No Thinspiration

Aimee Liu, the author of over 10 books, spoke with me recently about her new work, Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders (Warner Books, 2007), and how her life with anorexia impacted the words within.

Kelly Jad’on: Why the title, Gaining?

Aimee Liu: That is the word which strikes fear and loathing in the hearts of those with eating disorders. It is associated with gaining fat. It has richer meanings, though. Gaining pleasure, gaining independence, gaining confidence. All of these appetites are connected. To gain freedom from eating disorders, you have to gain in power and maturity. This is central to recovery from eating disorders.

In our culture, women are told implicitly to be afraid of gaining weight both in pounds and purpose; a lot of women portrayed as celebrities or in fashion magazines are encouraged to remain in a state of immature adolescence. The unspoken message has long been that an “ideal” woman is a perennial child whose sole value and responsibility is to look cute. But today, with the creation of Size Zero clothing, the message is even worse. Now the “perfect” woman is a zero - in other words, nonexistent.

Aimee, where did the anorexia begin? How old were you when you began losing or wasting?

Wasting has multiple meanings related to one’s life and body. I originally began dieting in 7th grade. I developed what is now considered true symptoms of an eating disorder in the 8th grade. That was back in the 1960s, when few were diagnosed. I was obsessive, and at 5’6”, remained below 100 lbs until college, around age 19-20.

I was never as severe as some anorexics, near death; I maintained a weight that was too low. Like a vast majority who hover on the brink of anorexia, the real damage is psychological.
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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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Cameron Diaz has become the latest star to say she is worried about the influence of ultra-skinny celebrities.

Her comments echo those of Billie Piper and Kate Winslet, who both criticised the phenomenon last week.

The Hollywood actress, 34, tells ITV1 show Parkinson: “I think it’s terrifying. It’s tragic and sad.

“I think that it’s a sickness, something that’s going on in someone’s head where their perspective is off.

“We get ideals from images that we see and there certainly should be more responsibility put on those people who are putting those images out into the world.

“Let’s be a little bit more responsible to what’s realistic.”

She adds: “I’m a skinny girl, so all my life all I have ever wanted to be is curvaceous and voluptuous, have everything falling out everywhere.

“Some people…their perception and their perspective is completely askew.”

Last week, former Doctor Who star Piper said Victoria Beckham should not be a teenage role model because of her tiny frame.

The star, who suffered from anorexia, said she worried that younger people were looking up to skinny stars.

Former singer Piper, 24, said: “I think the whole size-zero debate is disgusting.

“Some models you see are tiny because that’s the way they were born, but then they’ll get the attention and that will start feeding a fire.
“My sister, who is 13, looks amazing but she’s already worried about her figure.
“She loves Posh and I say: ‘Come on Ellie. She’s tiny. What’s wrong with Shakira? She’s sexy, curvy,’ but she has no interest.”

Winslet also joined the debate, describing the trend as “unbelievably disturbing“.

The 31-year-old said she refused to have any magazines showing skinny stars in her house because of the damaging effect it could have on her six-year-old daughter, Mia.

“It’s only a matter of time before she becomes aware of it and it frightens the life out of me,” she said.

Nicole Richie and Kate Bosworth are among the celebrities whose shrinking figures have been the subject of debate.

The controversy over underweight models has been raging since the death last month of Ana Carolina Reston, 21, a Brazilian model who suffered from anorexia (some pics here).

In August, Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos, 22, died of heart failure after not eating for several days.

Dec. 18, 2006 (Newsweek)
If a food craving strikes, try a manicure to “keep your hands occupied.”
This kind of tip is common fare on pro-”ana” (anorexia) and pro-”mia” (bulimia) Web sites. Well intended or not, they’re not “benign,” says Dr. Rebecka Peebles of Stanford University, coauthor of “Surfing for Thinness,” published in Pediatrics last week. Stanford researchers surveyed patients treated for eating disorders, ages 10 to 22, and found that users of pro-eating-disorder sites were sick longer. And 96 percent of them reported learning new tips for weight loss or purging; 69 percent said they used them.

The sites tend to gloss over bad news: people with anorexia are 56 times more likely than their peers to commit suicide. (And they’re not broadcasting the November anorexia-related death of Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston.)

Sites deny being harmful, saying they provide a community for those with eating disorders. The term “pro-ana” is broadly used, and sites vary greatly. “We offer them support, saying, ‘It will be. Continue going to your doctor’,” says five-foot, 89-pound proana.us owner Anna Robbins.

In November, the Academy for Eating Disorders suggested a mandatory warning statement: “Warning: anorexia nervosa is a potentially deadly illness. The site you are about to enter provides material that may be detrimental to your health.”

—Karen Springen

LONDON (Reuters) - Marg Oaten’s daughter was a happy, healthy girl who loved table tennis and drama until at the age of 10 she developed anorexia. Twelve years on she is still fighting the illness, which almost killed her.
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“I was absolutely distraught,” said Oaten, 54. “It is the worst thing in the world to know your daughter might die.”

At her darkest point, Oaten said her daughter existed on five flakes of cereal a day, washed down with a mouthful of water.

Children as young as seven can suffer from eating disorders. The illness also afflicts older women as well as men and boys, though it is most common in young women, health experts say.

In Britain, about five to ten percent of women aged 14 to 24 suffer from some form of eating disorder. The ratio falls to 1 percent for the whole female population, said Professor Janet Treasure, head of the eating disorders service and research unit at King’s College London.

Bulimia nervosa, when a person binges and vomits, is two to five times more common than anorexia nervosa, when someone restricts their intake of food and drink, she said.

Both psychiatric disorders, can be fatal — two models from Latin America died this year after becoming anorexic — or cause permanent health defects such as brittle bones and infertility.
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On the afternoon of August 12, Nicole Richie finally reached her boiling point. As the actress and a friend exited the Planet Blue boutique in Malibu, California, a photographer yelled out to her, “Nicole, you look disgusting. Gain some f—cking weight!” A little while later, a shaken Richie walked right up to the photographer’s window and, in tears, verbally confronted him. Richie talked to Us’s Ken Baker about what made her snap, how she’s taking control of her life and her hopes for a healthy and successful future.

“You don’t scream at people that they are overweight, so what makes people think that they have the right to scream at me that I am underweight? It’s upsetting and mean,” Nicole tells Us. “I am not anorexic. At the moment, I was just sick of everyone constantly bothering me about how I look. I walked up to the photographer and told him, ‘What if I really had anorexia? What if I had a disease? How would you feel about saying such horrible things?’ He probably just wanted to get a rise out of me, but I’m a human being and he hurt my feelings.”

Vía: PopSugar

What do you think?
Does she thinspire you ?

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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