One of my best friends is anorexic. She doesn’t know it, but my other friends and I do. We realized she had a problem the summer of our junior year in high school. She began talking about how she was fat, hated her legs, and needed to be skinnier like me. I have a petite and very slender body not by choice, but because of my genetics. Unfortunately, I became her driving force and was caught in the middle of her vicious cycle. Although being slim can be nice, the idea of having my friend destroy herself, for what seems to be my fault, is haunting. But she didn’t see it that way, she saw me as motivation to become what she thought was ideal.
After a summer of dieting and running as many miles as her body could handle, she started to notice a difference. Her mission began by cutting out fattening foods and reducing the size of her meals. At first she looked good and really healthy, but as time went on her once beautifully proportioned body started to disappear. As my friends and I predicted, our senior year marked the time where we would start to use her name and anorexia in the same sentence. She discontinued running and most of her already too seldom eating habits. When she did eat, she would eat junk food like Doritos, macaroni and cheese, or candy. In some ways, it seemed good that her food intake was junk food because it would turn into fat, and fat takes much longer to break down then say a salad does.
You may be asking yourself why we didn’t try to stop her, and why we didn’t force her to eat. The reason is because whenever we would try, the situation would only worsen. She would compare herself to people she thought were smaller than her but in reality, had an extra ten pounds of weight on their bodies. By the summer of our senior year, I actually thought that if I hugged her too hard, she would crumble into the earth. Although an outsider might see her as being a healthy young girl, we all know that while she was loosing 30 pounds, she was also loosing all of her strength.
Now that we have all separated into different colleges along the east coast, it is hard for us to monitor what she does. We hoped that her friends at college would be a positive influence, but it turns out that they have addictions with shopping and drinking also, and my friend has kept hers with eating. Every time we see her, her body appears to have lost a few inches.
My friend is 5’5” and weighs 100 pounds even. Her junior year of high school marked the last time she ate properly, and looked “hot” as the guys would say. She had a toned, athletic body and was one of the top runners on our track team. Now, there is nothing left and she seems transparent. Although she is not so sick that she needs to be hospitalized, she surely is on her way. The scary part is that she truthfully thinks she is fat…fat at 100 pounds.
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First off, I am sorry hear about your friend. While I am not a girl I have witnessed girls from my high school who have appeared to and probably had anorexia. During my senior year of high school I took a psychology class that at one point focused on eating disorders. My teacher taught of how anorexics focus on certain parts of their bodies in your friend's case her legs. They zero in on that one portion of their body and end up transforming the rest of it. He told us that this differs from Bulimics who concentrate on their body as a whole. Another point he taught us was that anorexics have a tendency to be introverted about their problem and not realize what they are doing to themselves or have the ability to be open about their terrible problem. Did you ever speak with your friend's parents are any other outside source of her anorexia? Another interesting point that my teacher taught us was that anorexia has a high rate of development in girls during their sophomore year in college. It's terrible to hear that this occurred with your friend far earlier than this date.
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