Eating disorder awareness week runs Feb. 1 to 7 each year (stock: Microsoft SharePoint/University of Windsor)
By Kate Hargreaves
Education and awareness are key when it comes to preventing eating disorders.
Each Feb. 1 to 7, eating disorder awareness week encourages Canadians to learn more about eating disorders, challenge weight and body stigma and become familiar with resources and services that can help those who are struggling.
This year’s theme is “health doesn’t have a look,” challenging harmful beliefs that suggest being healthy means being thin.
Dr. Rachel Smail-Crevier (MA ’21, PhD ’26), who recently completed her doctorate in psychology under the supervision of Dr. Lance Rappaport, has studied eating disorders since her undergraduate days.
Smail-Crevier previously studied binge-eating disorder as well as the correlation between eating disorders and anxiety. She focused her doctoral work on what triggers individuals’ disordered eating behaviours in their day-to-day lives.
“A lot of research on eating disorders focuses on who will develop an eating disorder or treatment outcomes between individuals,” Smail-Crevier explains. “I was interested in looking at a person who has symptoms and when these symptoms occur in a day."
“We found that when cognitive symptoms like weight concern, shape concern and body dissatisfaction were higher, people were more likely to restrict food, engage in binge eating or over-exercise,” she adds.
Smail-Crevier's research also suggested that times of high stress, perfectionism and exposure to thin and muscular ideals across social media made disordered eating more likely.
These types of insights into individuals’ triggers can help in providing effective prevention strategies people can engage in during those at-risk moments.
“People engaging in binge eating or food restriction doesn’t mean they engage in it all the time,” Rappaport explains.
“When you look at when this happens and what predicts that someone would be imminently at risk right now, you can provide just-in-time interventions, what we call ecological momentary interventions.”
These interventions look different for each person, but the goal is to work with individuals to understand their own risk factors and create a plan they can enact when they experience something that triggers the behaviour.
Eating disorder prevention is also central to the work of Windsor’s Bulimia Anorexia Nervosa Association (BANA).
Co-founded in 1983 by Dr. Richard Moriarty, the first faculty member in the Faculty of Human Kinetics, and his wife Mary, BANA provides treatment, education and support for those affected by eating disorders in the region.
UWindsor director of advancement and alumni, Kelly Gosselin, is the current president of BANA's board of directors.
"At the BANA, we believe education and early intervention are critical to preventing eating disorders and reducing the harm caused by stigma around weight, shape and appearance," she says.
"For more than 40 years, BANA has supported the Windsor-Essex community through education, awareness and compassionate care, helping individuals and families recognize concerns early and seek support. By promoting healthy relationships with food and body image and reinforcing that health does not have a single look, we aim to create safer, more informed environments where recovery is possible at any stage of life."
Dr. Sarah Woodruff, a faculty member in Human Kinetics, is past president of BANA’s board of directors. She researches health behaviours, including nutrition, physical activity and body image. Recently, she has been looking at the role of social media in body image.
Woodruff cites image-based social media sites such as Instagram as a risk to poor body image that could lead to disordered eating behaviours.
“It’s everyone’s highlight reel of their life or in some cases can be filtered” she says, referencing the risk that users will compare their own bodies to edited or artificially generated images.
While disordered eating has been pervasive well before the advent of social media, Smail-Crevier suggests that the frequency of exposure, especially for young people, to thin and muscular body ideals can affect their body image and behaviours.
However, she notes that while many people use social media, not everyone ends up with an eating disorder; rather, the etiology of eating disorders is complex and often linked to other mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“The kind of social comparisons happening on social media were happening before it,” Rappaport adds, “and may continue to happen without it.”
Outside of media, other social contexts, such as expectations around sports performance, can also have implications for disordered eating.
“There’s a certain type of pressure placed on athletes, depending on the sport,” says Woodruff.
“Trying to get that desired body shape, weight, musculature or if there’s constant pressure to maintain or achieve that, it can lead to disordered eating patterns and eating disorders.”
In fact, Woodruff's research has included looking at online postings by professional and semi-professional male athletes opening up about their eating disorders.
“10 years ago, we never even talked about males having eating disorders,” she says noting that these conversations are beginning to become more prevalent.
Woodruff stresses that, contrary to popular belief that suggests the experience is limited to adolescent girls, eating disorders can affect anyone.
"BANA has had clients from five to upwards of 80. It can happen to anyone at any stage of life,” she says.
Part of debunking these common misconceptions around eating disorder risk is education and building awareness. These efforts, including those by BANA, are also central to prevention.
For Woodruff, prevention starts in the promotion of healthy behaviours and relationships with food, including ensuring that healthy eating choices, active transportation and physical activity are not just recommendations but meaningfully accessible to people.
Rappaport adds that it is important for people to be sensitive to their own individual triggers and risk factors and the variability in how stress, media, lack of sleep and other factors influence different people.
Education can also help adults, including coaches, support healthier environments around body image in youth and notice when disordered eating behaviours start to arise.
“Even if someone does not have a full-blown eating disorder, symptoms can still cause a lot of distress and impairment,” Smail-Crevier emphasizes, encouraging help-seeking and early intervention before symptoms get worse.
“Reaching out for support early if you are experiencing disordered eating or a lot of body image concerns is really helpful,” she says.
Those seeking assistance with disordered eating are encouraged to reach out to BANA for support.
For UWindsor employees looking to learn more about eating disorders, educators from BANA will be on campus Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 10:30 a.m. (Toldo 203) for a workshop on eating disorders and healthy relationships with food as part of the Employee Mental Health Strategy (EMHS) training calendar. Registration is available for faculty and staff on the EMHS training website.