'if I Just Keep It Up, I'll Have A Heart Attack'

The Sunday Age

Sunday September 2, 2007

Deborah Gough

AT HER worst, Catherine Wilson would sleep in her workout gear so she could get up at 4am to launch into 1000 lunges and crunches. At 6am it was off to the gym, where she would spend more than three hours every day.

She lost her editing job and many friends. She was hospitalised, and became estranged from her family. "I remember my doctor telling me that if I kept it up I would have a heart attack. It was to warn me to stop, but I just thought: 'Good, if I just keep it up, I'll have a heart attack - that will be a way out'," Ms Wilson said.

Still in recovery from anorexia nervosa and exercise compulsion, the 25-year-old has slowly cut her exercise - dropping by 20 minutes a day. She knows it is just the start.

In a sign of her progress she can now flick through fashion and lifestyle magazines looking for articles on weight loss, just as she used to obsessively. But she now has the strength to put the mags back on to the rack.

Ms Wilson says the magazines send out a dangerous mixed message: on one page celebrities Nicole Richie and Victoria Beckham are called anorexic and "sick", yet on another they are "hot". "I'm a highly intelligent person," she says. "On an intellectual level I know exactly what they are doing, but it's a very mixed message and it still gets to me."

She criticises the idea of an "obesity epidemic", as it makes people feel that eating disorders can be caught.

Her anger at these magazine articles is detailed in Faking It, a self-help magazine, by Women's Forum Australia, on the sexualisation of girls and women.

It cites Flinders University research that found that women who regularly exercised for body tone and sex appeal were often dissatisfied with their bodies and had poor self-esteem.

Those who exercised for strength and physical health were much happier with their physiques.

A co-director of the Peter Beumont Centre for Eating Disorders, Dr Stephen Touyz, said there was a real risk that adolescents with eating disorders could get the obesity message and called for more discussion between experts in both fields to ensure the message hits the mark.

"The only way that is going to be resolved is for the two groups to get together with a message for both groups, but it is not going to be easy. What is a good message for one is not a good message for the other," Dr Touyz said.

© 2007 The Sunday Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home