When eating disorders become a ‘lifestyle’
‘I GOT diagnosed with my eating disorder at the age of nine. I remember playing tag in the school yard with my friends and running around because I wanted to lose weight. I remember throwing out food. When celebrating my birthday, I never wanted a cake; I wanted healthy snacks and told everybody I didn’t like sweets.
“The disgust I felt towards my body developed during a period of abuse. I was sexually abused by a family member from the age of five. It lasted until I was 12 and it has made me hate my body. Starving myself is a way to make it disappear, to vanish, to clean, purify and punish myself.”
This is Jade’s story. Jade is 24 and runs a website that has thousands of followers around the world. At the top of the home page is a banner that reads “Anorexia is a lifestyle, not a disease”.
Instead of urging her readers to stop starving themselves, she helps — often encourages — them to embrace their eating disorder.
“I eat three meals a day, but make sure I never take in more than 50 calories,” she writes in one post. Another boasts: “I can go without food for three or four days. You can do it too, but it will take discipline and hard work.”
Her attitude is chilling but far from unique. She is part of a grow- ing international group of “proana” (pro-anorexia) and “pro-mia” (pro-bulimia) bloggers who perceive their illness as a “lifestyle”. Hers is one of a worrying new generation of online communities that have turned anorexia and bulimia into an aspirational state.
This idea of community, of anorexics and bulimics wanting to “belong” to a virtual family, is played out across the websites.
On the world’s largest pro-ana forum, which has 65 000 users and 1.5 million posts, many topics are available exclusively to members. Layers of access are granted the longer they stay with the site.
“It’s like Dante’s circles of hell,” said Dr John Morgan, who chairs the Royal College of Psychiatry’s eating disorder section.
“The more private a site is, the more deviant, toxic practices it advocates. This introduces glamour — people feel they are being initiated into a group.”
There is also a little-known but disturbing link between pro-ana sites and “skinny porn”.
“It’s like grooming,” said Susan Ringwood, chief executive of Beat, the UK national charity for people with eating disorders.
“There is a group of people who get sexual satisfaction from looking at emaciated people, most of them photographed in their underwear.”