Your Ariana Grande & eating disorder questions answered

First question is a great one as far as it relates to all this Ariana discourse, but good general awareness question too.

How do you determine if someone actually has an eating disorder? Is being underweight enough to call it an eating disorder? It is not.

And there's a variety of reasons why.

One, when we look at the DSM-5, which is where we find the diagnostic criteria for eating disorders, weight can be a factor.

Sometimes it isn't a factor at all.

We have to remember that across the population of people with eating disorders, which as far as we know is a little over a million in Australia, only 3% to 4% of that overall population are medically underweight.

So we are really putting a lot of emphasis on one potential presentation, one potential symptom, but eating disorders don't always come with physical symptoms.

They don't always come with a physical presentation.

You can have somebody who's engaging in restriction, who is engaging in really, really dangerous behaviours.

And you would have absolutely no indication on how they appear.

And we have to remember as well, that is particularly important to distinguish that from all this online chatter because they are mental illnesses and we are hyper fixating on one potential physical symptom of someone who hasn't even come out and said they have an eating disorder, which is the other part of this.

There are so many reasons why somebody might present in a body similar to Ariana's that has nothing to do with an eating disorder, Crohn's disease, gastroparesis.

I could go on and on and on.

Terminal illnesses.

It is true that there are a multitude of reasons why somebody might appear to be in a body which people think is underweight or undernourished.

And to say that you absolutely can say from looking at somebody that they have an eating disorder is to discount all of those other illnesses, all of those other experiences.

And we tend to really only do it to women.

So no, it's not enough.

What I want to see the conversation move towards is, okay, let's have a wider conversation about eating disorders generally, because the other thing that tends to happen when these conversations are being had in this way is that we are only focusing on one diagnosis and it's actually the most rare diagnosis.

Anorexia is the rarest of all the diagnoses.

Binge eating disorder is about 40% of the sufferer population.

Bulimia is about 13 to 15%.

We then have OSFED, but Anorexia sits at about 3% to 4%, 3% to 5% of the eating disorder sufferer population.

So when we're only talking about this, you've got all these other people out there who are dealing with eating disorders and they're watching their whole experience just get flattened down to this very simplistic conversation that doesn't acknowledge the shared suffering of people with eating disorders regardless of how they present themselves.

physically, regardless of what body they're in, regardless of their behaviors.