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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Their views on food and body image could not be more different: Susannah Jowitt is the author of Fat, So?, which celebrates larger women. Candida Crewe wrote Eating Myself about her battle with anorexia and bulimia.

So what happened when they met?

Susannah Jowitt, 38, is 5ft 7in, weighs 14 stone and is a size 16 to 18.

She lives in West London with her husband Anthony and children Adelaide, five, and Winston, three. Susannah says: When I was 14, I nicked two pieces of bread from the middle of a new loaf of Hovis, then carefully re-sealed the bag with that fiddly piece of sticky yellow tape to escape detection.

Such extraordinary attention to detail was all in vain. My mother had counted the number of slices in the loaf and confronted me with my crime.

It was at that moment that I should have realised all was not well in our family’s Garden of Eating. How many parents count the slices in a loaf?

Such elaborate surveillance was necessary because I was, apparently, a Fat Child and needed to diet. My brother, on the other hand, was a Thin Child, so he was allowed sweets after tea (that’s how I remember it, anyway).

My parents yo-yoed between being people who loved their food (my mother was a truly great cook) and people who paid for their love of food by eating grapefruit. I inherited their greediness but, to my mother’s frustration, I missed out on the guilt gene.

Looking back at photos of myself as an adolescent, I wasn’t even particularly big - sturdy, yes, and with the same frame as my mum, who, by that time, was fat - but certainly nothing to worry about. But worry she did.
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I’ve found this tips in a pro ana site. What do you think about it?

1. WATER…I can’t say it enough…WaterWaterWaterWater Water…Any questions?

2. Three words: Crest White Strips. Here’s the deal. You’re supposed to wear these on your upper and lower teeth for 30 minutes each, 2x a day. And you definitely cannot eat while you’ve got these babies on. You can have up to 2 hours a day of literally not being able to eat! If you put them on about 15 minutes before dinner then you can’t eat dinner with your family and they’ll have to let you eat on your own later. It’s perfect!

3. Ride out the hour. When you start to get hungry, just tell yourself that you’ll wait until the end of the hour to eat anything. That way you’ll have time to think about whether or not you really want those calories, and you’ll also feel really powerful since you’ve proved to yourself that you can go for that time without food.

4. Move around. Bounce your feet, wiggle your fingers, every little calorie counts.
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1. you want to keep your weight under 100
2. you can grab something from the top of the closet without hiding your fat
3. you’ll get fat if you eat
4. nothing tastes as good as being thin feels
5. because you dont want to ruin your diet/fast
6. you hate your fat
7. you dont want to deal with the guilt after eating
8. you have worked so hard not to
9. that will dissapoint you
10. you want to be skinny
11. you want to acheive your goal
12. skinny clothes are much cuter than fat clothes
13. Saying ‘no thanks’to food is saying ‘yes please’to thin

Binge eating disorder is a psychiatric disorder in which a subject:

* periodically does not exercise control over consumption of food
* eats an unusually large amount of food at one time
* eats much more quickly during binge episodes than during normal eating episodes
* eats until physically uncomfortable
* eats large amounts of food, even when they are not really hungry
* always eats alone during binge eating episodes, in order to avoid discovery of the disorder
* often eats alone during periods of normal eating, owing to feelings of embarrassment about food
* feels disgusted, depressed, or guilty after binge eating

Binge eating is an element of another eating disorder, bulimia nervosa. The formal diagnosis criteria are similar: at least two binges per week for an extended period of time.[1] In bulimia, however, episodes of binge eating are followed by purging, periods of fasting, or performance of strenuous exercise - indeed, “exercise bulimia,” in which a person eats normally but then engages in strenuous exercise, is an inverse form of bulimia. People with binge eating disorder, by contrast, do not purge, fast or engage in strenuous exercise after binge eating. Additionally, people with bulimia are typically of normal weight or may be slightly overweight (the purging, etc., have little to no effect on the subject’s body fat), whereas people with binge eating disorder are typically overweight or obese.

Binge eating disorder is similar to, but it is distinct from, compulsive eating. People with binge eating disorder do not have a compulsion to overeat and do not spend a great deal of time fantasising about food. On the contrary, some people with binge eating disorder have very negative feelings about food. As with other eating disorders, binge eating is an expressive disorder - that is, the disorder is an expression of a deeper, psychological problem.

It is actually hotly contested whether binge eating disorder has its own diagnosis. Some believe that it is a milder form, or subset of bulimia nervosa, but others argue that it is its own distinct disorder. Currently, the DSM-IV categorizes it under Eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS), simply stating that more research is needed.

Via: Wikipedia