Anorexia; Shadow's Story
"I have a mother who is obsessed with my weight..."
I was curious. All I’d ever heard about Anorexia were tales from people who hadn’t had it, accounts from people who didn’t explain their opinions and the odd accusations from my mother.
I was told that girls with anorexia believed that they were really fat, even though their bones stuck out, and they starved themselves. I was told this, and I couldn’t believe it. How can you fail to see your ribs sticking out? How can a skeletal girl really believe that she is grossly overweight?
I have a mother who is obsessed with my weight, seemingly waiting for a sign of anorexia, just so she can accuse and force-feed me. Yet, she barely knew anything about the condition.
I had to know; I had to understand. I went on the Pro-Ana websites, as taboo and unexplained about as they are. I found dietary advice that doctor’s advocate. And I met Shadow. To be honest, she’s come to be a good friend of mine.
Shadow is a sixteen year old girl, and she told me about her life, and her anorexia. She suffers from no ‘eating disorder’, she doesn’t think that she is overweight, and she isn’t obsessed with eating and weight.
She admits that the anorexia portrayed by the media isn’t made up, although it differs from Pro-Ana. Anorexia Nervosa, or ED Ana as she called it, is indeed an eating disorder, just as the magazine articles say. And they say it a lot. There’s much I can say on the subject of eating disorders that hasn’t been said to everyone at least twice, except that ED Ana and Pro-Ana are different.
The definition that Shadow gave me for Pro-Ana was that it is Proactive Anorexia; a choice. There is no ‘suffering’ from an ‘eating disorder’ and there are no ‘victims’ of Pro-Ana. That would be ED Ana, and anyway, who would choose to be a victim?
Shadow looks at a world filled with gluttony and shame, people who overeat and are overweight, and she doesn’t want to be a part of it. I asked her what it is that’s so wrong about being overweight, or on the higher end of ‘normal’. She pointed out that muffin tops and rolls of fat aren’t really appealing and there are all sorts of health risks connected to excess body fat.
Shadows daily diet consists of skipping breakfast, a sandwich and an apple for lunch, and her mums cooking for dinner. On the weekend, she has a salad for lunch, and some days in the week she cooks for herself, as her mum works shifts.
She tries to add as many fruit and vegetables with a negative calorie content as she can to her diet. Foods with negative calorie content have a high level of cellulose, which uses up more calories in digesting that gained in eating, including apples, celery and lettuce.
When people talk about disorders such as Bipolar Disorder, Body Image Disorder and Anorexia Nervosa, they often personify the condition with an imaginary ‘friend’. Bipolar Disorder has ‘the black dog’, BID has the better version of yourself and Anorexia Nervosa has the best friend, ‘Ana’.
Although Pro-Ana isn’t an eating disorder, so isn’t exactly the same as Anorexia Nervosa, the imagery of the imaginary friend called Ana is a valid one, especially as Shadow already has BID, which can be explained through this.
For Shadow, she was practically bullied by a prettier, cleverer version of herself, who was better at things like school and friends. It was just a voice at first, teasing and taunting her about her faults and mistake, and each time she felt bad because of it, it grew stronger. Eventually there was a person she could see, who could shove her in the shoulder and yell in her face.
But she told me, when she decided on Pro-Ana, it was a blow to the BID voice. Straight away, it couldn’t shove her, and with each skipped breakfast, the voice telling her that she was really good at this, that she was slimming, that she was a nice person grew stronger, and the bullying voice faded back to just that.
As ‘Ana’ grew stronger and the BID voice grew weaker, Shadow began to feel good about herself again. She believed in herself, she was more confident and managed to pretty much shake the condition. As one of the millions of teens who suffer from Body Image Disorder, this is a pretty tempting prospect. To be free of the voice at the back of your head, belittling you all the time? I’d love that.
For the first time in over two years, Shadow told me, she felt good about herself again. Far from the sick, skeletal girl suffering from ED Ana and crying at her mirror image, Shadow says she’s a happy size six, full of self-esteem. She believes that she is simply on a healthy eating diet, like so many of the world’s population. The only difference is that she wasn’t overweight to begin with.
I know that Anorexia is a controversial subject, and that those that have recovered from eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa may take offense at my acceptance of Shadows choice. Especially with the Pro-Ana sites and the anti Pro-Ana sites both pushing their biased views towards us, it is hard to understand, hard to know who is right.
As much as anyone can believe that they are right and that Shadow is suffering from an eating disorder, Shadow believes that she is right, and that her choice is being discriminated against by the overeating overweight. I myself couldn’t understand the subject until I had both sides of the story.
Doctors themselves say that the best diets are those where you simply eat less of the same food, so the only issue to decide on is what the size of perfection is, and surely beauty is in the eye of the beholder? I’m not trying to take sides, far from it, I’m just trying to show you the side less documented. Me? I believe in understanding.
