Kennedy: Food for thought on eating disorders

photo Mark Kennedy

(To read an essay by Dana Lise Shavin about her new book, "The Body Tourist," see the November issue of Chatter magazine.)

As a young woman, Dana Lise Shavin's body weight was like a warm day in August -- highs in the mid- to upper-90s.

At 5-feet, 9-inches tall, she had a phobia about crossing into three digits, she says, "... somehow believing that the invisible line between 99 and 100 pounds was all that stood between me and complete disintegration." Such are the impulses of people with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that can cause sufferers to essentially starve themselves to death.

While attending Bard College in New York at age 19, Shavin says her mother was summoned to take her home when her weight dropped to 86 pounds. When her mother arrived, Shavin says she made a show of eating four sunflower seeds in an attempt to prove she was OK.

Shavin, a Chattanooga writer and artist now in her early 50s, says she was hospitalized and narrowly avoided becoming one of the 20 percent of women in the United States with anorexia who die from the disorder. While in the hospital, she refused to eat a cupcake celebrating her 20th birthday.

Many Times Free Press readers know Shavin from her introspective personal columns in the Sunday Life section. She reveals even more about her early life in a fascinating new book, "The Body Tourist," which chronicles her battle against anorexia. The memoir, published by Little Feather Books, will be available from online booksellers and in local bookstores beginning Nov. 1. Before that, Shavin will launch the book (and have copies available) during a public reading at the Camp House, 1427 Williams St., on Oct. 10 in conjunction with River City Sessions, a monthly Southern music and literature gathering.

Shavin cautions the book is not a self-help guide for people with eating disorders, although she knows that some sufferers will probably find their way to its pages.

"This is not a how-to-get-well book," Shavin said in an interview. "I don't see it as a book for young people."

Instead, the book is an honest assessment of Shavin's early-life battle with anorexia and her reflections on the childhood depression that she believes triggered her eating disorder. What makes the book so compelling is Shavin's elegant prose and her intensely personal writing style. The book is distinctive because it pulls off a rare triple play, blending Shavin's points of view as a writer, professional therapist and patient.

After college, she began her work as a therapist at a Georgia halfway house for drug abusers while she was still tending her own tenuous recovery from an eating disorder -- an irony that was not lost on her, now or then.

Looking back, Shavin said her family met the profile for what mental health professionals now realize is the classic incubator for anorexia. Her father was a workaholic (a newspaperman) and her mother was sensitive about her own weight.

"By the time I got to eighth grade, I was starting to manifest (symptoms of depression)," she says. "I didn't do anything in school. I didn't get involved in any activities. I didn't join social clubs. I wasn't dating. Nobody was paying attention to me."

Like many of us who reach a new level of understanding about our formative years in middle age, Shavin has come to see her eating disorder as gift -- a visible plea for help with her depression that might have otherwise gone untreated.

"I wouldn't wish (anorexia) on anyone," she says, "but it opened the door for me to look at what I needed to treat. I needed to look at all my misperceptions about the world and who I was in it -- whether I was programmed to fail."

As a result, she says, she has experienced a 180-degree turnaround in her baseline world view.

"I no longer see the world as an unfriendly place, a mean place," she says. "I see it as a good place."

What's more, Shavin explains, "The stories we tell about ourselves are not always true. If you are willing to challenge what you deeply believe to be true about yourself, you might be surprised at what you'll discover."

To suggest a human interest story contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.

Upcoming Events