By Rebecca Lester, Washington University in St. Louis
(Source: Yahoo! Life / The Conversation)
“No one expects a grown woman in her 40s to have an eating disorder. That’s for teenagers, right? Well, guess what – it happened to me.”
Alexa, a 44-year-old real estate agent, was telling me about her struggle with non-purging bulimia, which has come to control her life. We spoke in 2024 at a coffee shop as part of my ongoing research on eating disorders.
The names of my research subjects have been changed for this article to protect their identities.
“I didn’t understand what was happening for a long time,” Alexa said. “It didn’t even occur to me that it could be an eating disorder.”
She is not alone. A 2023 study estimated that over 9 million American women over 40 develop eating disorders. Some had eating disorders earlier in life and experience a resurgence at midlife. Others develop them for the first time in their 40s or older.
I am an anthropologist and licensed therapist who has researched and treated eating disorders for the past 30 years. I have also recovered from an eating disorder myself. I wrote a 2021 book about how contemporary clinical approaches to eating disorders can harm people and keep them sick. One of the things I uncovered in my research is that older women with eating disorders often fly completely under the radar, leading to increased health risks and even death.
My research leads me to conclude that this is due to health care providers’ misunderstanding of the cultural and existential factors affecting women in midlife, which can make this a time of increased risk of developing an eating disorder.
By the numbers
The numbers around eating disorders at midlife are sobering: Rates of eating disorders among middle-aged women have increased in recent years. As many as 13% of American women over 50 have eating disorder symptoms, slightly more than the percentage diagnosed with breast cancer.
One study found that 71% of women ages 30 to 74 wanted to be thinner, although 73% of them were at clinically normal weight for their height and age. Research shows that although anorexia, an eating disorder characterized by the severe restriction of calories, becomes less common after age 26, bulimia, where patients binge and then purge food from their bodies, doesn’t reach its peak until age 47. Binge eating disorder, or habitually eating excessive amounts in one sitting, can continue to plague women into their 70s.
