ABSTRACT
Becca’s story isn’t exceptional. Although a clinician would rightly diagnose “atypical anorexia nervosa”, her type-denying case is anything but atypical. Through in-depth interviews with 22 recovered anorexics (20 female, 2 male) in Tennessee and Toronto, we repeatedly heard type-denying cases. 2 So did Garrett ( 1998 ) who, in interviewing 34 Australian anorexics, found vanity did not explain the disease; and Warin ( 2010 ) whose 46 anorexics at three sites (Australia, Scotland, Canada) repeatedly told her “anorexia was not solely concerned with food and weight”. It’s the same for clinicians in Asia (Khandelwal, Sharan and Saxena 1995 ; Lee, Ho and Hsu 1993 ), not to mention the U.S. (Katzman and Lee 1997 ; Palmer 1993 ), who fi nd many patients neither fear fat nor crave thinness as “typical” anorexics should. Indeed, what the public and many professionals have come to expect-women dieting madly for appearance-does not adequately explain cases on either side of the globe.
