Rosalind Wiseman

When you hear the term “eating disorder,” what image comes to mind?  For most, it’s an emaciated white female who appears to be on the brink of collapsing. In her autobiography, Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat, author Stephanie Covington Armstrong outright dispels that belief.  Covington Armstrong grew up hungry, poor, and fatherless in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.  Unable to provide adequate care and stability, her emotionally neglectful mother turned she and her 3 sisters over to the foster care system.

Bouncing around foster homes, she quickly learned to escape her pain through books and food.  In her early years, Covington Armstrong chose her friends based on the availability of afternoon snacks. Tragically, she eventually became the victim of sexual abuse.  Using starving, dieting, and reading, she quickly found a means to numb her emotions and out of control existence.  After experiencing heartbreak in her early 20’s, an article meant to provide information about the dangers of bulimia introduced her to a new world of self-destruction.

Feeling pressure to project the image of a strong Black woman, Covington Armstrong keeps her battle a secret.  She uses her race as an outright justification to continue to her destructive patterns. Physically and mentally exhausted from years of cyclic binging, purging, hiding, and starving, she finally joins a 12-step program. Covington Armstrong was raised with the belief that therapy is only for “crazy people,” and that support groups were something that only white people went to.  She embraced her fear and faced a room full of affluent white women to begin her journey of healing.

It’s not often I pick up a book and read it cover to cover, twice.

Covington Armstrong provides a raw, detailed testimony to the fact that eating disorders are not about food or weight, but a means of controlling a much larger issue.

In addition, it provides the important exclamation point that eating disorders never discriminate!

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