A student image obsession
He clutches a white paper sack with his spindly fingers, purple from the cold – a bag containing a chicken sandwich to his liking: hold the butter, extra pickles.
“I have to ask for no butter. It’s partially hydrogenated liquid margarine,” said USU history senior Adam Nettina.
He plans to remove the bun later, or may toss the entire bag in a trash can, which happens regularly. Food consumes him, he said through teeth worn down from grinding. After shoving the food in his backpack, he follows his normal routine and walks two blocks north to the nearest grocery store to peruse the aisles, reading labels on discounted cinnamon rolls and Pop-Tarts to find evidence of partially hydrogenated oils. He purchases nothing.
“These things look so good,” he said while scanning the shelves over protruding cheekbones.
Lifestyle
A study by the National Institute for Mental Health states an estimated 1 million men, like Nettina, suffer from an eating disorder, and these numbers are on the rise. In addition, 10 percent of college females face clinical or sub-clinical eating disorders. More than half of these females have bulimia nervosa, a disorder that involves multiple methods of binging and purging in order to lose weight.
“I’ve worked at USU for nine years, but this year by far I’ve had the most referrals from counselors,” said Brooke Parker, USU dietician. “This semester my numbers have shot up, and this is just the people who are seeking help. Who knows how many more are out there.”
Barbara, whose name has been changed, is a USU senior who smokes in part to curve her growling stomach. Her best friend was anorexic in the seventh grade, and Barbara’s disorder began because of her influence. What started as anorexia in her teenage years transformed into bulimia in college, Barbara said.
“Honestly, I don’t now, I really don’t mind that I think I look fat sometimes because it helps me to stay lower in weight,” she said. “On the east coast, they are more at ease with weight. But in Utah, I feel like there is a lot of competition.”
USU Health and Wellness Center director and physician Jim Davis said he believes the majority of eating disorders begin in high school while bodies are still forming skeletally and those individuals begin to feel uncomfortable in their own skin. They also become increasingly aware of media and are greatly influenced by its messages, and these mentalities may follow these individuals to college.
Eri Bentley, a USU psychologist, said “I think being in a college setting where people are away from home and under a lot of stress, makes them vulnerable to develop things, maybe a more significant eating disorder.”
In an college environment that allows for a loose schedule, Nettina said he finds himself wandering around campus and Logan to distract himself from his anxiety. Since plans in his early college life did not unfold the way he had hoped, he felt the need to take back control, which is when the food and exercise obsession began, and has led him to feel more out of control than ever.
“You have to deal with food every day, you have to keep coming back to the very thing you’re trying to get away from,” he said. “For someone like me who relies on dining services, it almost becomes this extremely uncomfortable focus to cope with the anxiety of those eating situations while you’re trying to make progress.”
Pressure
Barbara said she believes eating disorder tendencies will continue to follow her, but she is not opposed to it. She does not want her family to become involved in her “eating issues” in any way. After eating Taco Bell she said she feels uncomfortable until she purges, and relies on that vice the majority of the times she goes out to eat.
Much of the pressure to be thin comes from the dating world, she said, which is also competitive. She said relationship status can be a large influence in the severity of an eating disorder.
Davis said, “I see some pressure at USU on dating and that may relate to some self-appearance issues.”
The initiative to maintain healthy students on campus has been a recent goal of many institutions on campus through a slew of specialized events that promote guzzling water, exercising regularly and eating foods rich in nutritional value.
“There is always a table at those health events that has this big globule of fat, these tables and charts telling us how much sugar is in this and that,” Nettina said. “We have all these messages, and maybe they are appropriate for a lot of college kids, but for people like me who don’t guzzle down Cokes at lunchtime and we have this message presented as to what health is, it’s just a trigger that puts us into these walls, this prison that we’re held into.”
However, Jessie Clark, a junior majoring in elementary education, finds the programs beneficial to her health. She said she participated in the Be Well program, which offered prizes to students who committed to healthier living. She and her roommate would check up on each other to see if the other met their goal to drink a set amount of water in a day, and because of it she “just felt better.”
Parker said, “The message out there is a blanket statement. Soda will kill you. The target group for that is not this entire population, this entire age group. It’s put in a very black and white, good and bad way. That’s why so many of my (patients) say, ‘that means it’s for me.'”
Humans today tend to need to lose weight, Davis said, and he feels confident that those with disordered eating know how to lose weight and are not overly affected by USU health programs.
“They’ve already crafted their plans,” he said. “That’s how they get skinny in the first place.”
Davis said all the university specialists who deal with eating disorders see issues in USU “performers” or athletes, mainly gymnasts and track athletes. The Aggiettes have heath requirements they must maintain in order to affirm they are in healthy standing, he said.
Effects
It’s about time for dinner, and Nettina heads to the Marketplace, a student eating community with food, from Aggie Ice Cream to steak, spread out in stations. Students wait in lines hugging their bowls and plates to their chests, contemplating their cravings.
Nettina wanders until he decides on the perfect thing to eat, and often ends at the salad station. He said he often sees other males picking at a lone chicken breast on their plate or a pile of egg whites. He understands, he said, and wishes he could find the courage to eat the amount of calories he knows he should. There is less anxiety sticking with the usual pattern, though.
“I know I don’t look good, I know girls don’t like skinny little guys, I know that,” Nettina said. “I look in the mirror and I don’t like what I see.”
However, he said his obsession with food and exercise has nothing to do with his appearance, it has to do with control, structure.
Barbara said, “It’s really hard to look at Victoria Secret models because I am just like ‘damn,’ and I feel really bad about myself.”
She said she has contemplated the metamorphosis of body image and has looked at pictures from the Victorian era and the Romantic era when it was beautiful to dwell in a soft, curvy body.
“Let’s be honest though, it’s just not attractive anymore,” Barbara said.
Bentley facilitates USU’s “Every Body Rocks” program, which promotes healthy body image to students bothered by their appearance, and said many of them tie their worth as a human being to the state of their body.
“We live in this culture of ‘fat talk,’ referring to how we somehow learn to talk about body and appearance based on size and weight and make comments like ‘Oh, I feel so fat.’ Or positive comments like ‘Oh, you look like you are losing weight,'” she said. “We internalize these things.”
At the end of the day, Nettina sits alone in his apartment, restless, attempting to put a dent in his capstone history project, but isn’t making much headway. He laces up his running shoes, pulls a knit hat over the wispy hairs on is head, slides his fingers into a pair of gloves and heads into the thick, cold breath of Cache Valley winter. He runs to exhaustion and heads home.
“It just gets tough to keep going through; it perpetuates itself,” Nettina said, shaking his head while looking at his feet. “I have a goofy spunky side of me, you know?”
He said he often feels that passersby look at him as if he’s a lunatic, but he’s tired of it, and tired of being an anonymous wanderer that few people know personally. He said he is starting to believe that he is a more capable person through his consistent meetings with USU medical personnel who are trained to assist students in this capacity.
“I think too many people with ED’s stereotype themselves and beat themselves up and worry, constantly living in fear of ‘what if? What if I gain weight?'” Nettina said. “But at the end of the day you can’t live in that fear. You have to turn the question around and say ‘what if?’ back. What if I can prove to myself that I’m more than just a need for food and control and order?”
– catherine.meidell@aggiemail.usu.edu