Primary+Sources

Setnick, Jessica. //An RD Confesses: “I Had Bulimia”//. Fitnessmagazine.com, Mar. 2006. Web. 8 May 2011. < []>. ** *Please note: This link shows the first page of the story only, use the “Pages in this story” menu on the right to navigate to the other pages **

Jessica Setnick is a nutritionist/dietician with ten years of experience who attended Texas Woman’s University and works with individuals with eating disorders. She combines her education with her own personal experience of overcoming bulimia. She works with children, teens, and adults to help them have a healthy relationship with food. The article is a report on her struggle to overcome bulimia that addresses its possible causes and her changing relationship with food. The article is for the layperson; it is in a popular magazine and does not use technical language.

Setnick’s article is more informational than thesis-driven; she seeks to share her battle with bulimia from its roots in her childhood to its end. Setnick organizes her arguments chronologically, with interjections of knowledge from her career including statistics and information on bulimia. She starts by discussing her childhood- sneaking snacks in kindergarten, getting sympathy for the occasional self-induced stomachache, the pressure placed on her for perfect grades by her father, and his death when she was 12. Her struggles in college to achieve perfection, unable to satisfy this drive during her grades, she turned her attention to having an “ideal” body. She outlines how she would not eat anything considered fattening in front of her friends, but after they went to sleep, she would go to the kitchen and gorge herself on the snacks. Seeing her weight slowly increase as a result, she would promise herself to “do better” avoiding the foods the next day. Soon, her weight became an obsession, after she found out how to use vomiting and excessive exercise to purge herself of her food; she was a healthy weight, but still wanted to lose more. She also obsessed over keeping her habits secret, but it was when her mother stated to question her suspicious activity that she started to realize she needed to stop. She was mostly able to quit her bingeing and purging cycle herself, but she still felt the need to vomiting response to emotional stress. For this she saw a therapist who helped hr realize her eating disorder had been an attempt to cope with stress. Occasionally, Setnick still struggles with these feelings. She then cites how culture plays a role in extreme dieting and eating disorders- people want to be physically “better”, which in this culture, means thinner. She then describes the methods she uses to help her clients.

Setnick’s evidence in the article mostly relies on her own experience- a firsthand account of an eating disorder. However, she also includes a few statistics about bulimia and its impact on the body and how many with the disorder are aware of its destructiveness. Her evidence of internal stressors that triggered her own condition, the statistics on bulimia, and her discussion of what “better” means in this culture helped to support my arguments- both family and media issues contributed to her condition.

The work is very clear, logical and easy to follow. Her information in this case is her firsthand account of having an eating disorder, which is the entirety of the article, making it very well-researched. Tracing her condition from childhood to present day, Setnick adequately addresses her topic. Setnick is neither entirely objective nor biased. Her piece is very emotional, but also simply seeks to inform the audience about how difficult a struggle it was for her.

From this source, I learned about the difficult struggles of overcoming and eating disorder and how these behaviors first appear. The specific evidence Setnick provides that supports my argument is the triggers of such a condition and the specific statistics regarding the prevalence and destruction of this eating disorder. The information in this source helped me develop my argument by helping me see what could possibly be going on in the thought processes of someone with this disorder.