Randoms on Starving Secrets

So I sort of just want to write a post so that the last unhappy one isn't on top anymore.  Last weekend was pretty bad, but things have been a lot calmer and more peaceful since then.  I just wish I understood my moods sometimes. I weigh the exact same this morning--to the ounce--that I did on Sunday, and yet my body anxiety is an order of magnitude lower.  Yeah dunno.

As one ever-astute commenter asked, which came first, the fighting with Match or the unhappy body image? I don't honestly know, sometimes it's a snowball type phenomenon and it feels like a chicken vs egg situation (wow, how many other cliches can I fit into one sentence?).  I think sometimes more than one type of stress can just hit at once and it the resulting emotions are exponential rather than additive. And yes, I'm a nerd, hopefully you knew that already.

One variable I could tentatively pick out regarding the god-awful body day, with no assurance that was actually causal, is watching 'Starving Secrets,' the new Tracey Gold series that is basically Intervention for EDs (even though Intervention does ED cases periodically also).  So I guess it's ED Intervention for the Lifetime Channel with an Ex-Child Star Host.

Objectively, I think that it has a lot fewer triggerpoints than many other things I have seen/read, but "triggering" is such an overwhelmingly subjective descriptor that it is rarely the same for any two people, or for the same person on any two occasions. I think the trigger factor often has a lot (not all) to do with what's going on inside someone's head rather than what they're seeing on the screen or page. I think that it was just a bad weekend for me to watch the show.

I know there has been a lot of press and controversy over this show.  I think, as most people have opined, that there are some things that are done well and some that aren't.

• I hated that they revealed any numbers.  Yes the woman was skinny as fuck, we can tell that without you giving it to us quantitatively.
• One review that I read (sorry I can't remember which one, speak up for credit if you wrote it!) pointed out that they gave the weight of the woman with anorexia and not the young woman with bulimia. I'm not sure if it was a permission issue from the women themselves, or if they simply didn't think the weight of the person with bulimia was shocking enough. 

• You see what I did there? A woman with anorexia.  It bugged me that they were simply labeled "anorexic" and "bulimic" under their names like a title.  The behaviors are anorexic and bulimic.  The women are people with a disease.

• I was VERY glad that they didn't do any exploitative body shots.  I have seen some episodes of Intervention that included scenes with an ED sufferer in a state of revealing undress that almost certainly had to be staged for the purpose of parading her clavicles and ribs around.  Newsflash: at those low weights most people live in a state of bundling limited only by the necessity to bend one's arms.  If bones turn you on then go look at an anatomy textbook, and get some therapy on your way.

• I have to admit that I had an incessant fascination with Tracey Gold when I was a teenager.  I had been a huge fan of Growing Pains in middle school, and it wasn't until later that I found out she had had an ED--and by that time, when I was dealing with one myself, it made me feel some kind of ill-defined but powerful connection to her story.  I think I watched her E! True Hollywood Story episode every weekend for a few years of high school.
•  So I am not a TG hater.  But I hated the way they handled her involvement in the show.  She does voiceovers, visits to the patients, and then little feature spots where she's just sitting there talking.  The thing is, she does the "sitting there talking on camera" parts EXACTLY as if she is doing a voice-over, and is obviously reading from a prompter.  The irritation of this might not be clear unless you've seen someone doing this.  Voice overs are often kind of halting, dramatic, emphatic, whatever, because you don't have the person's face and body language to go by.  But doing the same narration style when we can see you just doesn't work. Especially when you're an actress and we know you know how to handle a camera. Sorry TG.

• I liked that they actually showed some of the treatment process. On Intervention, you invariably see the person dropped off at the treatment center and meeting the staff, and then it's suddenly 2-6 months later and you either see them being discharged successfully or you get a screen-text update about how they flunked out of rehab.  The most important part of the entire process--the healing and dealing--is completely glossed over.  I don't want video of every part of every therapy session, but I am glad that at least a good bit of time was given to showing just how complex it is to give up a lifestyle that you've been married to for years.

• One point that I've tried to hold onto as the take-home message from that first episode came from the last interview with the woman in recovery from anorexia, where she has (SPOILER ALERT) finished her residential treatment and looks amazingly more healthy and happy.  TG asks her how she feels about her weight, and she says that she's not always happy with her body at that stage, but that it is more than a fair trade-off considering the fact that she essentially just won her life back and is able to enjoy friends, family, and being her true self for the first time in many years.  Damn skippy, and a message that I'm really going to try to reassure myself with on future bad body days.

So those are my extremely random thoughts about the show. If any of you watched it, what did y'all think?  I don't want to imply that I'm saying anyone should or shouldn't watch it, btw, as with anything like this, Handle with Care if you are still struggling at all.