London - Kate Moss sent health campaigners into a fury when she declared “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”.
And now research suggests they had good reason to be concerned – as such a sentiment is at the root of anorexia.
A study points to sufferers of the eating disorder being driven not by a fear of putting on weight but by the pleasure of losing it.
The French study turns one of the main criteria for diagnosis on its head and raises hopes of vital new treatments for a condition that affects as many as one in 25 women at some point in their lives. Anorexia can trigger health problems from brittle bones to life-threatening heart damage.
Existing drugs are of little help, and counselling, the mainstay of treatment, leads to as few as 10 percent of patients recovering. As a result, anorexics are about six times as likely to die young as other people.
Researcher Philip Gorwood said the search for effective treatments may be hindered by a fundamental misunderstanding of the disorder.
He said diagnosis is generally based on three criteria: eating less food, which leads to weight loss, a distorted perception of weight and body, and an intense fear of becoming fat.
But the professor added: “When research is going nowhere, it is important to call into question the criteria at the very root of the disorder. We have therefore re-evaluated the last criterion, although it is quite prominent in patient discourse, by assuming that it is a mirror image of what is really involved, i.e. a reward for losing weight. We established that patients felt pleasure at becoming thin rather than fear of becoming fat.”
Researchers from the INSERM medical research institute in Paris showed volunteers with and without anorexia images of women of different weights and asked them how good they would feel if they had the same shape.
The healthy women preferred the women of a regular weight and those with anorexia believed the underweight women had the most desirable shape.
But while the anorexic women did not like the pictures of fat women, they only saw them slightly more negatively than the healthy volunteers.
The scientists also measured how much the women sweated – a sign of excitement – as they looked at the pictures. Those with anorexia found the images of the underweight women particularly thrilling, the journal Translational Psychiatry reports. Professor Gorwood said the results suggest researchers should think of anorexia as being driven by pleasure of being thin rather than fear of becoming fat.
Miss Moss was accused of glorifying anorexia in 2009, when she told an interviewer that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” was one of her mottos.
An apology rushed out by her modelling agency stated: “For the record – Kate does not support this as a lifestyle choice.”
The eating disorder charity Beat said study does not necessarily shed light on the causes of anorexia, “which are complex and often genetically driven”.
Daily Mail