Last Friday I was told to attend a briefing on eating disorders. The briefing’s intention was to give the Congress a sense of how urgent eating disorders are and how they can be addressed through legislation. It was not a very informative briefing because the panelists told too many stories about eating disoders while we generally expect the them to give explicit information on the status quo and a cleaer solution to the problem. Despite that, I found one of the panelists told a really powerful story that really changed what I think about eating disorders and made me want to do something for them.
The panelist who is a nutritionist and also mother of a 12 year-old girl first shared a few case studies on eating disorders that explained how eating disorders can be treated in a both psychological and medical way. She told us that the weight stigman and the stress of “healthy eating” in schools are main causes of eating disorders among teenagers. She then went on to share her own story about her daughter who learned about how to eat healthily at school. The panelist then explained how she approached the school and provided resources for school to avoid invoking eating disorders. The main goal of her story is to tell the lawmakers that the best way to address the problem is to provide schools with enough resources and education. Her story didn’t fall perfectly into the three-stage model of public narrative, but nontheless conveyed stories of self, us, and now. She began with stories of others and then introduced her own story of self, and after that she impliclity told the story of us and of now — that eating disorder is a problem that most of us share and should be addressed now.
Just as I said before, I find her story convincing because she used her own example to show that the problem of eating disorder is both prevalent and solvable. She also successfully convinced me that there is an urgent need to address the issue.