How are Eating Disorders Different Among Women of Color?

My clinical experience supports the data of the Wilfley team. In communities of black women, the types of disordered eating that predominate are compulsive eating, the consumption of high fat diets, and simple overeating which result in obesity. Obesity can lead, in a higher degree than in the white community, to illnesses like hypertension, heart disease and cancer, and often eventuates in premature death. Obesity is also a factor among poor Latino women, and is a major factor for many native women as well. For black women and other women of color then, eating problems must include overeating, high fat consumption and obesity.

One of the members of my Wild Geese Group )a group for women fighting to overcome eating disorders) was a young native university student who weighed close to 300 pounds. Aside from her weight problems. Rene also struggled with a chemical dependency. Rene's clinical picture included several classic precursors of eating disorders. Her parents were divorced and she had been raped as a high school student. Cultural issues were also important. She had a family history of obesity and she linked her food and alcohol substance abuse problems to her life on the reservation. She described vividly her life on a reservation where unemployment was high and poverty was an ongoing fact of life. Food availability was inconsistent, and cheap and fattening foods were the mainstays of her diet.
When she came of age, she worked at a gambling casino on the reservation, where native people regularly came and routinely lost their money. She felt great guilt and anguish about putting herself through university on money earned from work at a casino, which she felt exploited her own people.

Another case is a young talented black woman whose mother worked two and three jobs as a single parent when the child was young. Later her mother moved into a fast moving professional track and the daughter spent her afternoons alone, eating. She weighed some thirty to forty pounds more than her White classmates in the predominantly white school she attended. Her white friends, who were struggling with similar family issues, starved themselves; this young woman, who had a history of family obesity and family diabetes, did the opposite, she overate.

Cases of anorexia among women of color are not unheard of, however. A 1984 paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry documents anorexia nervosa in a black Zimbabwean girl. This article is notable for highlighting the saliency of psychosocial issues. "Firstly she was educated in white boarding schools whee she was exposed to the desirability of slimness as a social norm; no such value pertains in Shona society where a fat wife is traditionally regarded as an important manifestation of her husband's affluence." Foregrounding the issue of social class, the authors noted that "Middle class African families commonly set great store on academic achievement, and over driven children are by no means rare."

By: Patricia Romney Ph.D