Terri and the rest of us girls

If you can stand one more post about Terri Schiavo, Kameron at Brutal Women has a few things to say about women and eating disorders. See her post Martyr Yourself For Christian America!, which starts out with discussion of a commentary by Paul Campos about Terri Schiavo's eating disorder. Of particular note is his recognition that eating disorders often go undiagnosed because their often-devastating results so frequently look like 'success.'

"The fatality rate ... is hard to determine, in part because they so often go undiagnosed (indeed the civil judgment that has paid for Terri's medical care was based on the failure of her doctors to diagnose her bulimia, despite what should have been obvious symptoms).

"Such diagnostic failures are caused by the same factors that have led the media to largely ignore this tragic irony at the center of Terri's story. After all, Terri was merely being a "good girl." She was fat, and she made herself thin - a transformation for which she surely received endless praise."

Anyway, Kameron brings it around to her own experience eating a cheeseburger for lunch Friday sitting next to an apparently successful dieter:

"But oh, God, sitting there next to Barbie, I felt so guilty for eating my cheeseburger. What must everyone think of me, scarfing down my burger for lunch? Had I no shame? I could see everyone turning to look at me, thinking, 'Look at that fat girl scarfing down that cheeseburger! Grotesque! Look at that fat woman, eating! A woman, eating, in a restaurant! How revolting! Has she no respect for herself?!'

"I wanted to curl up and die.

"And that's what a lot of women feel like: we'd rather die than be fat. We'd die to be thin for a decade, just give me a decade of hotness! Please! Please! I'll starve! I don't care!

"Careful what you wish for."

Oh, honey, have I ever been there.