Or consider the words of a person like MeMe Roth, the president of National Action Against Obesity, whose “qualifications” to speak on the issue consist of being tall, thin, young, and blond, as well as consumed with fear and hatred of anyone not as thin as she is. Roth has been all over the airwaves attacking Smith, claiming that what people like him are “expecting us to do is to subsidize the lifestyle choices of those who habitually eat improperly,” as she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. In an interview last year with The Guardian, Roth compared eating food to being raped, and then suggested that this form of rape “is incredibly pleasurable” for the victim. “From a food marketer’s point of view,” she says, “when your quote-unquote victim is so willing and enjoying of the process, who’s fighting back?”

The unhinged quality of such insights set off some alarm bells in The Guardian reporter, who quizzed Roth about her own dietary habits. Roth claimed that she’s “never even been on a diet,” but then revealed she doesn’t eat breakfast, isn’t too crazy about lunch, and doesn’t like to eat until she’s run at least four miles. (Indeed, the interview was taking place in the middle of the afternoon, and Roth had eaten nothing that day.)

This, of course, is classic eating-disorder behavior. A survey of Roth’s pronouncements about food, fat, exercise, and so forth reveal a lifestyle that would seem to fit the profile of someone suffering from anorexia nervosa: an overwhelming obsession with maintaining thinness, a denial of the dangers associated with her behavior, and, in the words of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a tendency to “engage in compulsive rituals, strange eating habits, and the division of food into good/safe and bad/dangerous categories.”

via Leave Fat People Alone – The Daily Beast.