Eating disorders are, in our collective consciousness, inextricably linked with fashion and imagery propagated by mass media. Following the changes in the past 10 years that have included dramatic increases in the numbers of eating disorders in adolescents and in men, a drop in the average size of fashion models from a 4 to a 0 and the high-profile deaths of two runway models due to complications arising from severe eating disorders, governments around the Western world have begun to respond by placing sanctions on the fashion industry and ‘pro-anorexia’ websites and calling out to media and advertisers to abstain from what they see as the spread of an unachievable beauty ideal that leads the public to eating disorders—in other words, to promise that they will stop selling us this sickness. But isn’t it the buyer who must beware?

Trisha Gura, in her 2008 book "Lying in Weight: The Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders in Adult Women", names as the primary cause of the problem: transition. Eating disorders are so commonly associated with models and the teenage girls seeking to emulate them that medicine and media have ignored those adult women who struggle with the disease in increasing numbers. Gura’s theory states that people who succumb to eating disorders do so during a key period of transition—puberty, pregnancy, a change in career or divorce. Amongthe women interviewed in the book, two developed anorexia at the ages of 68 and 92; both were in the middle of trying transitional periods related to the later years. Clearly, this disease has more faces than that of the latest adolescent celebrity scrutinized in a ‘Skin & Bones Shocker!’ tabloid article.