Anorexia and Dieting:
pieces of the same puzzle

Anorexia and dieting go together. You can't get Anorexia Nervosa unless you go on diet. By its very definition, it's just a protracted and over-the-top diet. So....100% of anorexia sufferers started their road to anorexia with a restrictive diet.

Isn't that another great reason to ditch diets and live light?

It's all triggered by that fearsome question: Am I overweight? It's all about a lack of body acceptance.So starts the slippery path to anorexia through dieting.

The key, once again, is that it all starts with a dieting with the aim being to lose weight. Anorexia and dieting are like two piece of the same puzzle... dieting is dangerous.

When I became anorexic, my degree of willpower (I ate only gelatine and diet cold drink for about 8 months) as well as my diminishing size were sources of great pride and feelings of superiority.

Anorexia made me feel as if I was in control. I (the great I) had mastered my eating and my body unlike other weak-willed individuals who hadn't. Ha! Ha! Little did I know what a big fat anorexia and dieting lie that was.

In common with other anorexics, underneath my desire to get thinner my insecurity and control issues and my fears about my worthiness and acceptability were running rampant.

I hadn't mastered anything - anorexia and dieting had grown into a monster that had mastered me! Anorexia is dieting that has become obsessive. While you're not eating, IT can literally eat up your entire life.

For example I was always working with food. Eat it? Heck no... I'd just be feeding everyone else up. I even volunteered to work in the school kitchen. It was a good foil so people didn't notice I wasn't eating.

And the sense of control I had (which I didn't normally have around food or in a kitchen) put me on a high. It made me feel like I could conquer Everest! I never refused food - no I had a giant cardboard box at the bottom of my cupboard where everything landed.

And the high I got from everyone when I started losing the weight only fueled the problem. The message I kept 'hearing' (even if that wasn't exactly what people were saying) was: you're getting prettier and more acceptable and more worthy.

Now know that was just the baloney voice of anorexia - I was doing nothing of the sort. Anorexia Nervosa was closing my life down, not expanding it and making it better. I had to become worthy in my head - not my body for any lasting change to come about.

I guess my profile fits almost perfectly: I'm a Westernized Caucasian, from a (relatively-speaking) high socio-economic group. I also had perfectionistic tendencies and a huge need for approval and to please.

I've had to grow my inner rebel in order to heal. And one way I've done that is to take back my power when it comes to deciding what kind of body makes me worthy of love!

My brush with anorexia started when I was 15 - in the vulnerable period of adolescence which is pretty typical. But here's what scares me.

Nowadays therapists are treating younger and younger children and older women as well. I recently read of a Dr. Emily Major who'd treated a 4-year old (!) for Anorexia Nervosa at Van der Bilt University. And I've personally worked with a woman who was almost 70 with anorexia.

But even though this is shocking - there are no surprises about it. Here's why: Girls are dieting at progressively younger ages and women keep dieting to much later ages.

Males can also develop the disorder but it's much more rare. And again there's a pretty logical reason for that. Traditionally mens' worth has not been judged by their appearance but more by their status, position and earnings power. But that's changing!

So I want to make a prediction and say that we're going to see more and more men dieting and as a result more anorexia and other eating disorders. And there's no mystery as to why men are starting to diet?

Just take a peek at magazine racks - what do you notice? A rash of men's glossies and many of the covers are graced by semi-naked male images. For the first time research shows we are seeing more semi-naked male images than women.

Body beautiful for men has become BIG business for the fashion and beauty industries. As men become more appearance-orientated (even though the trend is more likely to be towards being muscular than towards being skinny), dieting is inevitably playing a part in it as you'll see when we talk about Bigorexia.

Because here's part of the solution to the anorexic and dieting riddle:

• You don't find Anorexia in cultures where larger bodies are honored and revered.

• You don't find Anorexia in naturalist villages where the emphasis is feeling comfortable in your own skin rather than great emphasis on how it looks.

• You don’t find Anorexia where you don’t have Westernized TV or the glossies – but as the Fijians will attest, as soon as those arrive, so do previously unheard of eating disorders.

• You don’t find Anorexia where food is in short supply and people can’t afford to use food to ‘say’ what I and other anorexics perhaps weren't/aren't able to verbalize.

• You don’t find Anorexia where you don't find dieting. that's why anorexia and dieting are part of the same picture.

Those are rather telling factors, don't you think?

If you find the ditch-diets-live-light website useful, please recommend it to your friends.

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