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Abstract
Discourse in support of the eating disordered “lifestyle” is grounded in the belief that eating disorders are lifestyle choices rather than diseases, a claim that is counter to popular and medical opinion. I analyze how the images and text on two “lifestyle” websites work together as “imagetexts” to make the unreasonable appear reasonable. Lifestyle imagetexts argue for similitude between the lifestyle philosophy and mainstream culture by mimicking culturally accepted symbols and self-consciously drawing attention to this mimicry. In this way, lifestyle imagetexts may be understood as performances of the contradictions in mainstream rhetoric rather than rational arguments about them.