Mother For Life

I was going to write this post on my nipplelicious blog, but the more I thought about it, the more I decided it belonged on my parenting blog. Because it does concern parents, and their children. I was surfing the net, using my favorite thing, Google, and I stumbled upon a comment about a pro Anna site. I had no clue what that was, and being the nosy cat I am, I had to check it out.

I was shocked, disgusted, angry, and ready to do some physical damage to the creator of that website. This was a place where everyone from young girls to older woman were posting the pros to being anorexic!  It is supposed to be from age 16 and up only, but from the looks of it, there were plenty of girls under that age. They had tips on how to hide what you don’t eat, what “foods” such as gum and crackers, had the least amount of calories. There was talk from women who complained about being 5ft 6 and weighing in at 130 lbs. Girls who wrote in and asked for help on staying thin and “beautiful” were being mentored by older anorexic women.

They had pictures up of celebrity women who are anorexic, and these were their heroes! Oh, just siting here writing this and I am still fuming. There was advice from the more experienced on how to hide the website on their computer so the teens parents wouldn’t see it. The teenage girls were even shown how to make fake profiles so they couldn’t be found out. Not one woman posted a bad thing about being pro Anna, in fact they often ridiculed women who were not  and any post made going against their ideas was deleted.

I clicked on partner links in that forum and was led to other pro Anna sites. Every one of them had the same theme. Not only were they bragging about making it through the day with only a few pieces of food and water, but there were girls on there who talked about the “purging” they did after a slide back into eating. Of course, with older women telling them congratulations on getting back on the track to becoming thin. Many of the profiles had weight calculators, and I have to tell you, none of these teens were overweight. Not a damn one.

I have no problem with teens losing weight and staying healthy. I was the chunky girl in junior high, and that summer, I worked out, fixed what I ate, and came back 50 pounds lighter, and kept it off. I did it the right way.  The women on this site should be telling these girls, and other women, the same advice. There should be no talk of fiber use so you “do number two and clear out the calories.”

As the mother of a young tween, if I ever found out another mother was telling my daughter she is fat, and gave her advice on how to do her body harm, I would hunt that woman down and beat the ever living crap out of her. I read girls writing in with the side effects they had from being anorexic and wondering if those were normal. Only one woman wrote advice that it was time for them to cut back their food counting. All the rest were saying its quite normal, and gave tips on how to hide the harm it was doing their young bodies.

I wish there was a way I could out these girls to their mothers. To let them see how badly their daughters were hurting. The medical problems associated with being anorexic far outweigh the supposed good results posted on these websites. You have the loss of muscle control, the bone density loss, the loss of hair, kidney failure, to name only a few of the medical problems. Of course then you have the mental issues when a teenager feels she hasn’t followed her strict regime, and a woman on the site agrees with her. The mental thought that unless your pelvic bones and ribcage are showing, you aren’t on the “beautiful” side of life.

Maybe if someone told these girls that thin isn’t in, being a woman with curves is.

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