"A doctor interviewed in the film describes Winehouse’s death as a combination of alcohol poisoning and the weakened state of her body due to an eating disorder, but that assertion never made it into the official “cause of death” statement released to the public after Winehouse’s passing.
The impact of such technically accurate but holistically incomplete reporting is that the general population is not conditioned to perceive eating disorders—especially bulimia—as deadly.
Had Winehouse’s cause of death included the phrase “complications from bulimia,” the world would likely—or hopefully—have begun to engage in some very different, more complete conversations about health. The more our body-obsessed culture acknowledges the realities of eating disorders, the more we can hope to put the world on a path to a better and more accurate understanding of this devastating set of diseases, as well as the illnesses’ unique, complex sufferers. The unwillingness to truly regard Amy Winehouse’s eating disorder shows that we still have a long way to go."
Yeah that would’ve been good to talk about. I went back and they did mention it as one of the symptoms. I think Mitch saw it as her replacing one addiction with another rather than it being part of an eating disorder. It really is so hard to overcome and so easy to get into that mindset when you feel like you have no control in your life.
I don’t know much about bulimia so had never really understood the link between her face and her eating disorder. But yeah, now that I read that, I see it in every photo of Amy. Fuck.
There was a scene in the film, shot during Amy’s late teens, where the curves of Amy’s face look more round than they did when she was an adult. When I saw that, I thought that Amy was a bit more full-figured at that age, but now I realize that I might have been seeing swollen salivary glands. This makes me even more sad. Why couldn’t Amy see that she was beautiful and that there was no need to need to change anything. Why couldn’t she learn to love hersef?
