Food For Thought page 1 (click for page 2 & page 3 & page 4 & page 5 & page 6 & new page 7)
This section is for you to write, not me. Send me your thoughts and if you don't mind them published in this section, they might be appearing. If you don't want your email posted, then please specify not to post your email. Abstract thoughts, poems, freewrites, journal entries, your own story, responses to this web page (negative or positive) are ALL welcome. Please keep it fairly short and to the point so that a lot of people can be heard. Send e-mail to: foodforthought@anorexicweb.com
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From Emily...
Fri, Oct 1, 1999, 4:03 PM
Dying. That's what I am. The scale reads 51.1. The numbers are magical, bright florescent against the digital scale. And the joy I feel, the euphoric, lighter than-air joy, makes me want to fly, soar above the sky. I am the thinnest. The thinnest. This is how my day was yesterday. I am 5'4 and 51 pounds. Clinically dying. and if that's what gets me the thinnest, thinner than every other anorexic, then so be it. I live for the emaciation. I love how I look right now-though I can possibly get a little thinner. My eyes are sunken, dark circles underneath them. My skin is yellow, paper-thin and stretched tightly over my skeleton. My ribs can be counted, sternum juts, and hipbones and kneebones distend through my clothes, all falling off of me. I love the bones. I love the light, downy hair, the vertabrae and collarbones, which I must ALWAYS make sure are visible. Unfortunately for me, and my 15 years, with the 9 hospitalizations, the feeding tubes and near-death experiences, the crown of reigning "queen of anorexia", I HAVE NOT BEEN SCARED. I haven't felt "I have to get better. I have to eat. I can't live like this". I haven't felt "I must get well". This torture, this starvation, this compulsive exercising day in and day out, the physical pain, exhaustion, chilled to-the-bone cold feeling, is an addiction I cannot break. My goal is to get to fifty pounds, to go through more days of starvation and longer exercise routines. I am not normal. I know this. Don't they realize I know this. I am soooooo competitive. I compare myself to the anorexics I love reading about, to the skeleton in the Earth Science classroom. "Emily, you're a concentration camp victim", they say to me over and over again. Like a broken record. My body goes "Give me food", my head goes, "No you fat worthless piece of crap! You must not eat!". And eventually, I collapse. My body cant take any more. I just sleep. I wake up with a throbbing headache, but try and punish myself with 2 hours of running and calisthenics. I am dying. But I must be the thinnest.
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Dear "Queen of Anorexia"
I will put this on the site. And though you say you like being the "thinnest" and that you find joy in this delusion disease, you also tell yourself that you are a "worthless piece of crap". You say you love the emaciation, but you don't love your life. It's clear that you are trapped, and though it may sometimes feel like you are in control of it all, it is also clear that you are a hostage of the anorexia and you can't see beyond it. That is not freedom.
It is a very powerful, heartbreaking, strong, desperate piece. I am sorry you demand so much from yourself, pushing competition upon yourself with such impossibly strict rules, asking your absolute broken body to do more despite your years of relentless torture...
And what is with the "I must be the thinnest" crap? You are the thinnest and it means nothing more than that. You are only fucking 51 pounds, less than a good-sized dog, and what? So what? Is suicide supposto be impressive? Because the magazines say so, or because the other anorexics say so, or because the doctors are so amazed that your heart is still pumping?? You said yourself that YOUR body wants food and you just say NO to your body. There is nothing cool or "winning" about that, its just a part of how hard it is for you to really talk about how you feel and its just an attempt to express something you can't otherwise say and its not your body's fault.
You have earned the sought-after title of "Queen of Anorexia". But you aren't celebrating your victory, you are punishing yourself with another 2 hours of running and calisthenics. Running, running, running and getting no where. I am so sorry you feel you must be so mean to yourself. Serial killers sitting on death row treat themselves better. You are at war. I feel sad to hear about your war and I want you to know I have been at war too and it isn't the only experience available on this Earth. Don't leave before finding that out for yourself, Emily. Why don't you try doing what all the healthy, living people around you are saying you ought to do? It's your only chance, my friend, because you aren't in control anymore, the anorexia is.
I wish you would dare change your mind, heal yourself and try another approach to this life. You can turn all of this around and surprise everyone by healing and loving yourself and standing up for yourself... then oneday you can tell everyone else your story... what you learned... what you know...
I want you to live long enough to tell the world your story because I think it is an important one but we can't do this without you, girl.
Blessings, Lisa
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Hey, I don't think you should have printed Emily's note. She is someone who is all over the web with her little story about being so low in weight. I've seen stuff by her on the razzberry site and on the deja.com site and the something fishy site. Yeah, there's something fishy about HER, all right. I don't believe her. She's a lying bitch. Why isn't she in the hospital if she's that low in weight and stuff? How could anyone whose brain is presumably fried by the anorexia write so well? I think she's lying up the wazoo. Interestingly enough about the one place she hasn't put out her story is the alt.support.eating-disorders newsgroup. They wouldn't buy her shit for a moment, and probably would confront her immediately. I really thnk she's lying and that it's too bad you printed her letter. It's just too well written for someone who is supposedly that far gone with anorexia. In the hospital I met people who were real sick like her and they sure couldn't put a sentence together, much less write the way she does. I bet she just says that she's that low weight to get attention and stuff.
Aside from that, your whole website is really, really triggering. I loved it! Me and a friend have picked up some cool tips from here. The photos are neat, but some of them are kinda gross. I liked most of them, though. A lot of the stuff you mention I've done but there are a few new tricks you've talked about that I haven't tried yet. This is a cool place to find neat tricks! I have the feeling, though, that maybe this wasn't your idea when you set up this website, to give us new ideas. Are you really recovered? Somehow it sure doesn't seem that way after reading this website! Sounds to me that your just like us, still obsessed and everything. A lot of the stuff on here doesn't sound like the other websites I've seen on recovery. OK, gotta go back and read some more stuff from the site.
Great job! Tamsin
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LISA'S NOTE: I did respond to Emily, as posted, and attempted to call her on her seriousness and denial. If Emily is not really eating disordered and is having "fun" posting her letters than rest-assure she's got some kind of mental illness going on and that is issue enough!
IF YOU ARE JUST LOOKING FOR "TRICKS" THEN YOU MISSED THE WHOLE POINT OF THAT SECTION AND I ASK YOU TO READ IT ENTIRELY FIRST, OKAY??. And, no worries, I AM IN RECOVERY. -Lisa
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Unfortunately for everyone who thinks I am lying, I am not. This is too serious a subject to lie about-I dont understand why anyone would lie about this. I am friends with the founder of a particular newsgroup at deja.com, and we have similar feelings about the disease. I am sorry if I bragged, or if I wrote too well, but I am not lying. I never would, it's ridiculous. If I ever did lie, I am now trying to tone down anything I ever did. I didn't mean to hurt anyone or anything. I've been sick lately, so I'm sort of just resting. I'm not even allowed to exercise any more. I dont spread lies, and I dont use hurtful insults to people. Why dont I use the alt.eatingdisorders.support newsgroup? Is at at deja.com? because if it is, you'll notice, Shalom posts FOR me at deja.com, I dont post. I have serious trouble accessing the posting. My computer sends me poor information back when I try to post. It's very complicated. And also, I've never ever posted in the something fishy website, never. I go there once in awhile, just to check out the links.
-Emily
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now for something else: "Is Thinner the Winner?"
Lisa~ Your webpage is one of the better ones i have ever been to. I just wanted to thank you for sharing your struggles, and information with me and everyone else. While reading what you wrote it just makes me so scared, scared that I will never change and that I will be like this for life. NO, I can't let this happen I won't! I want a life , career, husband, and family. Although I continue to spend my days isolated ( or most of them ) and filling my free time with binging and purging. Locking myself away in my room in a corner wondering why I am so angery and how I got that way. Keeping myself out of touch with everyone all because I want to be thin..and thinner. "Thinner is the winner". Am I winning though? I don't think so I realize this about 50% of the time. I"m not thin...I suffer from both anorexia and bulimia so it keeps me pretty balanced sometimes on the lower side. Its so frusturating when people say to me, " oh you are so thin..." " or you have no choice go take your lunch break" , and other *nice* comments to that nature. When I hear things like this I think how in the FUCK can they be saying that I don't look any different then anyone else! What are they seeing??? They must be smoking crack to be even considering me thin! I just dont know who to believe anymore myself..because I do trust myself so much, although I am my worst critic, or all of those people smoking crack!? Who can I trust? People will always say "oh you are thin" but what if they aren't telling me the truth, and they are just saying that to not make me freaked out. Well, I think I could go on for hours on this topic, but I will spare you, and maybe everyone else this.
-age 20, L.A.
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I have a friend who suffers from anorexia. She is 5'8 and weighs 108 pounds. I never really thought of her as anorexic.... even when I knew she weighed that little. I very upset with myself now that I didn't even notice my best friend was as skinny as a stick and hungry as a pig. One day at lunch me and my friends were discussing at lunch how she got really skinny really fast. I confronted her and she denied it!! Then one day after lunch (of eating nothing once again) she told me she coughed up blood. My whole world stopped. The songs we were singing in chorus seemed like drowning depressing songs when they were really upbeat "Allelulia" songs. My mind spun and spun..... how could it hit so close to home? how could she act as if nothingwas wrong? what do I do to help her? she said not to tell her mom but should I? Questions flooded through my brain. I decided to tell a close friend. We talked to her, i told her to weigh herself... she was 113 and she was sooo mad at herself. She had gained 5 pounds!!! An unforgiven verse to her!! We tried to tell her it was good...she didn't listen, we decided to take the next step. We took her to the guidence counselar at school. I heard frightneing things about pressure to be skinny for sports, how the world we live in is getting skinnier and fatter all at the same time!! Where did the medium go?? Well we had a good long talk. We left the guidence room after an hour and a half of tears and laughs. She stayed. The guidence counseler had told her the one thing she was terrfied to hear and the one thing she tried to avoid and the one thing that was true about her... SHE WAS ANOREXIC!!!! She cried soo hard she couldn't see striaght! I cried to, but for her!! She has to weigh herself every 5 days at the school nurses office and she has to make a journal of what she eats evry day evry meal. Shes getting better and so am I.
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Keep writing... keep reading...
It is one of the few brilliant ways to get through these lonely disorders.
