Anorexia nervose is not a disease. It's an obsession. It takes over your body until you lose control. You couldn't eat even if you tried. Your body rejects food, the fuel that keeps you alive. It makes you sick. If you're one of the lucky ones, you get put in ICU and they feed you through a tube. If you're not, well there's a nice cold home waiting for you six feet beneath the grass.
Having anorexia makes you feel in control in an otherwise chaotic life. You monitor what goes into your mouth - or lack thereof. As the fat melts away you feel better about yourself. When you look like the warped image that you have stored away in your mind of what a person should look like, it gives you a higher self-esteem. When you weight 98 pounds, you feel like you should have started starving yourself a lot sooner. But deep down you know you hate the sacrifice. You hate how you gave up food to see your bones protruding from your body, yet seeing the fat over them is unbearable. You miss the delicious chocolate cake, that used to be your favorite dessert, sliding down your throat. You have almost forgotten what it feels like to taste the grease from the hamburger you bought from McDonald's months ago.
Making up excuses to keep from eating becomes second nature, but it doesn't matter anyway - everyone is so in denial that their baby could never be anorexic that they don't notice. They blindly look the other way as you wear the same clothes you've worn but instead of fitting snuggly, they hang off you like a little girl dressed in her mother's clothing.
You don't realize it's too late until you're too far gone. You can't understand what you're doing to yourself because you're as blind as everyone else. Society has gotten to you and created a "perfect" picture in your mind. But what dictates perfect? Who judges what is and what isn't? You will never look like Britney Spears and you will never look like Jennifer Lopez no matter how much you starve yourself. To be real in your own body and proud of it is to be perfect.
But dropping weight like a stone in water gives you a renewed feeling of strength. Physically you're worn out but mentally you have this adrenaline rush that makes up for everything. When people around you ask if you've lost weight, you can't help but smile and nod your head yes. You feel excited and you know you look great. You think back to when you weighed 20 pounds more and cringe at the thought. And every morning you look at yourself in the mirror and sigh in relief that you don't look any fatter than the grotesque monster you already are. And every morning in that mirror you hold in your stomach and stretch until you can see each and every rib, pleased at the sight. Every night as you lay in bed and gravity pulls your stomach flatter you can't help but run you hands over the same ribs, wishing that your stomach was as flat when you were standing up.
If your stomach isn't as concave as it was the night before, you resolve to eat less the next day. You feel disappointed in yourself if you screw up and eat too much. You wish you could take it back but you can't. And you can't throw it up because it's already digested. The only way to counteract it is to exercise. So at midnight when you can't sleep because your mind is racing too fast, you get up and do as many crunches as you can before collapsing. Then exhausted you crawl back into bed and you can finally sleep.
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