It had never occurred to me what a complete and total lack of perspective is involved in anorexia nervosa. I mean, yeah, they starve themselves to be thin. I can totally see that. They tend to percieve themselves as fat, even when they’re not. Well, my body image fluctuates from day to day, and if I somehow got stuck in “Oh my god, I’m hideous mode,” I might do something drastic, too (though knowing me, it would probably involve obscene amounts of Ben & Jerry’s, not starvation.)
I watched this episod of Nova last night, and it had a great deal of information about the latest research into the biological causes/symptoms of anorexia.
It also had some amazing interviews. One anorexic teenager said that she got the idea to be anorexic from a movie about Karen Carpenter. She watched this whole movie about a woman who tragically starved herself to death, and what she took away was, “Hey, what a nifty idea! I could starve myself!” For some reason, the death part either didn’t sink in, or was not the least deterent.
Another woman recovering from bulimia said that she and her anorexic and bulimic friends would read self-help books about the diseases in order to pick up “tips” from the stories of the horrific things other sufferers had done to themselves to be thin.
Wow.
I guess the moral is, folks, don’t try to help your daughters (or sons, for that matter) by giving them anti-anorexia/bulimia materials! Oh, and watch that episode of Nova, if you’re interested in this subject. It was fascinating. And contained no “tips.”
I recall reading about censorship on the Internet of “pro-ana” websites advocating eating disorders.
Girls with anorexia often team up, exchange tips, and reinforce each other’s dangerous behavior. Internet technology helps them do this anonamously and in great numbers. New sites spring up as soon as old ones are shut down by ISP’s.
I have been anorexic. I don’t remember trying to learn tips. There is a guy in my office though that is. He and I have talked and he says he gets tempted to try new stuff to make it better meaning get himself thinner.
I was also anorexic, and I looked EVERYWHERE for new ideas. How to hide it, how to pretend that I was eating when I wasn’t, how I could evade all the food questions.
I just knew that I was too smart to die from it. Teens are too smart to die, in their minds, at least. I knew all about nutrition, but I thought I knew better than those dieticians. I knew my own body, and I took in 200-300 calories a day. I read all the magazines, and I read all the books about it. To lose weight, you just need to work off more calories than you consume. So I did.
I was wrong about a lot of it, but at the time, I absolutely knew I was too smart. I could balance my minimal caloric needs against my caloric output… yadda yadda. I hit 69 pounds and I was proud that my ribs were plainly visible when I wore a bikini at the pool. Gah, I shudder to see pictures of myself at that stage now, but at the time, I thought I was HOT!
Even today, 16 years later, I still find myself looking for hard-core weight-loss tips. And I refuse to diet, or even weigh myself. I’m a perfectly normal weight for my size, and smallish by most female standards. But I still look for those anorexic tips… Sad, I agree.
As a young’un, I read a lot of books about eating disorders and a few of them mentioned that some girls choose suicide via starvation. In some cases, death is either a desirable outcome, or they are indifferent as to whether they live or die.
Yeah, if you really want to be shocked, do a search for “pro-ana.” If you’re on Livejournal, there are a number of communities there.
Anybody else find it annoying how there’s an article about anorexia or bulimia in every other teen magazine? We get free magazines from frequent flier miles or something in my family, and the selection is crap, so my parents just sign up for whatever. I’m way more disturbed reading those magazines than I am about any pro-ana site you could show me. Why are they telling these girls in practically every magazine exactly what these people did to lose weight (with a couple paragraphs at the end about consequences), and then show pictures of skinny girls throughout the rest of the magazine? And then some of them devote one page to separate fashions for “big” girls and that’s viewed at good?
I’ve started just throwing them out as they come in. Teen mags are just trash.
Wow. I just googled for pro-ana and explored some message boards. At first I was disturbed but eventually just saddened. There are some crazy opinions running around those threads. I tend to believe that any kind of support is beneficial, so I’m glad that people with ed’s are finding communities of like-minded others. I imagine that eating disorders can easily breed loneliness and guilt. Better to have a disease and friends than have a disease alone.
The risk of people learning tips and tricks from open discussion about eating disorders does not outweigh the importance of bringing general understanding of ed’s to the attention of the public.
In general, I would agree with this statement. However, ‘support’ is not what a lot of these sites are about. If you stay within any of the communities over a span of time, you will see that there does tend to be competition, the spread of destructive ‘tips’, cliquishness, etc. These are not the friends a person with an ED needs. this is not support for recovery, but for further immersion into the world of anorexia.
It’s a common problem on hospital units or in ED groups that this type of situation will happen, but this is just that on a larger scale. As the mother of a girl AND as someone who was anorexic and bulimic, this frightens me to no end.