at Franklin & Marshall, Kappa Delta and Active Minds will be collaborating in efforts in supporting National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. For more information, both groups will be tabling in Steinman College Center for the week.

For more information on eating disorders and how to help:

Eating Disorder Hope

National Eating Disorders

Help Guide