MeMe Roth and Anorexia

Life on Fatz already covered MeMe Roth’s equating eating food with rape, which is on a level of F’d up I haven’t seen yet. I want to cover another problem that came up in the interview.

I have a hate-hate relationship with the article in general. The first hate is that they are giving this woman attention, despite her complete lack of credibility or expertise. (Fat parents and a job as an “image consultant” does not a health expert make). She portrays herself as a modern Jeanne D’arc leading the people from death, and the last thing you want to do with a hate-mongerer crazy for publicity is to give them publicity. For some reason the media seem to fawn on her, but I’m not sure if it’s because of body-envy or because she’s spewing the vitriol they’re secretly afraid to say because they know it’s nasty and bigoted. At least this reporter is careful to emphasize that she’s the only nut job in her particular bag ‘o trail mix. Second, of course, is that the reporter has to give the obligatory paragraph-long crunch on Death Fat, trotting out the same statistics that have been disproven for years but are still stacked somewhere in a fact-check file for reporters to reference.

Now for the reason why I even bothered to click over to it. This interview casts a light on MeMe’s disturbing intensity of fanaticism. First she refuses to meet the reporter anywhere that serves food. She shows up in a tightly belted coat she refuses to take off. She talks about shame trauma as a child which she centers on the weight of her relatives. She’s highly uncomfortable talking about her own eating. She says she doesn’t do breakfast, halfway admits to not often eating lunch, won’t or can’t name a food she does eat other than black beans, brags that she runs four miles a day, sometimes doesn’t allow herself to eat until after she’s run four miles a day, and as of the 3:30 interview had not eaten anything that day.

Now I’m not an expert either, but doesn’t this quack a whole helluva lot like anorexia?

I’ve spent as much time as anyone in disgust and sometimes anger over this woman and her unproductive bile, but is it possible that instead of just being a nasty, hateful human being she might also/instead be seriously ill? There’s also the risk that if she is anorexic as she comes across in this interview, that she’s passing dangerous behaviours on to others via her “private nutrition counselling business”.

There’s a point where sometimes an aversion becomes pathological. I can see where a lifetime associating fat with shame and pain could warp into disordered eating, which then would need to be self-justified. By encouraging disordered eating in others she would validate her own illness to herself. I wonder what she’s doing to her daughters, as an example? What would she do if one of her own children picked up a gene for fatness from their grandparents or great-grandparents? Would she be willing to watch or force her own daughters to run four miles a day on no food? Give the daughter her own childhood of shame and abuse (this time external instead of internal)? I would hate to think there’s that kind of evil in the world sitting in plain sight.