Posted on 05/31/2005 5:13:44 AM PDT by Momaw Nadon
CHICAGO - They call her "Ana." She is a role model to some, a goddess to others — the subject of drawings, prayers and even a creed. She tells them what to eat and mocks them when they don't lose weight. And yet, while she is a very real presence in the lives of many of her followers, she exists only in their minds.
Ana is short for anorexia, and — to the alarm of experts — many who suffer from the potentially fatal eating disorder are part of an underground movement that promotes self-starvation and, in some cases, has an almost cult-like appeal.
Followers include young women and teens who wear red Ana bracelets and offer one another encouraging words of "thinspiration" on Web pages and blogs.
They share tips for shedding pounds and faithfully report their "cw" and "gw" — current weight and goal weight, which often falls into the double digits. They also post pictures of celebrity role models, including teen stars Lindsay Lohan and Mary-Kate Olsen, who last year set aside the acting career and merchandising empire she shares with her twin sister to seek help for her own eating disorder.
"Put on your Ana bracelet and raise your skinny fist in solidarity!" one "pro-Ana" blogger wrote shortly after Olsen entered treatment.
The movement has flourished on the Web and eating disorder experts say that, despite attempts to limit Ana's online presence, it has now grown to include followers — many of them young — in many parts of the world.
No one knows just how many of the estimated 8 million to 11 million Americans afflicted with eating disorders have been influenced by the pro-Ana movement. But experts fear its reach is fairly wide. A preliminary survey of teens who've been diagnosed with eating disorders at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University, for instance, found that 40 percent had visited Web sites that promote eating disorders.
"The more they feel like we — 'the others' — are trying to shut them down, the more united they stand," says Alison Tarlow, a licensed psychologist and supervisor of clinical training at the Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, Fla., a residential facility that focuses on eating disorders.
Experts say the Ana movement also plays on the tendency people with eating disorders have toward "all or nothing thinking."
"When they do something, they tend to pursue it to the fullest extent. In that respect, Ana may almost become a religion for them," says Carmen Mikhail, director of the eating disorders clinic at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston.
She and others point to the "Ana creed," a litany of beliefs about control and starvation, that appears on many Web sites and blogs. At least one site encourages followers to make a vow to Ana and sign it in blood.
People with eating disorders who've been involved in the movement confirm its cult-like feel.
"People pray to Ana to make them skinny," says Sara, a 17-year-old in Columbus, Ohio, who was an avid organizer of Ana followers until she recently entered treatment for her eating disorder. She spoke on the condition that her last name not be used.
Among other things, Sara was the self-proclaimed president of Beta Sigma Kappa, dubbed the official Ana sorority and "the most talked about, nearly illegal group" on a popular blog hosting service that Sara still uses to communicate with friends. She also had an online Ana "boot camp" and told girls what they could and couldn't eat.
"I guess I was attention-starved," she now says of her motivation. "I really liked being the girl that everyone looked up to and the one they saw as their 'thinspiration.'
"But then I realized I was helping girls kill themselves."
For others, Ana is a person — a voice that directs their every move when it comes to food and exercise.
"She's someone who's perfect. It's different for everyone — but for me, she's someone who looks totally opposite to the way I do," says Kasey Brixius, a 19-year-old college student from Hot Springs, S.D.
To Brixius — athletic with brown hair and brown eyes — Ana is a wispy, blue-eyed blonde.
"I know I could never be that," she says, "but she keeps telling me that if I work hard enough, I CAN be that."
Dr. Mae Sokol often treats young patients in her Omaha, Neb., practice who personify their eating disorder beyond just Ana. To them, bulimia is "Mia." And an eating disorder often becomes "Ed."
"A lot of times they're lonely and they don't have a lot of friends. So Ana or Mia become their friend. Or Ed becomes their boyfriend," says Sokol, who is director of the eating disorders program run by Children's Hospital and Creighton University.
In the end, treatment can include writing "goodbye" letters to Ana, Mia and Ed in order to gain control over them.
But it often takes a long time to get to that point — and experts agree that, until someone with an eating disorder wants to help themselves, treatment often fails.
Tarlow, at the Renfrew Center, says it's also easy for patients to fall back into the online world of Ana after they leave treatment. "Unfortunately," she says, "with all people who are in recovery, it's so much about who you surround yourself with."
Some patients, including Brixius, the 19-year-old South Dakotan, have had trouble finding counselors who truly understand their struggle with Ana.
"I'd tell them about Ana and how she's a real person to me. And they'd just look at me like I'm nuts," Brixius says of the counselors she's seen at college and in her hometown. "They wouldn't address her ever again, so it got very frustrating.
"Half the time I'm, like, 'You know what? I give up.'"
Other days, she's more hopeful.
"I gotta snap out of this eventually if I want to have kids and get a job. One day, I'll get to that point," she says, pausing. "But I'll always obsess about food."
From a pro-Ana website:
Thin Commandments
1. If you aren't thin you aren't attractive.
2. Being thin is more important than being healthy.
3. You must buy clothes, cut your hair, take laxatives, starve yourself, do anything to make yourself look thinner.
4. Thou shall not eat without feeling guilty.
5. Thou shall not eat fattening food without punishing oneself afterwards.
6. Thou shall count calories and restrict intake accordingly.
7. What the scale says is the most important thing.
8. Losing weight is good/ gaining weight is bad.
9. You can never be too thin.
10. Being thin and not eating are signs of true will power and success.
Scary stuff.
Ther're just putting into words what Hollywood and the fashion industry have been telling women for years.
They've taken the gay male dominated fashion industry's blue pill of lies.
You hit that nail on the head.
Also from a pro-Ana website:
ANA CREED
I believe in Control, the only force mighty enough to bring order to the chaos that is my world.
I believe that I am the most vile, worthless and useless person ever to have existed on this planet, and that I am totally unworthy of anyone's time and attention.
I believe that other people who tell me differently must be idiots. If they could see how I really am, then they would hate me almost as much as I do.
I believe in oughts, musts and shoulds as unbreakable laws to determine my daily behaviour.
I believe in perfection and strive to attain it.
I believe in salvation through trying just a bit harder than I did yesterday.
I believe in calorie counters as the inspired word of god, and memorise them accordingly.
I believe in bathroom scales as an indicator of my daily successes and failures.
I believe in hell, because I sometimes think that I'm living in it.
I believe in a wholly black and white world, the losing of weight, recrimination for sins, the abnegation of the body and a life ever fasting.
I could give examples of some of the behaviors of these women and the long term effects, but it's beyond your wildest imagination and I won't go there. Just go visit a regional psychiatric hospital which specializes in eating disorders. They run $1,000 per day. The sights and stories you'll experience will boggle the mind. Another thing to realize here is that the article seems to think starvation is the issue, it's not. Most eating disorders are binge eaters who then vomit. Very few percentagewise starve themselves by not eating. They eat all the time. Food in pockets, their glove box, car trunk, desk drawers, etc... They can puke in buckets, soda cups, etc... like a normal person would burp. Their abdomen and stomach gets trained to puke on demand.
You don't see too many poor people with eating disorders as a generalization and in all the years of my exposure to the condition I've never once seen a black woman effected by it.
Ana is, in a spiritual sense, just another blood thirsty pagan diety calling upon her followers to committ the ultimate in self-sacrifice - to kill themselves.
This is really sad. I post on a weight loss board and this mindset is rampant there. These women go from one extreme (overweight) to another (thin at all cost). It's that all or nothing mentality that never gets dealt with that is the culprit.
What a sad story. It can be beaten, but only sort of. It's like alcoholism in that regard, you have to first want to beat it and then you have to make the commitment to never tempt it again... Ever. That includes no junk or trigger foods in the house, and never eating to the point you're full and get a "oh s**t I ate too much" feeling. I'm thinking that those bulimics with an anorexic component have a much easier time of it because of their incredibly focused perfectionist mindset.
Sounds about right. :( How did your wife (or ex-wife, as the case may be) turn out?
Even scarier when it is your X wife's dogma and your daughter has been inculcated with it since birth...
This article would seem to contradict that notion. These anorexics realize that they are anorexic. They do not deny their condition; they revel in it.
Was I misinformed before? Or are we seeing here something different?
She's been hospitalized a few times and unfortunately psychiatric care thru HMO's only makes these cases worse. She at one point actually had a psychiatrist prescribing her amphetamines because they made her "feel better". Well of course ED victims will feel better on amphetamines! Idiots in that profession!(most)
I've been fortunate enough to have had three kids with her and enjoyed her company for so long. I've gotta raise the kids though, because she's got it so bad.
One medication alone seems to help signifigantly, and that's olanzapine/Zyprexa. It makes the metabolism pack on pounds. It's scary to them though, but at least they aren't in that brain eating itself meltdown when on it. The trick is to allow them to control most of their behaviors as their own to succeed or fail, and only step in if it falls outside some arranged boundries established. This seems to work as well because they live for extreme discipline over foods. Let them not eat their plate to anything beyond half, and encourage them to eat only very nutritious foods in small quantities. Every pound they gain is seen as losing control, so you've gotta give them as much control as can be. She's been as low as 82 pounds and is presently at 110 pounds after a hospitalization. She's working at 120 as her goal. She was ok with the rise up to 110, but is really showing signs of panic over the next 10 pounds.
I work with one. She is 35 and 5 foot and weights 90 pounds. She just advised me that her fat body index went up 10% in the last month. She is always dieting, she is a size 0. She looks haggard and old. Anyway I feel so fat after this weekend. I feel like I have J LOW butt and here is my co-worker telling me she is fat! She is a great girl and there is no one to help her not even her mother.
I am not one to say this sort of thing but people who follow this really need G0d in their lives.
It works for JLo, if I had her butt I would be real happy. ;) That's the one thing I like about her, she apparently is happy with her body and doesn't allow the ptb to pressure her to starve herself to look like a skeleton with skin on.
I know several people like your coworker. It's sad what people do to themselves trying hit some magical number on a scale. Health means nothing to them. They are mentally ill.
I am reading a pretty good book by Deborah Low right now called: "The Quest for Peace, Love and a 24 Inch Waist". She addresses the problem with the constant dieting mindset and how we as women miss out on living our lives now chasing the perfect body.
Wow, what an amazing story. It must be very, very hard dealing with a burden like that... The love for your wife really shines through that post. Does she really want to be cured or is she trying to make you & others happy?
I've came dangerously close to going down that path, but around 2 years ago or so I took a good long look at those close to me who suffered from it for decades. They were/are living in slavery and I was starting to get chained to the scale too. The only way I could be an individual with a free will was to overcome it, and I did. It was tough because we also have mild hypothermia, but a rigorous exercise program, and a focus on building muscle did the trick.
Makes me wonder if this is all genetic, or if it is triggered by generations of obsessive parenting/behavior...
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