Participants after the National Eating Disorder Association walk at the Phoenix Zoo on March 1, 2015 (Morgan Hipps/ The State Press)Members of ASU’s sexual wellness club, Devils in the Bedroom, joined the National Eating Disorders Awareness organization’s annual walk Sunday morning to help support eating disorder research.
The club participated in the walk around Phoenix Zoo to encourage body pride, which global health senior Traci Ayub, the club’s peer education coordinator, said coincides with sexual wellness.
“Many of us have either suffered from eating disorders or have friends who suffered from eating disorders,” she said. “We were discussing body pride at the time and we decided that this would be a really good bonding event for the organization.”
Ayub said eating disorders are not taken as seriously as other diseases.
“There’s a lot of stigma about mental illnesses,” she said. “Unlike something like diabetes or cancer, we consider it as something that’s fake or something that means the person’s weak for having (mental) impulses.”
These impulses are not foreign to ASU’s students, Ayub said.
“Especially at ASU, we have a very exercise and wellness culture that definitely pushes a thin ideal and pushes people to look a certain way," Ayub said. "It drives people a lot of times to engage in behavior that may not always be healthy.”
Devils in the Bedroom member and global studies sophomore Alexis Johnson, said she feels pressured by body standards.
“As a young woman, I have not experienced an eating disorder, but I definitely have felt the pressure of the media,” she said. “As athletic as I am, there’s still a pressure to be even skinnier than I am.”
Psychology junior Anne Mattson, the club’s peer educator and marketing director, said the American culture often promotes thin ideals under the guise of health.
“Our culture in the early 2000s really glamorized the heroin-chic models, the ones who are super skinny,” she said. “While healthy is coming into trend now, some of the things that are being shown as healthy in the media are not actual depictions of what healthy people look like.”
Mattson said her own battle with eating disorders has given her a greater understanding of the recovery process.
“It’s definitely something that is an up-hill battle,” she said. “I think anything when you’re recovering from a mental illness is hard, but it’s really hard when a culture tells you that you look better thin.”
Kaelyn Polick-Kirkpatrick, a sustainability sophomore and the club’s membership director, said Devils in the Bedroom views eating disorders as real mental illnesses.
“Devils in the Bedroom specifically relates to sexual health and wellness, but related to that is body image and how we view ourselves” she said. “I think that it is important that we don’t erase individuals who might be struggling with that due to a real mental illness.”
Editor's Note: Kaelyn Polick-Kirkpatrick is a former opinion columnist for The State Press but was not involved in the reporting or editing of this article.
Reach the reporter at aplante@asu.edu or follow @aimeenplante on Twitter.
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