The prevalence of “The White Girl Disorder” in Brown communities

Let’s face it: if you’re a Brown woman or the daughter of immigrant parents, you’re probably not coming to therapy for help with an eating disorder. Instead, you’re coming to therapy because you want to reclaim your life. You want to have more control and autonomy over your own decisions, separate from what your family and culture tells you to do. As a licensed therapist who is also a Brown woman and the daughter of immigrant parents, I get it. My relationship with food and body was almost never the focus in my personal therapy experience. But it was something that came up alongside guilt, shame, and disgust in other areas of my life. For many Brown women, therapy isn’t about an eating disorder, disordered eating, or relationship to food and body, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not active themes in our lives.

When we talk about eating disorders, the image that often comes to mind is painfully narrow: thin, white, teenage girls obsessed with weight loss. This stereotype lacks context, creates stigma, and enforces silence, especially for Brown American women and daughters of immigrant parents who have been struggling silently for years without language, support, or recognition.

Eating disorders and disordered eating affect women across races, cultures, and body sizes. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, research shows that women of color experience eating disorders at rates comparable to white women, sometimes even at higher rates, yet they are significantly less likely to be diagnosed, referred to care, or taken seriously by providers. For adult daughters of immigrant parents, the risk is often compounded by chronic stress, perfectionism, intergenerational trauma, and unrelenting cultural expectations. At the same time, many Brown women and daughters of immigrant parents feel discouraged to seek out eating disorder support due to stigma that it’s a “white girl disease”.

In many Brown families, eating disorders are heavily stigmatized. They might be dismissed as a “white girl disorder,” misunderstood as vanity, or outright denied as something that could ever happen “in our community.” In fact, many Brown communities don’t believe that it’s an issue that’s relevant to us. Mental health struggles and disordered eating are often reframed as a lack of gratitude or resilience. This silence doesn’t protect us. It isolates us.

When Brown women finally reach out for help, they’re often met with Western therapy models and eating disorder treatment centers that feel cold, clinically rigid, and culturally disconnected. These spaces may put a huge focus on the eating disorder itself rather than the underlying cultural factors that reinforce them. They might prioritize weight charts, meal plans, and symptom compliance while overlooking family and power dynamics, cultural shame, racism, colorism, and the emotional labor placed on immigrant daughters. For many, treatment feels more like surveillance than healing for a population of women that already struggle with freedom and autonomy. The last thing we need is yet another adult telling us what to do and giving advice that doesn’t work for us.

This is why it’s so important to say this clearly: eating disorders for Brown girls aren’t always about body image. Often, they’re about control, shame, disgust, autonomy, and survival. And when we understand that, healing becomes possible.

The symptom, not the cause

One of the most liberating shifts in eating disorder recovery is realizing that the eating disorder itself is not the root problem, but that it’s a symptom of much larger ones. An eating disorder is a coping strategy and a behavioral response to something much deeper.

For many daughters of immigrants, food becomes a language when emotions were never allowed to be spoken. Eating disorders are not about vanity; they’re about regulation. They are attempts to manage anxiety, numb emotional pain, create predictability, or reclaim a sense of power in environments where control feels constantly threatened. For many Brown women, having freedom and autonomy feels like a privilege. When we try to exercise autonomy in our lives, our communities and families meet us with resistance. Often the competing narrative is, “Why do you want to be a white girl so bad?” As if only white women are allowed to have freedom and autonomy. Freedom is treated as a “Western” concept.

Let’s challenge a few stigmatizing narratives:

Eating disorders are not always about wanting to be thin
Not everybody who has an eating disorder is thin
Not everybody with an eating disorder wants to lose weight
You don’t have to hate your body to have an eating disorder
You can be successful, high-achieving, and still deeply struggling
You can love food and still have disordered eating

Shame and disgust often sit at the core of eating disorder patterns. Shame tells you that something is inherently wrong with you. Disgust creates distance from your body, your needs, your hunger, your desires. Control steps in as a promise of relief: If I can just do this right, I’ll finally feel safe.

And here’s the part that often gets missed in Western therapy: wanting control makes sense. When your life has been shaped by constant monitoring, comparison, and expectations, control becomes a survival strategy, not a flaw. For many Brown cultures, control is the power dynamic that’s present in family interactions. Everyone’s allowed to control your future, but you’re not allowed to have control over yourself. Having control gives us certainty that things will be okay, especially if you’re not used to having control over your life.

If you’ve ever felt out of control in your family, relationships, career, or identity, it is completely understandable that your nervous system would reach for something, anything, that feels manageable.

The chase for freedom

Many Brown American women grow up believing that control is freedom. But that belief didn’t come out of nowhere.

In immigrant households, especially for eldest daughters, autonomy is often restricted early on. Decisions about education, relationships, marriage, appearance, and even emotions are tightly regulated. Privacy is limited. Independence is conditional. Obedience is rewarded. You’re told that you’ll finally have freedom once you’re married. That was what was promised to our mothers. Instead, our mothers found power and control in being able to exert control over us and over their daughters-in-law.

In these environments, autonomy can feel dangerous or “selfish”. So instead, control becomes the substitute. Our parents cope with anxiety through controlling us. We learn how to cope with anxiety by controlling what we eat, how we eat, how much we eat, and what we do with the food we ate later.

Eating disorder behaviors can offer a false sense of freedom:

“This is mine and mine only”
“No one else gets to decide this”
“This is how I take up space without asking permission”
“This is the one area of my life I get to have decisions for myself”

For women who were taught to be accommodating, food and body control can feel like rebellion without confrontation. It’s quiet, invisible, and deeply isolating.

But control is not the same as freedom. Control is rigid and punishing. Autonomy is flexible and compassionate. Control narrows your world; autonomy expands it. Autonomy is about letting go of control, and learning how to live without grasping onto it.

Understanding this distinction through a trauma-informed and culturally responsive lens helps shift the question from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What happened to me?”, and “What am I trying to protect?”

Shame and disgust

Shame is often the emotional inheritance of immigrant households, even when love and sacrifice are present. Many adult daughters of immigrants grow up internalizing the belief that their worth is conditional and dependent on achievement, respectability, and compliance.

Cultural expectations around gender, success, and femininity can amplify this shame. Brown women are expected to be grateful, selfless, thin (but not too thin), curvy (but not curvy in the wrong places), ambitious (but not intimidating), modern (but not disrespectful to the culture), traditional (but not so traditional that you stick out like a sore thumb in America). These contradictions create a constant sense of failure and never feeling culturally “enough”.

Layer racism and sexism on top of that, and shame becomes embodied. Brown women’s bodies are policed, exoticized, or erased. We’re taught implicitly and explicitly that our bodies are too much or not enough at the same time.

Colorism plays a particularly harmful role. Messages that lighter skin is more desirable or worthy can deeply impact body image and self-worth. Sometimes these messages make being tan “okay”, but not too tan that you’re visibly and uncomfortably “too Brown” to fit in. Or, that you’re allowed to be dark, but you can’t be dark and in a bigger body at the same time. For many Brown women, disgust towards their bodies isn’t just personal, it’s cultural, historical, and rooted in racist perceptions that Brown bodies are disgusting. For Indian and Indian American women and men, this might look like the internalized belief that our foods and our bodies are “smelly” and “gross”.

Eating disorders can emerge as attempts to manage this disgust. To disappear, become acceptable, fit in, and control what feels uncontrollable. None of this means you’re weak. It means you’re trying to adapt in a world that forces you to assimilate to survive.

Control vs. autonomy

Control and autonomy are often confused, especially in healing spaces that don’t understand cultural context. Control is rooted in fear and survival and it’s a coping skill for anxiety. It relies on rigidity, rules, and punishment. Autonomy is rooted in trust: trust in your body, your emotions, and your right to choose.

In culturally responsive and trauma-informed therapy, the goal isn’t to take control away from you. That would only recreate the same powerlessness many Brown women experienced growing up. Instead, therapy explores why control feels necessary and how to build safety without self-harm. Letting go of control is not giving up; it’s reclaiming agency. True autonomy allows for choice, flexibility, and self-respect. It means you get to decide what healing looks like for you.

Trauma-informed eating disorder therapy respects individual autonomy around food and body. It understands that recovery is not about forcing body positivity or rigid compliance, but about restoring trust, discernment, and informed decision-making for a group of women who have been deprived of this right.

What culturally responsive eating disorder therapy support is like

A culturally responsive therapist understands that eating disorders don’t exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by family systems, cultural values, racism, immigration stress, and intergenerational trauma.

Rather than making food the sole focus, therapy centers the emotional experiences underneath:

Control: how does the desire for control dictate decision-making in your relationships, including the one you have with yourself?
Shame: what shame-based narratives are hard for you to sit with? What does shame tell you about yourself?
Disgust: what parts of your identity evoke disgust? Where did you learn to feel disgust?
Anxiety: how do you sit with the fear of uncertainty and the unknown?
Identity conflict: what does it mean to be “Brown” enough? What does it look like to be “too Brown”? What does it mean to be a “good girl”?

Eating disorder symptoms are assessed and held with care, but they are not treated as the entirety of who you are. In culturally responsive eating disorder treatment, your eating disorder is not the focus of therapy. Instead, a culturally informed therapist who has experience with eating disorders might explore:

Your guilt and boundaries in relationships, especially with immigrant parents and family
Anxiety in romantic and platonic friendships and relationships
Perfectionism and imposter syndrome at work and in career
Comparison with other Brown women who are successful and accomplished
Fear of taking up space or being seen due to fear of attack or criticism

By addressing these root issues, disordered eating patterns often soften naturally. Healing becomes integrated into your whole life, not confined to food logs or weight goals.

This approach feels warmer, more relational, and more humane than traditional Western therapy models for eating disorder support. It honors your lived experience instead of pathologizing it, and focuses on the bigger picture.

Progress, not perfection

Being a Brown woman with an eating disorder does not mean you are broken. It does not mean healing has to feel overwhelming or clinically rigid. In fact, you don’t have to make your eating disorder symptoms the focus of therapy if you don’t want to. Let’s face it: you’re probably coming to therapy because you need help establishing your own life separate from your parents. Working on these underlying mechanisms of control, shame, and guilt can indirectly address your eating disorder symptoms.

Recovery is not about perfection. You don’t have to love your body. You don’t have to give up control all at once. And you don’t have to have everything figured out before asking for support.

Progress with culturally responsive eating disorder support might look like:

Curiosity instead of judgment
Choice instead of compulsion
Compassion instead of shame
Informed decision-making instead of obedience

If you’re a Brown American woman or daughter of immigrants struggling with disordered eating, perfectionism, anxiety, or control, you deserve support that understands your cultural context.

Do you want more autonomy over your life? Book your free intro call if you’re interested in trauma-informed and culturally responsive therapy support for eating disorders. This is a gentle first step; no pressure, no commitment, just space to explore what culturally-informed healing can look like for you outside of the Western lens.

You don’t have to keep carrying this alone. Healing is possible and it can honor all parts of who you are.

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