The Unbound Book Festival is coming up this weekend, and KBIA has been talking to featured writers in a series we're calling "Unbound Conversations." Find the rest of them here.
Lisa Knopp was set to to revisit her 2016 book, Bread: A Memoir of Hunger, at this year's Unbound Book Festival. However, festival organizers have shared that Knopp has been prevented from attending because of a last-minute emergency.
Bread: A Memoir of Hunger explores Knopp's experience with disordered eating, or what she nicknames her “malady.” Knopp examines her malady from all angles: social, genetic, emotional and familial. This is all to understand the gray area between the umbrella of disordered eating and an official diagnosis, where countless individuals reside.
KBIA's Scout Hudson sat down with Knopp prior to her departure from Unbound to reflect on Bread amid our current age of GLP-1s and diet culture. Here's an excerpt from their conversation:
Scout Hudson: There's this distance between official diagnoses of eating disorders and the more common, gray area of disordered eating. I was hoping you could expand on those two different categories and how they relate to each other.
Lisa Knopp: The thing about eating disorders, if you look at the history of them, if you look in the DSM — every time there is a new edition, they’ve changed. And so, somebody who may have qualified as [having] an eating disorder at one point doesn’t anymore. I don’t want to put too much stake in an official diagnosis. People with disordered eating can suffer mightily and they can die from it.
"I think it’s important to have a name for what's happening to us."Lisa Knopp
There’s been more written about eating disorders, awareness, et cetera, but when it came out, there were so many people that read the book and said to me, “I’m so grateful. I did not know,” — they had never heard of disordered eating. And they said, “I have that! I didn’t know there was a name for it. I just thought it was my personal stuff.” And a couple of women were in tears over it, just the gratitude of knowing that what they had was real, even though it wasn’t an official diagnosis. And I think that’s important. I think it’s important to have a name for what's happening to us.
Hudson: Absolutely. I think that you touched on this really profoundly in one of those earlier chapters, where you cite psychologist Judith Rodin, “one in 20 adults almost have anorexia.” So it might not be qualifying as a full eating disorder, but that’s such a large chunk of the population and likely an underreported population that is in that territory of disordered eating.
Knopp: Right. And among older and elderly women, too, that is the eating disorder and disordered eating that we see among them. They’re not eating.
Hudson: How do you see GLP-1s fitting into this gray area?
Knopp: Well, I will say first off [that] I know people who have wanted to lose weight all their lives and finally they have. And I think they really are in a healthier place than they were, at least physically. The problem with a GLP-1 is that you never address the triggers and the reasons for the disordered eating. It seems to me that it’s blurring your ability to know when you’re hungry and full. It’s interfering with your body's signals, there.
It seems like we're in the middle of a huge social experiment right now with so many people taking these drugs and really changing their sizes. And of course, in the hands of people with eating disorders, there is a big problem there.
