Dying to lose weight
Behind a healthy goal of bringing trim and fit may lurk something more sinister－an obsession that ends up with some fighting to stay alive, or worse, Zhang Lei reports.
Eating disorders is a general term for a group of diseases such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder. Chen Jue, director of the clinical psychology department of Shanghai Mental Health Center, told China News Weekly that "although eating disorder is a minor disease in the psychiatric department, anorexia has the highest fatality rate among mental disorders, as high as 5-20 percent."
Zhang was admitted to an intensive care unit weighing just 28 kilograms. With tests showing how exhausted her body was, the hospital listed her in critical condition. In the course of treatment she used a pseudonym, Girl God Granny, online to record her state of facing anorexia and gradually recovering, and began to form a mutual aid group with other patients on the internet. The patient explains the condition and popularizes relevant knowledge for the public.
"Pig","Shame","She is better than you","Too fat"... In a gallery space, various notes in which people are evaluated and often humiliated appear in a collage on walls, and the center of the space is a cage in which a string puppet symbolizes a man with an eating disorder. He is sitting at a table replete with delicious food wrapped in dense threads, holding a ruler and a knife in his hand. He is not eating but measuring, calculating and taking pictures. This is one of the exhibits of the Anti Body-Shaming exhibition that Zhang curated at the Himalayas Art Museum in Shanghai in May. It depicted the daily state of patients with eating disorders trapped in their bodies, and food and external evaluations.
Another striking exhibit in the exhibition was an apple made of clay, acrylic and PVC environmentally friendly plastic. The middle part was bitten into by the creator Li Yuyuan. This is said to be the experience of anyone with an eating disorder, the feeling that things "taste like chewing wax". Zhang says food is an angel to the body, but it is a devil in the mind of those with eating disorders.
"They experience the mind and the body being at loggerheads every day," she says.
