No Thinspiration

A centre of excellence to treat a growing number of patients with eating disorders has been relaunched in Yorkshire as experts warn more young people than ever are in need of specialist care.
Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Liam Donaldson officially marked the landmark at the Yorkshire Centre for Eating Disorders in Seacroft, Leeds.

The number of inpatient beds at the centre is being increased from 16 to 19 as it deals with an increasing number of referrals of seriously ill patients from across the North of England and further afield, treating as many as 200 people a year.

A link-up with the world-leading service provided at St George’s Hospital in London is also enhancing expertise and leading to new research into problems caused by anorexia nervosa and severe bulimia.
Doctors fear increasing pressures on both sexes are leading to more cases amid evidence one in five young women aged 14-30 now have eating binges, one in 20 have bulimia and one per cent are anorexic. A massive 80 per cent believe they are overweight while even girls as young as nine or 10 view their bodies in disparaging terms.

There are also signs more boys are suffering disorders. About 10 per cent of patients treated in Leeds are male.
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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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The struggle for food has long been a drama for millions of impoverished Brazilians.

But these days the nation is transfixed by another sort of starvation: anorexia among the successful and well off.

The deaths of four young women in the last two months from anorexia - a disorder characterised by an abnormal fear of becoming obese, an aversion to food and severe weight loss - have been splashed across the front pages of newspapers. The subject has become a morbid fascination for Brazilians and a theme of a popular soap opera. It’s also touched off a debate within the fashion industry that has long presented the rail-thin model as the paragon of female beauty.

The most recent victim was Beatriz Cristina Ferraz Lopes Bastos, 23, whose death on Sunday at a hospital in Jau, 300kms northeast of Sao Paulo, was reported by national television news programmes.

Local media reports said she was 1.57 metres tall and weighed just 35kgs.

“Another victim of anorexia,” the Globo newspaper said on its website, alongside a glamorous photo of the blonde-coiffed Bastos. An English teacher and a skilled piano player, Bastos was an amateur historian and wrote a literature column for a hometown website.

Folha de S. Paulo newspaper reported that she described herself as “thin” on an internet discussion group and friends said they had to “fight with her to eat”. A former boyfriend, Leandro Murgo, told reporters Bastos was a chubby teenager and became fixated on losing weight.

Brazilians were shocked at the November 14 death of 21-year-old model Ana Carolina Reston, who died of generalised infection caused by anorexia nervosa. She was reportedly 1.72 metres tall and weighed about 40kgs.

Two days later, college student Carla Sobrado Casalle, 21, died in the southeastern city of Araraquara, also with symptoms linked to anorexia.

She was 1.74 metres tall and weighed 45kgs. A third anorexia victim died later in the month.

Vía: Gulfnews.

Pandeblog shows us the faces of the dead skinny girls

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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