Anorexia - a Personal Account

What exactly is anorexia? Anorexia Nervosa is an eating disorder that affects millions of people world wide on a daily basis. The affected person refusing to eat or take in any nutrition on a substantial basis is the chief characteristics of this disorder. I often wondered exactly how this disorder worked. The thought that someone would starve themselves often to the point of hospitalization or even death was just beyond my comprehension.

So, I set out to find someone affected by this disorder to try and get some idea of what went on in the mind of someone affected. I quickly found that one of my closest friends had suffered from this disorder for years, and the interview that follows are her responses to my questions about anorexia. She chose to remain anonymous in this interview, simply because she finds the disorder to be an embarrassment.

1. How do you get to a point where you decide that Anorexia is okay? What makes you decide to starve yourself? Well, it isn't exactly like you wake up one morning and say, okay today I am going to start starving myself to death. Actually, mine started out when I was 13, and it started out as just a diet.
2. Didn't your family notice a change? Of course they noticed. You have to understand, when I started my "diet", I weighed 118 lbs and was 5'4" tall.

   So, I wasn't big to begin with, but once I started losing weight everyone at school began telling me how great I looked. My parents were worried, but they thought it was just a phase I was going through at first, so they really didn't say that much to me about it.

3. When did they decide it wasn't just a phase? Well, I had stayed all night with a friend I was around 15 at the time and weighed about 95 lbs. We skipped school the next day, and I passed out just walking across the street. She immediately called my mom. My mom came to pick me up and my friend told her I had only ate 2 grapes in the last day and a half. I think that was when it really hit my mom that something was wrong.

   She cried all the way home, and told me if I didn't start eating she was going to have to put me in the hospital. She also told me that from that point on I would have to eat in front of her at home.

4. Didn't it ever occur to you that something was wrong with you? Not really. I mean I knew I ate a lot less than everyone else, but I had long ago decided everyone liked the "new" me better than they had the "old" me, and not eating was my way of maintaining a feeling of control. Everything else in my life seemed to be going crazy, I was running with a bad crowd and partying all the time, and I felt like the only way I would continue to fit in with my new crowd was to stay little.

   The only way I knew I could stay that small was to not eat, so that's what I did. Actually, contrary to what people believe when you don't eat for long enough you simply stop feeling hungry, and then you just forget to eat. At that point, eating has to become a conscious decision, and it was a decision I was not willing to make and risk gaining back the weight I had lost. Looking back, I know it is really all about self-esteem, that feeling that I had to look a certain way to fit in, but as a teenager it's hard to see that.

5. How did it go after that, when your mom started watching you eat? It didn't stop me it just made it more difficult.

   You have to understand, people with anorexia become very good at lying and very good at manipulating people in order to avoid eating. My mom would cook for me every afternoon, and every day I would tell her what I had just eaten, or would think of something to get her out of the kitchen so that I could get rid of the food without eating it.

6. How long did you go on like that? I continued that pattern throughout high school. When I graduated I weighed 93 lbs and wore a size 10 slim in little girls jeans. After high school I got married and it leveled off.

   I gained up to 103 lbs and was actually comfortable and didn't think about my weight.

7. So, you were cured? I don't think anyone is ever truly cured from anorexia. I did fine for about 3 years, and then my husband and me split up. Within 3 months of us splitting up I was down to 89 lbs, and my mom was again threatening to have me hospitalized.

   I started gaining weight about 6 months after that, and have done okay since. However, unlike most people when my life gets hectic or I get stressed it is really easy to slip back into old habits. Most people eat to calm their fears or when they are nervous.

   Me, I stop eating completely.

8. Do you think you will ever get over this? I think as long as I live anorexia will be a part of me. The tendency will always be there, now I just make a conscious choice that I am not going to do that to my family or myself.

   Truly, it always comes down to that, anyone suffering from anorexia has to make a conscious choice every day to give in to the disorder or not, and for now I am choosing not to give in. Now, that being said, depending on what life throws at me I know I may slip at any moment, and have to make that choice again.

During this interview, I learned a lot about a disorder that always intrigued me. I found that anorexia isn't truly a conscious decision on the part of the person suffering from it, but that to fight back they do have to make a conscious decision to eat.

The low self-esteem of most people suffering from this disorder simply compounds the problem, and contrary to popular belief they do not seem to walk around hungry all the time. In fact, judging from what my friend had to say, they feel like the only way they can maintain their happiness is to maintain their weight loss.

Anorexia is a very scary, heart breaking disorder. If you know anyone suffering from the disorder, please encourage them to get help. At the very least, offer them a shoulder to lean on, after all they are not doing this to themselves on purpose, they may not even realize that they have a problem.