Dear Ana Thinspo

I see you on Xanga. I see you on Myspace. You're obsessively counting calories from the moment you wake to the moment you go to bed. You even count that piece of gum you were chewing in Homeroom. Well, that is if you're not fasting for the week, then you're just counting your daily calorie output through excessive exercising or cleaning. You're constantly on your bathroom scale or on your social networking website of choice. All you can talk about is how little you've eaten, how much you exercised, and then follow up the post with women who look like they haven't eaten in months. Pictures of skeletons with skin and a tiny dress. Pictures where every notch in the backbone can be counted and the ribs can be used as xylophones. Pictures of girls who are sick... just like you.

But you don't look at it as a disease, you see it as a lifestyle decision. You believe that it's normal to starve for five days and consume nothing but water and Diet Pepsi. You think it's okay to punish yourself for liking the taste of a cheeseburger by exercising until you nearly pass out. You visit other sites and offer encouragement to other girls that are fasting. Your new friends in your not so secret society. You exclaim how well they've done by consuming only 500 calories that whole day. You say, "You can do it! Think thin!" "Nothing tastes as good as thin!" You push each other to the limits. 120 pounds one day. 98 pounds the next. Another picture of Kate Moss. Thin, thinner,and thinnest. You think you have control. You must if you can ignore the human instinct to eat. You have detailed blog entries about every single calorie consumed, every calorie burned by the most menial task, and every drop or gain of a pound. You're in control, right? Wrong. It's controlling you. The scale is controlling you with it's numbers. Models who don't eat control you. The other girls on these sites control you. Every calorie counted, every picture of skinny girls, and every step on the scale controls you.

Someone is on to you though. Your friends notice you don't eat lunch anymore. You refuse to eat when going out to dinner with them. They say you look great though, and that's all you needed to hear- even though they wouldn't ever understand like your pro-Ana friends. Your mother is on to you too. She notices the excessive exercise. She knows you're not eating since you don't eat with the family anymore. She tells you you're beautiful more often than you've probably heard. She's worried. None of that concerns you though. You're secret friends on the internet tell you mothers are bad for diets. Mothers only make you eat and tell you what you want to hear. So you starve for five days, sip on a diet soda, and get on the scale one last time before you go to bed. No one's going to stop you from being skin and bones.

It's taking a toll on you now. You don't notice; your days are spent fighting off taboo thoughts of food, constantly cleaning or exercising, and wishing that scale would budge just a little more. But your hair is getting thin. You're weaker than you ever were and your breath is getting shallower. Your period hasn't come in months. Your bones are getting weaker since they are not getting the nutrients needed from food. If this goes on too much longer, you may not be able to have children, you'll have an increased chance of developing osteoporosis, and you could die. There are few things a human will die for, thin shouldn't be one of those things. The thinspo girls will tell you otherwise. They exclaim they could just die if the numbers on the scale didn't read low enough. And you think you could too.

It's getting ridiculous, isn't it?

Your plight breaks my heart. Pro-Ana is encouragement to slowly kill yourself. You may not think you're beautiful until you're frail and thin, but somebody in your life loves you the way you are. Give up the control. No more counting calories, no more sickly models for inspiration. Throw the scale out the window. Dare I say, get away from those other girls on the internet, they're not helping you. Enjoy some sort of food without the guilt, guilt should not come with fulfilling the body's natural desires. If, and when, you are ready and you want help, talk to your family. Find someone online who has been through the same thing. Go to anorexiahelp.net and call the number on their site. When you're ready, of course, I know it takes time. Just don't kill yourself for a beauty standard set by media idiots and brainless socialites. Pro-Ana is not a self esteem boost and a community to feel good in, it forces you to see imperfections in you that don't exist and masks the real problem- the disease.
You're better than those pictures on the internet. You deserve and long and happy existence. Life is too damn short to be controlled by a scale.

Take care of yourselves.

Yours Truly.

Sources
http://www.mamashealth.com/anorexia.asp
http://www.anorexiahelp.net/
http://www.freewebs.com/tonsofthinspo/