No Thinspiration

The struggle with anorexia is a long way from the glamour of catwalks, fashion glossies and the latest diet. Two men talk about the women they love for whom ‘thin’ is a constant state of mind

It’s hard to say whether, if Grace had been bigger, I would still have found her attractive. You can never know that kind of thing. But her slimness wasn’t part of my initial attraction to her. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Slim girl - great!’ It was more about our connection. I don’t think Grace was very thin when I first met her, and I don’t think her size has really changed since then. Physically she had recovered from anorexia while at university. The psychological part is a longer recovery process and I met her during this time, when she had just moved from university to London, and was in her first week of a new job. She wasn’t comfortable with changing her environment or disrupting her control or routine; it wasn’t an easy transition for her.

But I would say she was still recovering for the first year we were together. We met at a work party - she was 23 and on the graduate scheme for an advertising agency; I was 24 and worked for a media agency in the same London building. We got talking and found we knew some of the same people. Grace called me the next day to arrange another meeting that weekend, and a month later she was my girlfriend. On our second date - over dinner in a restaurant - Grace told me: ‘There’s something you need to know. I was anorexic, but I’m better now.’ I didn’t really understand what eating disorders were all about. I don’t think I would have known at all, unless she had told me, at least not for a couple of months. I might have asked her why she needed to diet, because she was very slim, but I never thought of her as too thin. Every woman seems to be on a diet and think she is too fat! As soon as Grace told me, I was very conscious of looking out for signs that she was controlling her diet. I looked to see if she had finished her plate, but there was nothing really obvious. No one else would have noticed.

I read Grace’s book [Thin, published by Penguin, which details her experience of anorexia], and there’s a section where Grace says she felt she had to tell me this secret, even though she’d only just met me. She wrote that she didn’t want to spend too much time in the loo, because I’d probably think she was being sick. That’s exactly what I was thinking! Being sick after eating is, of course, a different eating disorder altogether, but I didn’t really know that then. For a few weeks after she told me, I kept an eye on her - seeing if she went to the toilet during a meal, that sort of thing. But as I got to know more about how Grace was actually feeling and the history of it, and how far she had come from where she was, I got less concerned. Grace has actually never binged in the time I’ve known her.
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RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Supermodel Gisele Bundchen says weak families are to blame for anorexia – not the fashion industry that has been widely criticized for promoting waifish silhouettes.

“I never suffered from this problem (anorexia) because I had a very strong family base. Parents are responsible, not the fashion industry,” Bundchen said in the Friday edition of O Globo newspaper.

Bundchen, 26, was visiting her native Brazil this week for the Fashion Rio show, which has banned models who are under the age of 16 and has required proof of their good health after the death of a Brazilian model from complications due to starvation last year.

In September, Spain barred models below a certain weight from Madrid fashion shows while the Italian government and its fashion chiefs signed a pact to keep sickly thin girls off the catwalk.
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Poured into a gold swimsuit, Make Me A Supermodel winner Jen Hunter looks as if this outfit was custom-made for her.

But the one-piece triggered a furious row about stick-thin models when her rival finalist Marianne Berglund appeared painfully underweight in the same attire.

Appearing here for the first time in the outfit which sparked the debate about size zero models, Miss Hunter - who was criticised on the show for being too fat - said: “This is what a real woman should look like.

“I am all curves and flesh, not skin and bone. Boys, who would you rather snuggle up to?”

Looking as different as chalk and cheese, the swimwear clings to Miss Hunter’s voluptuous curves and reveals acres of cleavage while on clinically underweight Miss Berglund, it shows her protruding hips and ribs and appears to hang off her.

Barmaid Miss Hunter, 24 - who weighs 11 stone and is a healthy size 12 - was reduced to tears when she was castigated on the reality TV show for not taking a food and exercise regime seriously.

Judge Tandy Anderson, managing director of Select Model Management, criticised her for having “stocky” legs while supermodel Rachel Hunter, a fellow panellist, reprimanded her for saying she wanted to prove larger women could be successful models.

Swedish blonde Miss Berglund, 18, who made it to the final with her, was meanwhile praised for having a “sensational” body for modelling despite having a body mass index of 16.1.

It fell well below the minimum BMI of 18 for models taking part in Madrid Fashion Week in September, set after catwalk model Luisel Ramos dropped dead from self-starvation.

But mother-of-one Miss Hunter triumphed when viewers voted her to the top female slot in the contest - and claimed she owed her success to her favourite dish of hotpot and chips.
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Young sufferers of anorexia and bulimia who try to hide their eating problems from their parents and doctors are turning to a growing number of internet chat rooms dedicated to perpetuating their illness.

A pilot study released this week of US eating disorder patients aged between 10 and 22 showed that up to a third learn new weight loss or purging methods from websites that promote eating disorders by enabling users to share tips, such as what drugs induce vomiting and what internet sites sell them.

But the study - published in the American Academy of Pediatrics’ journal Pediatrics - found that eating disorder sufferers were also learning new high-risk ways to lose weight from each other on websites aimed at helping them recover.

The survey by researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford showed a third of patients also visited pro-recovery sites and half of them learnt new weight loss and purging methods.

“Parents and physicians need to realise that the internet is essentially an unmonitored media forum,” said Rebecka Peebles, Packard Children’s adolescent medicine and eating disorder specialist and an author of the study.
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After Cibeles (spanish catwalk) rejected some extra skinny models, anorexic girls still can work in some other countries without problems.

One of the world’s most famous fashion designers yesterday became the first to speak out against the use of stick-thin models.

Giorgio Armani urged the fashion industry not to use ’size zero’ models in an effort to curb the rise in eating disorders among young women.

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