Food=beauty, according to former soccer player

Story published on the Women's Views on News website on February 3, 2012

Beauty x is a short ebook, from the Eat Campaign, a Facebook-based network of ‘beauty ambassadors’ and ‘right to eat activists’, which uses pictures and experiences of celebrities to warn and educate young women about the dangers of under-eating.

The book starts with a letter by the author, Ranko Tutulugdzija, to a young woman called Kristen, who is suffering from an eating disorder.

Tutulugdzija explains the medical impact of not eating – anaemia, followed by oedema, when the face and eventually the whole body swell up with fluid as the kidneys, weakened by lack of food, are unable to dispose of waste properly
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Food=beauty, he writes.

Tutulugdzij describes how he travelled to China to get treatment for the constant muscle pain and fatigue caused by over exercise and a protein-only diet, whilst on a college soccer scholarship.  He had no medical insurance, and taught English to get his visa.

He became very aware of how college girls in China, like young women all over the world, ate hardly anything.  They were losing their beauty, unlike the  older women he met, who at 60, looked more like 30.

He describes the psychological effects – fear, insomnia, panic attacks – operating in a kind of survival mode brought on by near starvation, and is concerned that many young women who present to doctors with these symptoms are prescribed anti-depressants, ignoring the real causes.

He warns against calorie counting, consuming ‘dead empty matter’  (foods full of processed white sugar), and eating just one type of food.

Unlike many nutritionists, he tells his readers not to worry about eating white rice or flour, as these are staples in countries like China.

The book is aimed not at those suffering severe anorexia, but at the millions of women and girls for whom under-eating is a way of life.

The campaign is clever in its use of social networking, celebrity and on-line activism to draw women away from dieting and the damage it can do, but does not move far enough away from the myth that beauty is all about being thin and looking young.

However, hopefully young women will follow the spirit, if not the letter, of his message.