Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski has a book hitting stores tomorrow titled Obsessed: America’s Food Addiction — And My Own. She talked about the project this morning on her own show, as well as Today, and a lot of what she had to say was great, and made perfect sense. For instance: “The obesity crisis in America is not because people are undisciplined or because people are slobs,” Brzezinski insists. “We have to stop judging people who are struggling with their weight.” Damn right. Agreed. That said, Let’s be careful about diagnosing every overweight or obese person as addicted to food or having an eating disorder. That’s just not true.
Brzezinski does have an eating disorder, however, although perhaps you’d never know it. She’s fully aware of how it looks, being the thin, well-kempt TV personality, talking about obesity; she writes: “How does a person who is not overweight write about her lifelong obsession with overeating without sounding like a narcissistic, woe-is-me skinny girl?” She is quite candid about her food issues in excerpts from the book; for her, binge-eating was a way of life:
For years, I suffered from an almost uncontrollable urge to eat certain foods. My disordered eating patterns extended from late nights in high school, when I would jam two or three Big Macs down my throat, to all-night eating sessions alone in my dorm room, to an Ambien-addled night when I walked downstairs as if in a trance, in front of my horrified husband, who watched me scarf down an entire jar of Nutella with my bare hands.
After binge-eating, Brzezinski would go on long, “punishing” runs. She also had bouts of bulimia.
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