Does Jewish Culture and Religion Make Women Prone to Eating Disorders?

Potato
knishes, challah bread, rugulah pastries — face it, Jewish people have
some tempting food options. And with weekly Shabbat and tons of
food-filled holidays, not to mention a widely held penchant for
food-pushing matriarchs, Jewish women are not culturally positioned to
be effortlessly slender.

Though conversations surrounding food
and holiday traditions are usually jovial, there is a serious issue at
hand here — Jewish women, with culturally prescribed days of feast and
fasting, are at risk for eating disorders. This is why the
Renfrew Center Foundation, the country’s largest eating disorder
treatment network, this week brought to Dallas a seminar titled Food, Body Image, and Eating Disorders in the Jewish Community. 

About
30 mental health professionals gathered at the Crescent Club in Uptown
to hear two experts speak on the subject. Adrienne Ressler, the National
Training Director for the Renfrew Center and a body image specialist,
said that observant Jewish women are prone to suppressing their desires
to adhere to cultural and religious expectations and requirements. “In
Jewish tradition, we want to be the brightest, we want to be the best,
and sometimes that gets taken so far,” she said. “They may
feel that they can’t control their life, but they can control their
weight.”

Marjorie Feinson, PhD, a consultant for the Renfrew Center and the principal investigator for a study on eating disorders and abuse among
women in Israel, told the group that in her
community survey, 15.2 percent of women had seriously disordered eating
and 28 percent had considerably disordered eating, as defined by a list
of clinical symptoms. Feinson said that the numbers she found through
her study in Israel are consistent with data she’s examined about the
general population in the United States. Another significant number the
researcher noted was that 64 percent of those with seriously disordered
eating had experienced either mental, physical or sexual abuse. That’s
huge. 

“These are not people in  treatment,” Feinson stressed.
Surprising to some  was the fact that anorexia and bulimia are far less
prevalent than binge eating. And binge eating is largely overlooked
because it is not formally defined as a clinical disorder, though this is expected to change. Obesity epidemic?
Yes, this is all interconnected.

Toward the end of Feinson’s
morning lecture, she told the story of an obese woman in Israel who came
to her for help. The woman was a binge eater, and when Feinson told her
to avoid the kitchen as much as possible, she balked. The woman had 13 adult children and was responsible for cooking Shabbat dinner
for them and their families. The preparation would start days ahead of
the weekly holiday, and trays of delicious foods would be around all the
time, ripe for picking. Baking was the hardest thing for her. She was
more concerned about the misery of preparing challah while struggling to
control her eating than she was with more serious health concerns. Her
eating habits were simply not healthy. They were out of control. 

Finally,
through conversations with Feinson, the woman came to the conclusion
that it would help her immensely to start recovery by giving her
daughter the duty of baking the challah bread. Small steps like this,
Feinson said, are integral to recovery.

Wrapping up her lecture,
Feinson lightened the mood, drawing participants’ attention to a
beautiful breakfast spread. “So, having said that, I invite you to have
some breakfast,” she said.