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Karla Mosley wants you to know that people with eating disorders are similar to her too.
"I am a woman of color and I certainly did not know that people like me had eating disorders," she says. "I thought it was a white, rich, feminine, adolescent disorder."
Only one of these identifiers corresponds to Mosley: he is black, crazy and purged for years. But Mosley, an actor and a regular on the soap opera, Love glory and beauty, tells his story of fighting bulimia and restoring his health.
She is part of a growing movement of people of color who are working to educate their communities, as well as researchers in the field, about how these disorders affect people from all walks of life – and all of them. body types.
Mosley says she's struggled for years with obsessive thoughts about food.
"I have experienced so many vacations and social events where I was not with people because I was focusing on what was on the table, what was going on in my mouth, and then once I have eaten it, will it make me fat the next day? "she says.
The food haunted her sometimes. And that comforted her, in others. When she vomited, she said that it was a way to purge her sadness and anxiety.
She says that there was a period in her life where she vomited every night. It was in the early 2000s, while she was working on a children's show and that she hit rock bottom.
"At night, I did this very violent thing all by myself all night, and during the day, I smiled, laughed and amused children," she recalls. "It was that very strange moment of Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and I barely kept it."
Then her aunt, who looked like a second mother, died. And when she had this news, her first thing to do was run to the toilet to make her vomit.
Her colleagues were aware of what was going on and begged her to ask for help.
She did it. She sought treatment 16 years ago and claims to have been released from her eating disorder behaviors in the last 10 years.
She says she was lucky to have colleagues who supported her and she knows that not everyone has this luxury. Sharing the story of his eating disorder and his recovery is a way to give back to Mosley. She uses her platform as a black actor with 60,000 Instagram followers.
"My picture appears daily in their stream, it's a wide range of people … It's possible that by telling my story, people can be helped," she says.
Mosley is the ambassador for the largest non-profit organization in the United States that helps people with eating disorders: the National Eating Disorder Association or NEDA. Over the past week, NEDA has conducted its annual Inclusion-Oriented Eating Disorders Awareness Campaign with the slogan: Come as you are. The organization encourages people to share their stories using the #ComeAsYouAre hashtag.
NEDA Executive Director Claire Mysko said she hoped that people of all genders and racial and ethnic backgrounds would participate.
"It's really, once again, celebrating the community and breaking down those myths that prevent and have prevented so many people from coming forward," she says.
Mysko says that 30 million Americans have had an eating disorder during their lifetime. And that number is probably higher, because the stereotype of the one who has a eating disorder affects the way we talk about it, who is seeking treatment, who receives treatment and how it is treated.
Another myth that groups like NEDA want to dispel is the idea that people with eating disorders are all thin.
Chevese Turner, who founded in 2008 the Binge Eating Disorder Association, or BEDA, claims that it's just not true.
She is struggling with binge eating disorders and atypical anorexia. It is at this point that you limit your food intake and your calories, but you do not seem particularly thin.
"I've always lived in a body of higher weight," she says. "Part of what the big eating disorder community was not doing in 2008 was really about representing people with high weight bodies suffering from eating disorders."
The binge eating disorder has not been recognized in the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association until 2013. Turner has helped to advance this change.
And, now that there is more research on binge eating disorder, she says that demographic data is emerging.
"The Latin American community has the highest rates of binge eating and is followed by the black community," she says.
Mae Lynn Reyes-Rodriguez, a psychology researcher specializing in eating disorders, works primarily with uncultivated Latinas. She discovered that binge eating was common among her patients who had crossed the border between Central America and Mexico and had been without food for much of the trip.
Thus, food insecurity can be a trigger. A trauma can also be a trigger, as well as anxiety and depression. But Reyes-Rodriguez says that there are so many things we do not know about the harmful effects of eating disorders on the Latinx community. She's not even sure that the tools she uses to diagnose her clients work as well as they could because they've been developed and tailored for white women.
Turner, who is white, wanted to address the lack of representation in the world of advocacy for eating disorders.
She invited an equity and inclusion expert, Desiree Adaway – who is black – to speak at the Binge Eating Disorder Association's annual conference a few years ago.
She says, Adaway went on stage and said, "I just want to let you know that it's a room filled with white supremacy."
"Until then, I did not really realize how white our organizations were and how much we did not listen," Turner says.
Turner's organization has recently merged with NEDA to "unify the eating disorder community."
NEDA's Mysko said he still had a lot of work to do to become more inclusive.
"As a white woman, I kind of offer the typical image of those who are struggling," she says.
NEDA has not yet ambassador Latinx. But, they contacted Gloria Lucas to help spread the word about Come As You Are.
Lucas stated that she felt that the eating disorder community was not meeting her needs as a Latina with a eating disorder identified as "chubby" .
Her project, Nalgona Positivity Pride, provides information and support to people of color who are struggling with eating disorders.
"Nalgona means a woman with a big behind and it's also slang, so I think people have something to do with it," she says. "Ordinary people who speak Spanish are like, 'Oh, that's familiar."
Lucas shares positive body images and inspirational quotes with his 80,000 Instagram followers. She also lectures at schools, universities and bilingual bookstores wherever she can bring together a public of people of color to share her recovery story.
She tells how she realized that trying to prove her worth in a society that did not value her made her sick. Lucas says that she believes that racism and historical trauma of colonialism play an important role in why the Latinx community has problems with food.
She says she could not afford treatment for her eating disorder. So she searched for help alone, searching for information online, reading books, and attending Anonymous Overeaters meetings.
"It was the only free resource for me at that time and I was always the youngest or only person of color," she says. "I do not recommend it to anyone because it is extremely difficult."
She attributes something that she read in the book, A hunger so wide and so deep, from Becky Thompson for helping her to stop blaming herself for her excessive consumption of food.
"She explains how eating disorders are healthy reactions to senseless circumstances," says Lucas.
She hopes this idea will resonate in other people of color who have not recognized their eating problems due to shame or embarrassment.
"I think" Come as you are "is like everyone, from all walks of life," she says. "Come as you are and discuss our food problems, no? Because eating disorders develop in isolation."
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