Thread: "My Battle With Anorexia"

Good article Will - thanks for posting.

I think any woman who stumbles across a fitness website / forum will have come down some variation of the same path of trying to separate and reconcile the relationship and the differences between how we perceive how we look, and how we go about arriving at a certain look. Humans are visual so we start w/ things we see that "attract" us and this can then translate into "I want that". And for some reason, despite the Nutrition section of 8th grade Health class, all the common sense around eating & nutrition seem to get lost in the obsession w/ how to achieve a look, and the further expansion into interpretation of "will power" and "control" in terms of eating & nutrition.

Anorexia & bulemia, in some cases, stem from the need to have some sort of control - I think this can even be expanded to include things like cutting and drug abuse. For whatever reason, it all translates into the need to continue dropping weight, but not recognizing the healthy way to do it - i.e. how your body actually works - its sort of like having the hottest high-performance car in the world - just like if you put mud in the gas tank (my analogy for shit food in a diet), you're not going to run well, But along the same lines, if you put absolutely NOTHING in the tank, you're only going to run until the fumes run out. It just doesn't work that way and its not maintainable.

Then throw on the media, the focus on skinny skinny skinny, the praise that seems to come w/ it, the canned "miracle weight loss plans' that are really only building up a revenue from your bank account, the promotion of extreme transformations like The Biggest Loser and the victim / heroism that seems to come with that - all of this goes towards the mindfuck that leads us to have unrealistic expectations and make ridiculous decisions on how to "get skinny".

There are plenty of stories of people, but women specifically in this discussion, who have gotten into fitness competition and found a way to achieve their goals, but somewhere along the line they took it too literally and it went to the other extreme, producing metabolic damange, and in the process, still not picking up the "how it works" for the non-competition lifestyle OR coming out of a competition diet to get back to maintenance state. Just finding a mental, emotional and physical balance of all of that to just be happy and have your body do what it does best, is the challenge.

I still dont' have any easy answers - I can't take my experience as a seasoned competitor and also someone who has had the liftetime battle w/ weight & my relationship w/ food - and deliver a concise message as to "how". You are dealing w/ so many dimensions of the "how", even tho technically it is relatively simple - finding the combination of good quality foods that allow your body to run optimally and then setting that all up into a LIFESTYLE that makes the whole food / weight thing a secondary issue and not the focus and obsession of everything you do. Literally - Eat to live, but not live to eat.

Thanks for the article. Btw, Is it just me or do I see all the pictures posted of her throughout the story with captions under them are different girls. The first and last ones are Asian looking, and the middle on is black? What's going on here?

Originally Posted by zespheley

Thanks for the article. Btw, Is it just me or do I see all the pictures posted of her throughout the story with captions under them are different girls. The first and last ones are Asian looking, and the middle on is black? What's going on here?

All the same girl and all look very Asian to me.

well obviously you don't pay attention to detail very well... skin color and facial features..

theres no way unless she went through some major changes from high schoolskin color is different coulda been a spray tan but her face is different too.

most of them look asian yes, but i wasn't so sure when i first looked through them. I still applaude her though.

Originally Posted by zespheley

well obviously you don't pay attention to detail very well...

No, you don't. One pic she's a kid (2003 as it says right under the pic...), the rest are recent. Added muscle, female curves, tan, etc, make a big difference obviously. Facially, I see the exact same girl in all the pics. If you can't it that's fine by me, but keep the attitude to yourself and maybe actually take some time to fully read the article.

Good luck.