Inside Pro-Ana: Why Would Someone Be FOR Eating Disorders?

This question was raised in response to my recent post about self-righteous dieters. Pro-eating disorder sites referred to as "pro-ana" and "pro-mia" are all over social networking sites, blogs, YouTube, etc. A casual viewer sees (usually girls) exchanging secrets about how to hide food and hide their disorder from other people and even more alarmingly sharing pictures of bony (usually women) who are within an inch of death to inspire one another to continue crash dieting.

When I first learned about this, it sounded like downright cruelty. First of all, a woman who is starving to death is not beautiful, she is dying! No one should want to look like that or encourage someone else to be that way. Second of all, if someone already feels bad about themselves, why show them images that are going to make it worse?

I didn't really understand pro-ana until my freshman year of college when I gained the freshman fifteen. I was going through a lot of emotional difficulties as well. I had just ended a friendship with a former (female) abuser and I felt like I had nothing left. Even though she was abusive, manipulative, evil, etc, I still loved her more than anything and would rather suffer myself than see her hurt. She set a standard, a cruel standard, for who I was and who I should be. If a woman who used me and threw me out like trash, telling me that I didn't even have basic sexual object worth to her, could approve of me or even like me (and she did for a while) then I felt like I had succeeded at something amazing. Other people's approval felt like passing a simple multiplication tables test versus passing Multi-variable Calculus with an "A." I had shit self-esteem and only the cruelest and harshest critic could make me feel any better.

I left anyway. I couldn't stand her anymore and the more I dealt with her destroying herself and expecting pity for entirely self-made problems when I was quietly dealing with the aftermath of her abuse. I left because I had to, but I didn't feel like a better (or stronger) person for it. I felt like a failure. I hated the idea that I had lost. That she might hate me now. That I had no one to obsessively love and to structure my fantasies and insecurities and expressions of pain around. This happened around the time when I started outgrowing my jeans. I had the same skinny body from 7th grade through 12th grade and that was how my abuser remembered me. Skinny. A cup. Practically pedophile-bait even when I turned 18. Now I was getting fleshy like a woman and I had no idea if she'd still find me sexually appealing. If she'd bother raping me at this point. Remember, my self-esteem sucked.

I didn't stop eating because of her. I stopped because I could feel containments in my body. Fat didn't feel like body matter, but like dirt. Filth. My OCD flared. I felt like there was feces under my skin for how dirty it was. So I joined a website where the calories of every food known to man can be added daily to keep you in line. It's supposed to be for healthy people dieting safely with a doctor's advice, but come on. If that were true, they'd be tracking meals and health, not counting calories.

I reluctantly joined a pro-anorexia site too. It had the most active 24 hour chat I have ever encountered because no one stays up later than starving people. It distorts your sense of time essentially, because meals mark morning, noon, evening. Besides, I didn't want to sleep with memories of the abuser I left. I didn't want to get in bed where my vibrator was sitting and fantasize about being raped knowing my poor roommate could probably hear the damn toy and knew what I was doing. So I avoided sleep. I went to bed between 5 and 7 a.m. sometimes. And there were always girls (and sometimes boys) online to talk.

Pro-ana was kind of a fantasy world. Everyone on there at least somewhat believed that we were going to be beautiful eventually. We were flawed, but for once there was a solution. It sometimes felt like the all-night vapid slumber party with popular and cute friends that I never had in high school. People assume (I think) that members of pro-ana sites are mean. It's not entirely true. They would ask for each other's stats (body mass index, weight, ana or mia, e stats: body mass indexes, goals, etc) but no one in my experience criticized other people. Sometimes people the exact same size as me or even smaller told me my size wasn't bad. We didn't think other people's fat was gross. We just thought our own was (at least most of us).

When it was really late at night, sometimes you found people on there who were very interesting. One girl in particular whose name I don't remember was engaged to a man despite feeling like she might be a lesbian. She was Christian and she knew what God wanted (or thought she did). But we exchanged photos and talked. We were both lonely and desperation was mutual for once. She believed you have to repent to be forgiven and didn't believe she could honestly regret spending her life with a woman she loved enough to repent. We found each other pretty and when I was hungry enough she would encourage me to eat. We didn't want each other to hurt or suffer, we just didn't have the same hope or care for ourselves as we did for one another.

Girls personified Ana (anorexia). She was a cruel abuser who would force your finger down your throat, swat away food, tell you you're fat, hold up a mirror to your ugliest and worst insecurities. She was the harshness and the standards I missed in my abuser. And the girls I met on the pro-ana site were the comfort.

I watched documentaries about other people with anorexia. I wanted to understand what I was falling into. The girls who had never found pro-ana or thinspiration were hospitalized for avoiding all intake including water. A girl in the documentary thought water had calories. No one on pro-ana believed that. Pro-ana sites tell you what has calories and what doesn't. They're honest with you about the dangers of crash dieting (some are anyway) and they provide you with recipes that will keep you alive (and eating) while you deal. Perhaps it's stupid, tiptoeing around Ana to keep her from hurting you. But there were ways. 90 calorie banana brownies. Orange slices. Lollipops that make your appetite go away. Eat at least one meal a day, the one you eat with your family and friends. No one would suspect a thing.

It's not good to keep secrets perhaps, but the girls I talked to all ate. The girl I was enamored with had half a peanut butter sandwich every day. It was actually surprising how many pro-ana girls were lesbians. So many of them were doing it because they had failed someone's standards (usually their own). Maybe they weren't exactly like me, but we understood each other.

Many people would say, "sure it gets them eating but it doesn't get them therapy." Maybe. Having been to four therapists and one counselor in my life I can tell you that I don't trust therapy too much.

1. In the documentary I saw, girls who were starving were immediately expected to cram fattening clogging food that would be disgusting by anyone's standards into their mouths as fast as possible while nurses stared them down. These are girls who are already insecure about eating, whose stomachs might have shrunk from lack of use. A lot of girls were showing real effort to eat, but if they didn't finish dinner fast enough they were forcibly dragged off to another room and restrained while someone jammed a tube down their throat and forced food into them.

This, to me, is inexcusable. A lot of anorexic girls are rape survivors. To hold them down and forcibly penetrate them, then force things they don't want into their body is criminal I think. To me, forcing people to eat is only addressing the obvious physical problem. Like with many things, anorexia is a symptom. If you were raped, being held down and forced into something that unpleasant and awful, all you're learning is that you have no agency and other people have the right to force their will onto you. I can fully understand why someone wouldn't want to do that kind of treatment.

2. My friend in high school told me that whatever I did, I should avoid the mental hospital. People come out of it silent, even suicidal. It's not a good place and anyone whose been there will tell you that.

Of course I hope everyone with an eating disorder will get better. But I'm "better" and I feel just as much like I failed as I ever did. I feel like I'm not allowed to be thin, not allowed to be pretty, and everyone who tells me that I'm beautiful the way I am makes me want to vomit (sorry...I don't mean literally I was never a purger). To try to treat the problem of victim hood and depression, you have to address the feelings of worthlessness and lack of control. Being forced into things will not help someone who feels like they have absolutely no agency or power whatsoever and is exercising abusive power over their own body.

People who are pro-ana aren't always really pro-eating disorder. They're pro-sufferer. They told me to eat peanut butter. They told me not to starve. They told me to exercise a bit less. They knew therapy doesn't always work and they knew I was an adult and had the right to make my own decisions. But they encouraged each other to eat, and maybe it's important to keep a victim alive on 90 calorie brownies until they work up the strength to deal with their emotional issues and work their way back up to a normal diet. I'm not condoning or supporting pro-ana but I want people to understand that people who support it are not evil, sick, irrational monsters who want to see other people suffer. Also that the therapy system is not perfect.

Psychology is a new science and it's not even agreed upon what an eating disorder should look like. Over 50% of people with diagnosed eating disorders have Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified because they don't fit anorexia OR bulimia. If we don't even know what these disorders are yet, how can we perfectly treat them. There is also the fact that therapy has been shown to be ineffective in people who don't want to change or aren't ready. I can't entirely oppose pro-ana because it's one of the only ways to attract people with eating disorders to food without forcing them to admit problems that they may not be ready to admit yet.