Really? You want to be anorexic? My sister was anorexic for about 2/3 of her life, so I’ll tell you what she did. It started when she was 13. Due to some horrid events out of her control, she somehow got psychologically twisted into believing that the only thing in her life she *could* control was her weight. And the best way to do that was by controlling the amount of food she ate. She began to cut way back on the amount of food she ate. At a time when her age, height and activity level dictated her eating between 1800 and 2000 calories a day, she was probably eating more like 1000/day. As she started to drop weight, she got excited because she realized her new-found weight loss method was really working fast! Never mind the fact that she was losing the ability to think properly.
Have you ever gone a day without eating? 1/2 a day? You start to shake, get snappy, lose focus on little things. Keep that up for a day or two and your body begins to understand something critical: it’s not getting any nourishment and probably won’t be any time soon so it better do something fast to preserve itself. "Hmm…" it thinks. "If she won’t feed me, I will!" So it starts to consume fat, then muscle, then eventually, if you let it go long enough, it starts to consume your organs. All the while, you’re not feeding your brain so you have no ability to think for yourself. You lose the ability to reason…you can’t see that you’re actually allowing your body to consume itself. You can’t even think to try to reverse the process you’ve already begun. Eventually, someone has to do the reasoning for you. Wow! talk about control! But hey! you’ll be skinny, oh yes!
Back to my sister. When people start noticing how skinny you’re getting, pressure is brought to bear on you to gain some weight. Nobody is ever happy with the weight you are. You’re either too heavy or too skinny. So you learn tricks to fool people. Push food around on your plate…make them think you’re eating. But when you are forced to actually eat something, then you make a bee-line for the bathroom to vomit. Ahhhhh!! now THERE is a great solution to your problems! You can have your cake AND throw it up too! If you decide to go that route, you’ll feel so in control of yourself! "Hey look what I can do! I can eat but not gain a pound!" Just be aware of the consequences (and these aren’t "potential," these are guaranteed consequences):
1) the hydrochloric acid, the acid that lines your stomach used in digestion, the acid that gives you that burning feeling in your esophagus when you vomit, will eat away the enamel of your teeth with repeated exposure. Eventually, you’ll start to get tooth decay. Mmmmm now there’s a pleasant side-effect! Ever smell the breath of someone with tooth decay? But hey! you’ll be looking hot in those size 1 jeans! Not really…anorexics are never happy or satisfied with their body image.
2) Electrolytic imbalance - your body is a marvel. It’s like a well-oiled machine when you take care of it. It knows exactly how much you need of certain nutrients to keep it cooled, warmed, functioning properly, etc. When you starve yourself and/or purge (the soft word for vomiting), you throw your body’s chemistry off. Sugars, salts, potassium, other minerals and vitamins…all those things a body needs for proper functioning get out of whack. The only way to bring them back into alignment is a stint in the hospital whereby they force-feed you those nutrients through a needle stuck in your arm and a feeding tube stuck down your nose, if you refuse to eat. That’s if you’re lucky and it’s caught in time and you haven’t yet suffered heart failure or slipped into a persistent vegetative state a la Terri Schiavo. Remember her?
15 years in a coma before her husband and parents battled it out in court for the right to let her die or let her live. In the end, her husband won the right to pull the plug. I’m guessing he thought that was a small price to pay because she was so thoughtful in life that she starved herself to give him a skinny wife.
3) A third consequence binging/purging cycle is your face changes shape and your skin becomes nasty. Your jaws, right where they hinge below your ears, start to enlarge. I’m not sure what causes that (I think it may be a glandular thing), but the overall effect is you start to look a bit like a chipmunk. Your face gets round, an ironic twist for someone who wants to look super skinny. Your skin also goes bad. It gets dry, flaky, and you have breakouts galore. These aren’t necessarily acne; sometimes they’re just sores. But that’s what happens when your body isn’t getting what it needs to survive. It starts the early stages of decomposition.
4) One more consequence of anorexia is lanugo. This is a fine, downy like hair that starts to grow over your whole body, including your face. It’s usually very pale, but at roughly 1/8" to 1/4", it’s quite visible especially because there is so much of it. This happens because of your body struggles to survive and keep you warm as you strip it of its protective fat and muscle layers.
All of these things happened to my sister. It’s guaranteed to happen to anyone who goes down this road. But hey, looking like a hairy chipmunk with bad skin and teeth is a small price to pay for fitting into that dress or those pants. Just ask my sister…oh wait, you can’t. She’s dead.)
Rewind a little. By the time my sister was about 26, she had spent half her life starving herself. She was down to an apple, a piece of bread, and a couple leaves of lettuce a day. That’s about 200 calories. And she was running 7 miles a day. How in God’s name her legs were able to carry her is beyond me. She was also doing a bazillion crunches and push-ups a day. It was only a matter of time before her 84 lb. body gave out. She was in and out of the hospital for years because her internal organs were suffering severely as a result of her neglect and mistreatment. She had numerous abdominal surgeries which resulted in rather lovely scars that criss-crossed her tummy. She was always in severe pain from the strictures caused by the repeated cutting and closing of her abdomen. (Strictures are spaghetti-like scars that grow inward and intertwine with your organs…especially your intestines. When these grow, more surgery is required to remove them. A rather viscious cycle.)
Well, to make a long story short, her heart finally gave out on her. She died alone. But hey! she was wicked skinny when we buried her! I’m so glad she chose to lose all that weight because it made her coffin much lighter.
Honey, I spent a lot of time writing this not to be flippant with you. I did it to scare you senseless. Anorexia is not a glamorous thing. It’s not pretty. It’s not beautiful. Vogue and Cosmopolitan will not be banging down your door to sign you as their next hot thing. The fact that you are contemplating (no, desiring!) such a horrid path is very frightening. At 6′1", 167 lbs., you are perfect…exactly where you should be. You should be concentrating on healthy habits, instead. Eat lots of fruits and vegetable, whole grains, lean meats, low-fat dairy products. Exercise. Find an activity that gets your blood pumping and that makes you happy and feel good about yourself. It could just be hip-hop dancing…doesn’t have to be anything formally organized. Just move. If you do these things everyday, you will not have a weight problem. You’ll be as you are: a lovely young woman…one with a little meat on her bones.
