It is the most common eating disorder (EDD). However, you may have never heard of it. Binge eating disorder (or binge eating disorder) is a painful compulsion that results in the uncontrolled ingestion of large quantities of food, to the point of causing physical discomfort. For those who suffer from it, food is used both as comfort and a diversionary tool, with physical pain temporarily relieving and replacing psychological discomfort.
Overeating affects 3 to 5% of the French population, compared to 1.5% for bulimia and 1% for anorexia. However, this eating disorder is difficult to spot, including by people who suffer from it, which leads to frequent delays in diagnosis. Media representations – at worst grossophobic, at best non-existent – thus lead patients to assimilate their disorder to a simple problem of gluttony, an absence of will, or even a trait of their personality… It is difficult to know that we are suffering from an illness of which we are unaware of the existence.
“Simplistic and sensationalist portraits”
Lucy Bassett, who suffered from anorexia, is a professor and researcher at the University of Virginia in the United States. She conducted an investigation, published in September 2023 in the scientific journal Journal of Eating Disorders, on the representation of eating disorders in films and series, after noting the disparity between her own experience and what she saw on the screen. “I was someone with a TCA in my 40s, I went to the doctor and no one batted an eye. I don’t even think anyone noticed it. So I saw how stereotyping could affect the real world, including the medical world. However, it is through media representations that many people learn about the subject.”
She and her co-author Maya Ewart compiled all the characters in American pop culture affected by an eating disorder, from 1981 to 2022. The results confirmed their initial hypothesis: films and series offer “simplistic and sensationalist portraits of the CAW, which do not align with real data”.
“A preconceived idea conveyed by these productions is that you necessarily have to be fat to have hyperphagia, or to be thin to be anorexic or bulimic. Whereas the reality is more complex.”
Most of the time, the character suffering from an ED is “a young, rich, white, thin woman, while men, people of color, older people and LGBT+ people are under-represented in these media productions”. However, even if the statistics are still limited, men represent a third of cases of bulimia and almost a quarter of cases of anorexia. “Another preconceived idea conveyed by these productions is that you must necessarily be fat to have hyperphagia, or be thin to be anorexic or bulimic. Whereas the reality is much more complex than that.”
Clichés (very) far from reality
Anorexia nervosa is the disorder most represented on screen, although it is the least common in reality. We all have in mind media and cultural representations of anorexia: the books of Amélie Nothomb, the film I’m fine, don’t worryby Philippe Lioret (2006), or even Black Swanby Darren Aronofsky (2011). Bulimia is often mocked in pop culture, particularly in adolescent series and films, where it is portrayed as the favorite diet of mean girls (literally “naughty girls”): less an illness than a narcissistic quest for perfection. One of his most notorious victims is Blair Waldorf (played by Leighton Meester), the plague of the series. Gossip Girl (2007-2012). But when it comes to overeating, the situation is even more dramatic.
In pop culture, characters who eat a lot often do so for comedic purposes, when their excess weight is not used to emphasize their vileness, stupidity and indolence (think of the Dursley family in the saga Harry Potter). If they are fat, they are often adorned with prosthetics to accentuate their weight and portrayed as irrepressible gourmands. This is the case, for example, of Monica Geller (Courteney Cox) in the flashbacks of Friendsdressed in a magnifying suit and constantly covered in mayonnaise stains. If the character uses food to soothe some of his neuroses, this is never really explored.
As Lucy Bassett has observed, it is rare for pop culture to take an in-depth interest in the causes of EDs, whereas like many addictions, eating compulsions are most of the time the reflection of a psychological malaise which can have a multitude of sources: bereavement, trauma, anxiety, etc. In reality, many cases of obesity can be linked to overeating; the feminist intellectual Roxane Gay also addresses the subject in her book Hungry (published in France in 2019). However, the psychological cause of being overweight is almost never mentioned in works of fiction.
“There are repercussions for individuals who do not feel represented”
Worse, when overeating is explicitly depicted, it is in a crude, sensationalist and offensive manner. New horror film from the talented Australian-American director Natalie Erika James (to whom we notably owe Relicreleased in 2020), Saccharin has been visible in French cinemas since June 3, 2026.
It follows Hana (Midori Francis), a medical student who suffers from compulsive eating and hates her curvy body. Despite a promising subject, the film plunges from its first seconds into the worst grossophobic clichés, based on disgusting close-ups of the heroine’s face, covered in fat and sugar, or sound effects amplifying every sound of chewing and engulfing. (Did you know? You can be fat and eat a lot without getting it everywhere.) The monster that haunts Hana in the film is an obese corpse. Images which, far from arousing empathy, favor a gratuitous shock, instead of exploring the interiority of the heroine.
This is not the only example. In 2022, The Whaleby Darren Aronofsky, told the story of the last days of a 272 kilo man, played by Brendan Fraser with the help of a prosthesis and special effects. From the dark and menacing music to the sound design, including the camera movements and the actor’s gestures, all the aesthetic choices contribute to making the character a beast, a grotesque monster as fascinating as it is repulsive.
These violent and extreme representations lead to stigmatization of those who really suffer from overeating and contribute to the lack of understanding of this disorder. “People will say to themselves: “Well, I’m not like that, I’m not grotesque”analyzes Lucy Bassett. There are repercussions for individuals who don’t feel represented, who don’t even understand that they might be affected too, and may say, “I’m not doing what the person on the screen is doing, so I don’t have a problem.” However, we know that TCAs are already intrinsically linked to denial, to the voices that tell us that we are doing the right thing, that we should not talk about it. So these bad representations reinforce this feeling and it’s dangerous.”
Some downsides on the series side
Despite everything, are there good representations of overeating in pop culture? We think of the very beautiful film A Ghost Storyby David Lowery (2017). In this drama about grief, a young woman played by Rooney Mara suddenly becomes a widow. During a long sequence, she eats, bite by bite, an entire pie left by a friend. Filmed in wide shot, without any sensationalism, the sequence perfectly illustrates the emotional emptiness and pain of the character, who does not eat out of hunger but as a compensatory mechanism.
Perhaps the best portrayals of eating disorders are found in series, which have the luxury of developing their characters over many episodes. In Mad Men (2007-2015), the character of Betty Draper (January Jones) experiences considerable weight gain in season 5. In a series which gives so much importance to addiction, Betty’s relationship with food is also represented as compulsive, marked by shame and suffering.
For anorexia, it’s impossible not to cite the British series Skins (2007-2013) and the memorable character of Cassie, played by Hannah Murray.
Lucy Bassett also talks about the series Heartstopper (broadcast since 2022) and the character Charlie (Joe Locke), who suffers from anorexia. “He represents one of the populations most at risk and yet underrepresented in fiction: a gay man, even if he remains white, middle class and thin, and therefore does not break all the clichés. Contrary to stereotypes, the cause of his illness is not the desire to lose weight, but his anxiety and psychological disorders.indicates the American researcher. To ensure the story was authentic, the series team worked with Beat, the UK’s largest eating disorder charity.
When Lucy Bassett is asked what remains to be done to better represent eating disorders, she takes a moment to reflect on the scale of the issue. “The media has a responsibility and the opportunity to tell more nuanced stories. It’s a real shame, because we have improved a lot in our representation of mental health in general. But on the TCA, for the moment, we are struggling.”
