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.

Telemarketing.

I seriously wish I could find a job. Anything that isn't getting cycled through shit telemarketing job after shit telemarketing job or spamming my friends with some asshole's marketing scheme.

Scoliosis (in my case) makes it hard to have a job where I don't get to sit down. When I don't get to sit down my back gets so messed up that I end up barely able to walk. And to my ex boss: "take an aspirin" is really shitty advice for someone who is limping and in serious serious pain. That ends up meaning that I basically HAVE to work a sitting job or a combination job. And most sitting jobs that can take you just for the summer are shitty telemarketing jobs. Jobs where you have to take a lot of verbal abuse both from people on the phone and from your boss. I've dealt with a borderline mother and a lot of bullying/abusive behavior in my lifetime and so it's kind of hard for me to just let things go when I feel already like so many people are just ignorant worthless and pointlessly cruel. Telemarketing jobs are always hiring, always firing if you don't make quota. Which means I might just get shuffled back and forth from job to job to job all summer. AGAIN. Fucking A. This is really not going to be good for my self-esteem.

Are you gonna eat that?

Something someone posted on my Facebook wall reminds me of a HUGE frustration I have with teenage/twenty-something girls and occasionally boys. Eating food is a fucking competition. Not a competition to see who can eat the most, a competition to see who can eat the least. Specifically, a competition to see who can WHINE the most about their caloric intake.

My boss recently decided that all the candy and soda we have around the office is going to lead her into temptation, so she started buying healthy snacks for the office. I have no real issue with healthy things, but what drives me nuts is that instead of buying say - fresh fruit, fruit juice, sun chips, etc, people basically buy bastardized versions of things that taste good. That and nature bars that taste like tree bark. Instead of some juice boxes like we used to have, we're drinking this weird pseudo-soda that has zero calories and all the flavor of sink cleaner. Instead of popcorn we have low-fat low-butter low-taste fopcorn. Calling it "fopcorn" was intentional. And then we have those nature bars that taste like tree bark.

Granted I appreciate people buying food for us, but the logic is somewhat absent here.

I suggested once that instead of drinking basically heavily carbonated artificially flavored water with fizz in it and probably plenty of high fructose corn syrup, we just buy the new natural Pepsi products. There are new soda products with REAL sugar out there so if you're worried about "the dangers of soda," you'd be better off with that than with all this splenda shit. I don't know for sure that splenda causes cancer, but I wouldn't be surprised. My suggestion was very much ignored.

So I've already established that every snack we've purchased has about two calories in it. That should STOP EVERYONE FROM WHINING ABOUT HOW FAT IT'S GOING TO MAKE THEM, RIGHT? No chance.

"I am just SO HUNGRY like ohmigod, I just am like SUPER hungry like the hungriest person ever I am like SUPER SUPER hungry!"

"Then eat something."

"I would but ugh I'm just EATING so much...I'm such a pig."

Okay. I don't have a problem with eating disorders. It's just this chill, flippant, nonchalant attitude toward disordered eating that upsets me. People I work with seem to think it's no big deal to eat one meal a day and then to do eight thousand sit ups afterward. As someone who flirted with an eating disorder a couple of years ago, it is really upsetting to me to be constantly reminded that food has calories and that everything I eat will make me fat. I'm trying to convince myself that my ability to be loved is not dependent on whether or not I get rid of the small bit of flab on my stomach. But then these people go on and on about it and it's hard to feel okay with who I am when they are half my size and still whining. Half my size isn't good. I'm 135 pounds, 5 foot 6.

Anyway. It isn't just their OWN eating they're concerned with. It's everyone else's too. If you grab a plate of something, it only takes moments for someone to go, "oh, I (meaning: unlike you, you fat cow) just can't eat all this. It's SO much food, I shouldn't be eating that much." Then they put like 1/4 the amount of food I took on their plate and continue on a big battle with their conscience about it. I recognize most of these people are only thinking of themselves, but it can be very frustrating to constantly be listening to people act like eating is a sin when I'm trying to convince myself it isn't.

There's also the lovely thing where I say, "I had dinner already but this looks pretty good and dinner was pretty small today," and someone responds with, "don't worry, the gym is open until midnight." As if my immediate response to having eaten on a special occasion should be to fly into the nearest gym and spend three hours on the treadmill. Come ON.

A lot of people seem to think that their ability to be wanted is based on thinness. They haven't figured out that attractiveness is lose-lose. If you're thin, men and women bitch that you don't have breasts or curves like a "real" woman. If you're curvy, men and women ignore you for twigs. The problem is, these people base attraction on the flavor of the minute. Today they like thin. Tomorrow they'll like chubby. The next day they'll like blonde. When people base their interest in you purely on physical things, they'll always find someone who better fits the fantasy idol in their head than you. That's why to me it makes sense to try hard to look good but at the same time not bank on thinness to help you find love.

I wish there was some way to tell people, "you know what? I used to be on those pro-ana sites and calculate every calorie that entered my body. I still can't eat more than a meal a day without getting serious unmentionable body issues. So please shut the hell up."

I don't eat very much at all. It takes like...emotional preparation and work for me to eat. So every person who tells me, "oh that's got FAT in it," or, "you should be eating veggie snacks instead of popcorn," or what the hell ever really needs to knock it off. I don't eat THAT unhealthily during the week. I also don't eat that much. If you're going to tell someone to stop eating fattening foods, find someone who uses food as a coping mechanism to yell at instead of someone who's trying not to have an ED.

I want to rip out people's souls for lack of a better way of saying it.

Why is it that somehow everyone on the planet is more allowed to feel the way they feel about sex than I am? It hurts when wanting someone and not getting someone is about more than the disappointment of not getting laid. It hurts when you KNOW someone is fucked up, unhealthy, indecent, possibly a rapist - yours, and instead of saying "that is fucked up shit and I'm getting the hell out of here," you finally realize you can't really stop it - stop her and say, "fuck it," and you let the side of you that loves her rule. I blame psychiatry, I blame that fucking Zoloft that made life feel under my control. I thought it was rape but I could make it NOT rape through love. I've always been so good, so prude, and so unwanted. I had a chance to be wanted. I had a chance to be a masochist, to be sexual in some unapologetically sick and fucked up way that didn't claim to be sweet or pure or caring in ways that it wasn't, to be BAD, to exist, to release the RAR under my skin that only comes out in short little bursts when I cut or masturbate, to be owned and used by someone who KNEW and liked that she was owning and using me, and to just let sick be sick. I had a chance to be WANTED. I had a chance to be hot, even in a stupid way. But for some reason, she didn't decide to go that direction. She was my friend, talked to me about my problems while casually threatening me if I said things she didn't like. I got wet just reading her type things on AIM because I knew she was on a computer putting at least some thought into me. I didn't get rid of her because she threatened me. I didn't get rid of her because she basically confirmed the rape to me. I didn't get rid of her because she was a terrible excuse of a human being. I got rid of her because she got pregnant and I couldn't handle the pain it caused me. I couldn't handle getting hit on by a pregnant woman who was bearing the permanent result of her shitty relationship with some derelict.

I feel so fucking empty all the time. I'm not attracted to anyone else. I don't even know if I fully FELT this way before I met her but there's so much energy, rage, sex in a cruel and negative manifestation, power, etc inside me that isn't positive and doesn't want to be. It couldn't hurt her, I don't think. I wanted it out of me, I could argue she put it in me. And even with all that in me, now, I just feel empty. Because I don't believe sex is this pretty happy thing and I don't think it can be fair or safe unless we actually really deeply know each other and have trust based on knowing and accepting ALL of what we are. But if sex can't be that, I'd rather it be brutal than bullshit. I feel this ravenous feeling in my heart and this empty bullshit inside me like I have no personality or Self. I forget I exist outside homework and wishing sex would go away and anything that makes me feel close to her makes me happy and sad and everything else just sucks and I really thought that I'd be over this shit by now. If I feel too close to her, sometimes, I remember what she actually is and I panic. And that's when I hate her. But it isn't often enough that I'm actually conscious of the fact that this isn't a badass kink, it's fucking rape.

An asshole post (inspired by Knightmare)

So today I was sent out to work in a certain part of town where ugly toothless women crawl into cars with men and come back 20 minutes later with more cash than they went in with. It was disgusting. My job is to canvass to people and ask them for money, and there were a few people I'd stop and think "oh this person looks okay," and they'd open their mouth and I'd see two rotting, yellow fangs emerge from their wobbly jaw. Their gums were like mush and their top jaw is almost nonexistent because it's so rotted out so when they talk it just looks like bits of old popcorn I found in the lining of my couch stuck in some rotten silly putty. Their cheeks, because of their weak jaws, are completely caved in.

I think this part of town has a law that says "if you have all your teeth you are required to have at least 6,000 warts on your face alone." I saw one guy whose face looked like bubble wrap, and another who looked like somebody took a messy crap on his face. It's infuriating because without medical insurance, they can't do anything about this but let's face it. I'm a human being, and human beings are hard-wired to be disgusted when they see horribly disfigured or messed up people because our minds think "oh shit I don't want whatever he's got." When I see someone who looks like a gnarled tree, I don't want to stop them, I don't want to talk to them, I don't want to be anywhere near them. I feel SO bad because I know these might be worthwhile people but looking at them makes me physically ill.

And then there are the people who are just insane. I don't worship the Christian God but I have to respect him for the amount of absolute lunatics who pray to him. This fat woman with stringy gray hair and legs that looked like two tiny bags swelling with lard stopped and started yammering about how she doesn't want to go to prison and this other lady told me she couldn't support human rights because she believes in Jesus. WHAT THE BLOODY HELL DOES THAT MEAN? If there is anyone in the world who cares about human rights, it is Jesus.

And then there was that cum dumpster with that triumphant look on her face who told me she disagrees 100% with everything my organization stands for. I wanted to look at her and say, "okay enjoy being raped." Our organization stands against rape, violence against women, human trafficking, forced prostitution, and a lot of anti-freedom violence that happens around the world. Anyone who thinks that's un-Christian or un-American needs to go have sex with a cheese grater and never reproduce.

I'm seriously so damn sick of this shit. I mean, it's not peoples' fault if they have no teeth or if they're covered in festering warts but the truly infuriating part is we have these warty, toothless, unemployed people walking around and the few people who HAVE teeth and HAVE nice clothes and clear skin can't take a fucking second out of their busy lives to talk to a canvasser who represents making things better for people.

I know, I know "why trust someone on the street blah blah blah fucking blah." I go through as many measures as I can (or we do) to make everything secure, and honestly people don't get that a canvasser's job depends on them making quota every day. I get FIRED if people decide "oh I'll just go on the website later." Even if they go to the website and donate ten billion dollars I could get FIRED. And is living in the midst of prostitution, homelessness, and all sorts of awful stuff NOT ENOUGH OF A REASON to take two fucking seconds out of your lunch break to talk to someone who's trying to make a real difference in the world? DAMMIT I hate people...

Is this normal?

Just to warn you, this is going to be grosser than usual

So yesterday we (my roommate, my parents, and I) were at my grandparents' house saying goodbye to them since we came back to Minnesota (my parents to visit/move stuff, us to stay,) and I had to use the bathroom before we left. So my mother comes in there and starts going on and on about how long I'm taking and THEN she starts like watching what I'm doing and how I'm wiping my ass...like...WHAT THE FUCK? And then she starts complaining about how I must be obsessive compulsive because I don't leave bits of shit around my anus and infers that if I'm not having anal sex it shouldn't matter if I have shit in my anus... WHAT THE FUCK?

And she made me get up because "it had to be flushed" halfway through my bathroom-use...at least this time she didn't insult my pubic hair.

So then she's yelling really loudly in the bathroom like, "ARE YOU STILL POOPING?" so the whole house can hear about it.

And she keeps patting me on the ass...which is getting really old, even though I keep telling her not to touch my ass.

And THEN we're at a rest stop and I come out of the stall and she starts making some huge ass deal about me taking a while in the bathroom so I ignore her and she gets all sad and is like, "you walked right past me," *pathetic voice* and then gets really stupid about it so I feel guilty and I go back and then she starts making comments about it.

So THEN like...we're at the apartment later and I'm using the bathroom and she's like "can I come in and talk to you?"

Like WHAT THE FUCK is my mom's issue with me using the fucking bathroom? I'm getting really tired of it and she's raising shit (no pun intended) over every stupid little thing and just getting all ridiculous about nothing and I just ugh I don't want to be around her anymore it's just...I mean being an insufferable bitch is one thing but barging into the bathroom (it didn't have a lock on the door when she came in so don't tell me I should've locked it) and smacking my ass that's a problem.

Privacy means in space that is yours.

I'm just wondering if it makes me a jerk that I think people sharing a bathroom should masturbate in their own bedrooms? Masturbation is lovely but that's a bit too personal. Aside from the cleanliness issue there's my weird issues with sexuality and the "what are you doing in there/tmi" thing. I feel like a jerk for sort of pushing that point today because I feel like I should be "cooler" than that but I'm just not. Supposedly it's understood and it's fine but I still feel like a cock-blocking on-leading lesbian tease/whore.

I can't help thinking of all the girls with sugar-doused souls who would be cooler with this stuff than I am. I mean it's working out, but I just can't help thinking that any given one of them would be "better" than me for not having issues with things.

WHY is it that I manage to be writing such fucked up sexual stories yet I can't even DEAL WITH THINGS in real life? It makes me crazy.

At least we're here. I made us mac and cheese for dinner (from a box but still) with a shit ton of butter and it turned out really frickin good. I haven't made it on a stove and actually used milk and butter in years so it was pretty awesome. As he said, just the right temperature to shovel it into your mouth without risk of burning. Even if it was something simple I sang some fragmented musical numbers while I was cooking and I looked like a frickin housewife, and then I served dinner from the pot. It was kind of cheesy how housewifey I looked.

The moving in part is taking forever. There are still boxes places and my desk/chest of drawers won't be here until next week so a lot of things have to stay in their boxes until things are okay.

We actually tested the acoustics of my vibrators earlier, basically turning one on and having him go into his room to see if he heard anything. He kept insisting he didn't but I was really self-conscious thinking "OH MY GOD HE HEARS IT OH EM GEE."

Speaking of vibrators, when my mom was cleaning out my chest of drawers she found the package for my first vibrator (the lawn mower) with the price sticker still on it. She started laughing and told my dad she found the case for my old dildo. I explained to her that it wasn't a dildo, it was a vibrator, but it's all the same to her. It's NOT THE SAME dangit. Usually dildos don't vibrate and if they do it's with a little bullet you stick in a little hole in the bottom that probably doesn't do jack shit. And usually dildos are bigger than this clitoris assailant that met its fate with leaky batteries that made it go off on its own in the bathroom a few times until it just completely croaked. My mom asked me where I got $13.95 for the thing...and I explained to her that uhm...first off I worked in high school a bit and second of all I was always being given money when I went out and nobody needed to know I bought a vibrator after we got our way-too-greasy fake Chinese food on the booths that squeaked.

Anyway yeah way too long of a story to explain a fairly simple event.