In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Meghan Trainor discussed her musical success, as well as a more personal topic: body image.
Trainor has been critically acclaimed for her début single, “All About That Bass,” but a comment she made during the interview didn’t sit well with some.
While discussing getting teased in school due to her size, Trainor casually told the interviewer that she “wasn’t strong enough to have an eating disorder.”
She continued to explain that she had tried to “go anorexic” for a good three hours before calling it quits. It sounded as though Trainor was talking about going vegan or gluten free, not something as a serious and life-altering as an eating disorder.
While the message of her song is overall positive about body image, I find her cavalier remarks about a mental illness that is already widely misunderstood to be rather disheartening and ?distasteful.
She described how she ate ice and celery, but said that’s “not even anorexic.” If by only consuming water and a two-calorie vegetable isn’t “anorexic,” please enlighten me as to what is considered as such.
To have an eating disorder is to suffer from a serious mental illness. It does not take strength and does not develop from a choice one makes on a whim. It does not equate to, “I am strong because I have enough self-discipline to starve myself so I can be thin.”
Strength is finding the self-discipline to overcome your demons and regain the self-control you lost along the way.
It is recognizing your imperfections and allowing yourself to be OK with them. It is knowing that you are worth something, no matter your dress size.
Many people have a tendency to brush off anorexia or bulimia, questioning why a task as simple as eating is so difficult for some. People, like Trainor for example, forget it is a deadly disease that affects primarily young people every single day.
Demi Lovato, who has battled bulimia in the past, took to Twitter in response to Trainor’s comments.
“Starving is not a ‘diet’ and throwing up isn’t something that only extremely thin men or women do,” Lovato tweeted. “Eating disorders do not discriminate.”
Lovato has recently partnered with CAST Recovery to create the Lovato Treatment Scholarship Program to sponsor someone who is struggling with mental health to obtain proper treatment.
Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are mental illnesses that not only affect the mind, but have detrimental effects on one’s physical health as well.
It is a battle one fights everyday, and it is not to be taken as a joke.
The IU Health Center offers counseling, specifically Coalition for Overcoming Problem Eating/Exercise, or C.O.P.E. Reaching out for help isn’t easy, but the resources are here.
There are people willing to help.
I do not believe Trainor meant any true harm by what she said.
She clearly did not understand the weight of her words.
However, she should have been more circumspect about what she said, especially when talking about eating disorders.
She should have known better.
nrowthor@indiana.edu
