Tag Archives: bulimia

The ABC Diet and… why??

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You’ve heard of diets, and you’ve heard of eating disorders. The levels to which these can exist is dismal, disgusting, and just plain stupid. A female person is supposed to consume approximately 1700 calories a day, depending on your exercise level.

Instead, eating disorders create a very scary goal. If you are eating less than about 500 calories a day, then your body will definitely be digesting muscle. Especially heart muscle. If sexy is your goal, heart attacks still aren’t sexy, so… don’t do that.

The above chart dictates the ABC diet, abbreviated for the Anorexia Boot Camp Diet. That’s right- Anorexia Boot Camp. Normal boot camps kick your ass into shape. This one makes your body anorexic, starved for everything. Each day, you are to consume the number of calories on the chart. The greatest amount is 800.

Need more tips on how to become anorexic? Push your food around on your plate so it will look like you have been eating. Brush your teeth, because other foods don’t taste good with toothpaste and you won’t want to eat. Drink gallons of water every day, so your body will think that it is full. Trick your friends, trick your family, trick your own body into thinking you are healthy.

A spin-off of eating disorders is “thinspo”, which is short for thinspiration, which is then short for inspiration to be thin. Thinspo is thankfully often blocked on popular websites, such as Tumblr. Pinterest puts up a health advisory warning when the word is searched. These pictures depict starved women, with quite visible spinal cords and hip bones that could be used as weapons. A better alternative is fitspo, as it depicts fit women.

I try to not tell people how to run their lives, but if purposefully starving your body is the adult and responsible decision you’ve made, then you are doing life wrong. Your goals in life would be better if they included “get healthy” or “get fit”, instead of “have thighs that don’t touch” or “have exceedingly prominent collar bones”.

I wouldn’t mind looking like a Victoria’s Secret model. I’m sure my boyfriend wouldn’t mind that either. However, there are certain things that women should seriously consider saying “no” to. Purposefully digesting your heart muscle is one of them.



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Male Killers More Overt, But No Crueler Than Females

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Scales with Men and Women

The recent movie theater massacre in Aurora shocked the country.  On some level, it did to movie-going what 9/11 did to flying—essentially, took away the innocence of what had hitherto been a common, everyday occurrence.

And, predictably, in the face of world-rocking disasters set into place by humans, the situation has been parsed on many levels.  Who was this James Holmes?  Why did he go with “The Joker”?  What could happen to cause a doctoral student to run amok?  What does this mean to the gun-control pissing contest?  Did Holmes’ psychiatrist have an obligation to alert authorities as to his profoundly violent tendencies?

I found myself most intrigued by a piece from Erika Christakis, an administrator at Harvard University, positing that mass murder has a tendency to be … well, a male-dominated club.  While Christakis admits that it’s not like women never kill (and there’s the odd female serial killer that’s floated through history), it’s an inarguable fact that the most shocking acts of violence, including but not limited to mass murder, have been “overwhelmingly perpetrated by men”.

In fact, Christakis goes so far as to say throw out there that “our silence about the huge gender disparity of such violence may be costing lives.”

Hmm …

From Time:

Imagine for a moment if a deadly disease disproportionately affected men. Not a disease like prostate cancer that can only affect men, but a condition prevalent in the general population that was vastly more likely to strike men. Violence is such a condition: men are nine to 10 times more likely to commit homicide and more likely to be its victims. The numbers are sobering when we look at young men. In the U.S., for example, young white males (between ages 14 and 24) represent only 6% of the population, yet commit almost 17% of the murders. For young black males, the numbers are even more alarming (1.2% of the population accounting for 27% of all homicides). Together, these two groups of young men make up just 7% of the population and 45% of the homicides. And, overall, 90% of all violent offenders are male, as are nearly 80% of the victims.

A lot of my teacher friends and colleagues and I have a theory on fighting that goes on in schools—basically, if girls get into a fight, it’s forever.  Oh, they may smile and “make up”, but both sides (and their legions of friends) will never forget the situation.  It gets dragged up repeatedly, often into adulthood.  Boys get pissed at each other, beat the shit out of each other, and have basically forgotten the whole thing within a month and often become friends.

As this has always been my attitude, I found those statistics troubling, to say …

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Portia DeRossi’s Memoir, Unbearable Lightness, Discusses Her Struggle With Eating Disorders

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Portia DeRossi, (Ellen DeGeneres’ wife) has gone and written a book.  While I am a little tired of every single celebrity and their mom out there writing a book, I do think that this one might be quite good.  Portia is really articulate and it does help that she was the star of my all-time favorite TV show, Arrested Development. So I’m intrigued.

Incidentally, I actually attended the Ellen taping when Portia discussed her memoir titled Unbearable Lightness.  My friends and I managed to sit in the front row, close enough to see Ellen’s pores.  It was pretty awesome, plus we got free stuff which is always a good thing!  However, this …

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Pro-Ana Nation: Sites Encouraging Eating Disorders are More Common Than You Think

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photo of skinny woman and thinspired thinspiration pro-ana quotes overlayed

Ah, the power of the internets does it again.

Recently, researchers have examined the power of websites that encourage eating disorders and have found, predictably, that they are very damaging. These sites act as sort of a how-to guide to becoming anorexic or bulimic. They also provide moral support (that term feels so wrong here) and other types of encouragement, i.e. providing photos of bony thin women on the site. Apparently, anecdotal doctors have been aware of the presence of these sites for a long time. Some claim that many of their patients have used the sites to help them know how to become anorexic or bulimic.

Now, there are a lot of wonderful things that world wide web provides us, but there are always controversial websites that mortify the rest of us. To me, though, this is worse than just one of those controversial sites. What I find exceptionally dangerous about the situation is that these sites are creating an acceptable social niche for people with these eating disorders. I’m no psychologist, but I imagine that someone who is susceptible to an eating disorder has a natural inclination to be more concerned with fitting in socially and feeling included and accepted. Providing an online resource to propagate an environment where fitting in suddenly includes having an eating disorder is a perfect storm for these people. Not only do they have explicit instructions on how to become anorexic, but they suddenly have a cheering squad to get them to do so.

What’s worse is that, generally speaking, it isn’t so much grown adults using these sites as it is children. I can see why a teenage girl, for example, would latch on to something like this. Most teens are already familiar and very comfortable using social networking sites, and these sites could fulfill a similar purpose. Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia are known for causing health problems later in life, especially for people who have suffered from such a disorder for a long time, i.e. they started as children.

I am actually really bothered that these websites even exist. The article mentions that even after they get shut down, they will reappear somewhere else (which isn’t too surprising). But in all honesty, what kinds of people are putting these sites up? It boggles my mind that there are people that would do that. I know, I should probably be more jaded and expect that sort of thing, but I can’t help it.

What are your thoughts? I’m sure you’re even vaguely familiar with sites of this nature.  Will they ever go away completely?



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