[quote]Gael wrote:
Natural Nate wrote:
Zund wrote:
I used to suffer from (slightly milder) anorexia only about 1.5 years ago. I was about 115-120 lbs at a height of 6’5. I didn’t get any help or anything, actually, I stumbled across T-Nation, read about nutrition and so on, and I started seeing how I was wrong. I now weigh ~185lbs at the same height.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask me anything you might wonder.
Haha, what a first post. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.
Can you give us some insight into why these girls think they’re overweight when a simple look in the mirror shows otherwise?
The simple answer is, they don’t. This is really a myth perpetuated by pop culture. I am not an expert, but I have had experience with people with eating disorders and the shrinks that deal with them.
Eating disorders are ways of alleviating guilt and pain. They are much like abuse of drugs, alcohol, self mutilation. It is really sick, but it is very effective, and because it works so well, it is very hard to cure.
Eating disorders usually happen when the girl ends up feeling guilty for everything that happens around her and resorts to self loathing. She ends up hating everything about herself, including her body, and takes her anger and hatred out on that. Sure, she ends up risking her life and destroying her body, but at least she feels better and has established power over at least something in her life – her weight. And she’s probably attracted plenty of attention in the process. And suddenly mommy/daddy listens. The attention, and the shrinks, the thousands of dollars of insurance money – they are all positive reinforcement.
You might have noticed that on some days, you look in the mirror and feel great about yourself, and on other days you don’t. Whatever your body composition goals are, you probably don’t look that different from day to day. What is different is how you feel in general. When you’re happy with yourself in general, that guy in the mirror tends to look a little more muscular, more slim. And when you feel bad about things, you tend to notice those love handles, the muscles that are lacking etc.
Now imagine a bulimic girl who feels like shit about her life, and the only way she can relieve guilt and cling onto any shred of power is to sit in her room and eat tubs of peanut butter all day, puking every 15 minutes by ramming a toothbrush down her throat. This effect is magnified, and makes it so addictive that it’s no wonder it’s so damned hard to cure. It doesn’t matter what the girl in the mirror actually looks like. What she sees is how she feels about herself.
So these girls cognitively know they are underweight, and none of them go around thinking they are overweight. But this doesn’t really matter. And the girls who are most at risk of developing eating disorders are wealthy, intelligent, and beautiful, at least until they tear themselves to shreds with their eating disorder.
So how do you cure eating disorders? There are two main schools of thought.
One is that you examine the circumstances that led to it, which are generally disfunctional relationships that cause the girl to feel powerless, too unsafe/vulnerable to communicate for real or imagined reasons, and where the girl ends up accepting an unrealistic and unmanageable share of guilt or blame. Fix these, and things start to look up. This is sometimes criticized because it “punishes the parents”.
The other school of thought is this – the girl is having a temper tantrum, stop paying so much attention, give her strict rules to follow, give her a few years and let maturity do some work. Let her “grow up” and cut the shit out. Give enough attention so that her health stays in check and that she doesn’t die, but otherwise, cut the therapy and support groups and everything out of the picture. Discipline, strict curfews, rules. This is a hissy fit, and should be treated as such. More of a “tough love” approach.
Which is correct? I don’t know. Whichever it is, the stakes are high, and opinionated people have probably already hastily decided which it is.[/quote]
This post gave me quite a lot to think about, and I think you’re right on many levels, especially about the “they don’t see themselves as fat”-part.
It sort of reminds me of when I first came here, and some of the articles told me basically to “eat until you throw up, you scrawny fuck”. It taught me that I was wrong without trying to be nice about it, and it worked brilliantly.
As always, we are dealing with a mental disorder, with different causes and cures from person to person. There is a lot of truth to what you just said, though.