Once the reference image was the diaphanous one of Kate Moss, today they are the toned bodies of athletes like Federica Pellegrini or Paola Egonu: it is Elena Rivapsychoanalyst and psychotherapist, to tell the new face of eating disorders in the essay Fragile Amazons The new eating disorders of adolescents (Franco Angeli), these days in the bookstore. Until a few years ago it was mainly boys who expressed their discomfort with the obsessive search for a toned and well-trained body. they feel flaccid – an adjective they use a lot to express their discomfort – or if the turtlethe muscles that define the abdomen, “explains Riva.
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More cases with the epidemic
A problem that the lockdown has helped to accentuate: “Already in 2020, eating disorders have increased by 30% – recalls the author – we are talking about girls devoted to excellence in all fields, from school to sport, who have reacted to the first lockdown by training the body and mind, with the approval of the adults “.
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And after a summer of freedom, they found themselves faced with Dad and social withdrawal, with no prospects for the future: “They have lost essential opportunities for a teenager: to express themselves through their bodies, to distance themselves from their parents and to deal with their peers”, Riva continues, “and they reacted by exasperating training and food restrictions”.
They do not reject femininity
But if the anorexics of a few decades ago aimed at skeletal thinness to move away from the soft forms of a maternal or seductive femininity, “today girls do not need to reject femininity to affirm themselves, they accept curves but in the context of a body strong, with sculpted muscles “. As if the perfectionism that characterizes anorexia were expressed through an intellectually efficient self but also physically.
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Toned and fit girls
“The goal is not to imitate sports cars, as in the past it was not a question of ‘imitating’ supermodels”, warns the author. “It is as if in these pathologies a feminine ideal took root that was once expressed through skeletal models and today by images of toned and well-trained girls”. A different but equally problematic way to react to the transformations that occur during puberty, a sort of armor that allows you to resemble the desired ideal, but leads to the denial of fragility, the need to confront the limit. “The true constant of these disorders”, continues Riva, “is not thinness but the attempt to build a female identity free from models, a self that corresponds to one’s own inner reality”. Extremely a model proposed by society, “as in the past it happened with anorexia as an aesthetic goal, or even earlier, in the Middle Ages, with the idea of the ‘cage body of the soul’ proposed by the anorexic saints, for which these forms of asceticism they were the only way to express their intellect. “
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An uneasiness that is expressed through the body, a desire for control that sometimes also takes on the aspect of orthorexia, the obsessive attention to a healthy diet for us and for the environment, which often leads to a vegan or otherwise drastically restrictive: “The problem”, Riva emphasizes, “is not the choice that respects the environment or other living beings, but the radicalization of these attitudes that ends up transforming a cultural choice into pathology”.
The organism as a machine
And if thinness is not the primary objective, often these girls interpret the organism as if it were a machine, they do not pay attention to physiological processes, and this can cause pathological weight loss: “Let’s not forget how close the relationship is between food and emotions: let’s think, for example, of foods consumed with a consoling function, or of the stomach that closes when we are in love “, remembers Riva. “In recent years, cooking and food have been talked about a lot but more and more often the physiological relationship with food, regulated by hunger, is replaced by other stimuli, or as in this case by a project”.
And the disorders manifest themselves at an increasingly young age, hand in hand with an early puberty, “which creates an imbalance between a precociously female body and an affective maturity that does not yet exist”, explains the author. “Often the little ones, who are unable to process what is happening to them, speak with amazement about a body refusing food, or a swollen belly”.
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Dialogue between doctor and psychotherapist
From a therapeutic point of view, the intervention is not very different from that foreseen for classical anorexia, based on a team that sees the doctor and psychotherapist interact: “What I work on is the psychic profile”, explains Riva, ” the question is not what we eat, but how through food restriction or physical activity we try to build an image of ourselves that compensates for an inner fragility, a deficit of identity “. And if the parental figures have changed, today the rebellion of girls gives way to fear and not satisfying their requests: “Today the children are invested with many expectations, overnourished in a symbolic sense, and when they enter adolescence contact with the outside world goes into crisis “, explains Riva. And these girls are prisoners of an armor of perfection that makes it difficult to express and even prefigure wishes:
“When we talk about the choice of a university, for example, we often see that they do not express interest in a specific faculty, they do carpet tests simply trying to get into a good university, no matter what”, explains the author. “just as they want a perfect body because they don’t know who they are, and aim for excellence in order to present themselves to the world“. A crisis on which it is important to start working: “It is an opportunity to stop and reflect”, concludes Riva. “If the search for perfection goes into crisis, we can begin to look for that self that has been stifled by the attempt to become what others expect of us.”
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