The Dangerous Reality of Midlife Women and Eating Disorders

We’re 50 going on 15. Only we have more to lose. Literally.

Vanessa Torre
7 min readJun 18, 2023
Photo by Engin Akyurt via Pexels

Let me come out swinging. There is something going on with women in midlife and we need to talk about it. Why? Because currently, there are more women over 50 (13%) suffering from symptoms of eating disorders than there are suffering from breast cancer (12%).

An article came across in a Google alert about increasing reports of the likelihood of midlife women having an eating disorder. It’s shocking because, even as the article states, eating disorders are usually something that we associate with teenage girls.

We don’t think about eating disorders in terms of something that a smart, successful woman in the middle of her life could possibly endure. But here we are.

Though it may be shocking, it’s not actually that surprising if you give it 3.4 seconds of thought.

In digging a little deeper I found several different studies and articles that are reiterating the same concern about women in midlife and everything seems to make so much sense and is so obvious.

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Vanessa Torre

Top 10 feminist writer. Writing, coaching, and relentlessly hyping women in midilfe. linktr.ee/Vanessaltorre Email: vanessa@vanessatorre.com