ANOREXIA
Someone that is intentionally starving themselves, do not really want to live.
Slow, but graduate suicide, this, is Anorexia. It is so obvious, a skeleton of yourself walking down the street. And you keep convincing yourself that you are ok, that you are simply “keeping fit”. As sad as it sounds, more and more cases of this disastrous disease are seen among women, and now men are also drawn into it.
Somehow, I strongly believe that current fashion trends are influencing the explosion of these food disturbances. How can they promote as a model of beauty a starved teenager? How can they do it to our children, young teenagers that are steel in the search for their own identity in this world? It breaks my heart to see those painfully thin models that are obviously making themselves sick every day in order to maintain an illusionary figure.
This is what the industry does to us. That way they can keep stealing the money while the nation is busy stressing out about loosing weight and buying up on false diets.
When a human being is shrinking in front of your face, when she or he is hiding food so that you believe that they actually eat it, you know that this person is in serious trouble. The sad thing is that it is really hard to help them, especially when they don’t want to help themselves.
The tragical consequences of this disorder are almost always death.
One after another, without the necessary nutrients, the organs fail to function, and eventually the heart stops.
There is a deep meaning hidden in this dysfunction and it is always down to lack of love. Somebody that is sincerely and unconditionally loved will never ever slide into that kind of a self-destructive disorder. Someone who is given a simple hug once in a while that reconfirms the true love and care of the nearest ones, will not search for ways of killing themselves.
When a body is that thin and dehydrated, it screams out loud for help :”See, nobody loves me! Why live?”.
The ones that got healed from it are the ones that had really loving people next to them that simply redirected all their attention to the sick ones. It’s that simple.
The bad news is that I don’t think that an anorexic can get out of it by himself simply because he has gone too far with the illness. His body is now refuting any food ingestion, so the brain actually goes into a sort of “slow burning mode”, and eventually shuts down without the person ever realizing that he has gone too far.
With anorexia, once you get into the slimming mode, your brain kind of tricks you into feeling the need to continue needing to lose even more weight.
That is because when you set yourself into loosing some weight, that already means that you weren’t happy with your appearance in the beginning and so you felt like your body needed to be changed.
See, you blame the body again!
So once the burning mode kicks in, you start feeling really “proud” about your achievement. You say to yourself: ”Look how great I am! I am an achiever. I managed to reduce my body to this size. I can do whatever I want then”! And you automatically fall into the trap.
It’s like saying to yourself:”I am a failure in almost everything that I wanted to do or have in life, but at least that, my body, I can make it be my way!. Plastic surgery obsession has the same origins in its train of thought.
Other then the self esteem being at its lowest low, the psychological consequences of dropping down so much weight are the worst to fear because the slimming mode sucks you in without you even realizing it. And gradually, you get so week and powerless that you lose all your capacity of fighting the illness. For that reason you fool yourself into thinking that this is how you are supposed to be actually, that really thin in healthy.
So many people look in the mirror and see a completely unobjective reflection of themselves. Most often we see ourselves ugly, fat, bold or whatever. We rarely see the best parts, like we might have great legs or beautiful lips for example. So ungrateful... So this desire to change something makes us experiment with our bodies in the search for happiness drawn by the illusion that having a “better” body would bring us happiness.
Anorexia is a very late stage of dieting gone overboard.
If you want to help an anorexic get healed this is what you have to do:
- Do not ever force him or her to eat what you offer or as much as you want. Be veeerrrry gentle. Try to be by their side when they are eating, try to make the whole process joyful and happy for them, so that the eating process gets anchored to having fun and pleasure in life. Remember that an anorexic hasn’t been eating for pleasure for a very, very, very long time, he was eating for survival! So you need to remind him that eating is a great pleasure without him realizing it. Make the process extremely lovable for him, by that I mean being loving, non restricting and generally a great company for the cared one.
- In the beginning you might find that he is vanishing somewhere, hiding…and that’s normal…for him. I advice you not to think too deeply into why he is doing that, as it is obvious. Just take it one step at a time. Give him time. It took him or her years to get into this state; you can’t expect her to give up on her “stress release” in one day just because you are a great company at the dinner table. Then, the next day, and the next one. Day by day...step by step… Without judgmental looks or pushing the portions too hard, as it will only scare the anorexic and make her withdraw themselves from being with you. If you push him too hard you will very soon find yourself alone at that table and he will find a way to slip away from you, trust me.
A large amount of patience is required. Just make eating a great experience for him, using colorful food that he used to enjoy, best if these are the ones he liked when he was a child, those that he will have a hard time refusing psychologically, rather then physically. You are not working with the body here, remember? It is the mind that needs healing.
Offer love, great amount of sincere love and care. And in time, he or she will realize that it might be a better choice to spend time “having fun” at the table rather than hiding in his dark solitude away from people in order to maintain a disorder that makes his life so miserable, a living hell.
If you love that person, this will come naturally to you.
An anorexic can only get healed with the help of a loving person. This is not bulimia, a sneaky and unnoticeable disease. Anorexia is so obvious! Yet the anorexic has gone so far that he has no physical or emotional strength to get out of it anymore. That’s why he needs external help to get out of it. But only if it is somebody sincerely loving will the ill person offer trust and confide with something so deeply personal. At times the anorexics do realize that they are taking the direct path to death, but are now in all ways powerless in front of it.
Just be there for your beloved one. Together you will %100 get healed.
You can save a life.