Quotes About Anorexia

A misperception about anorexia is that you don't eat. Not true. Maybe you eat just 500 calories a day. It would be easy for me to say, 'Why didn't my parents notice?' But I didn't want them to. I made sure to eat half a sandwich around my parents.

Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body - waiflike, angular - that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it, strips away all the ancillary signs of sexuality, strips away breasts and hips and butt and leaves in their place a garish caricature, a cruel cartoon of flesh and bone.

I was struggling with anorexia, and one of the biggest problems with an eating disorder is you don't realize you have it. And you can't heal until you realize there's a problem.

Anorexia, you starve yourself. Bulimia, you binge and purge. You eat huge amounts of food until you're sick and then you throw up. And anorexia, you just deny yourself. It's about control.

You're only popular with anorexia.

People are so obsessed with that these days. As long as you're healthy, what difference do a few pounds make? Crazy diets. Thirteen-year-old girls on magazine covers who wind up in hospitals because they're so anorexic. Real women don't look like that. And who wants them to? No one wants a woman who looks sick or like she;s been from a refugee camp.

Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.

That went on for a long time: telling various tales from my experience being anorexic and bulimic, and having people say, 'You've got to write this; you are a writer,' and me not knowing how to approach the material.

Anorexia is a self-destructive thing, and you become stubborn, so when people are trying to tell you something, you get it into your head that they're against you, and you're not going to listen.

I unwittingly became sort of this anorexia spokeswoman.

Of course, therapists aren't persuaders. We can't convince an anorexic to eat. We can't convince an alcoholic not to drink. We can't convince people not to be self-destructive, because for now, the self-destruction serves them. What we can do is try to help them understand themselves better and show them how to ask themselves the right questions until something happens — either internally or externally — that leads them to do their own persuading.

Father absence has been implicated in anorexia nervosa, in which daughters may exhibit literal father hunger by starving themselves.

I was anorexic in the 60s and 70s, although it wasn't called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn't high on my agenda. But it is now.

I couldn't be anorexic because I like food too much, and I couldn't be bulimic because I hate throwing up too much.

In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of the selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank.

The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.

However, sexual anorexics do have a definite profile that separates them from the larger population of those having difficulty being sexual: They are often extremely competent people who are committed to doing things very well and have a fear of making mistakes and being human.

Anorexics are the best liars in the world. You do anything to keep control. You place people into separate categories, those you trust, those you don't, those you can confide in and those whom you lie to. But of course the reality is that underneath it all, you are lying to yourself all the time.

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia.