The attempt to tamp down the shadowy pro-eating disorder community has been raging nearly as long as the community itself has existed. It's a well-intentioned effort. But every new opportunity for social media is also a new opportunity for like-minded spirits to converge in anonymity. You don't have to look far online to see the vibrantly sad and scary pro-ana (as in anorexia), pro-mia (as in bulimia) worlds alive and well and starving themselves to death.

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I’m being intentionally dense here. Obviously the idea was to touch on the role of appearance dissatisfaction in eating disorders, using something plenty of people wear — makeup — as an entry point for talking about the larger issue. (Certainly it’s more on target than cryptically posting the color of your bra on Facebook for breast cancer awareness.) And for something like a week designed to raise awareness about eating disorders, you need a campaign that's simple, accessible and attention-grabbing. But not only does the no-makeup rally willfully ignore the myriad reasons women wear makeup in favor of a one-dimensional shame-based explanation, it treats bodily dissatisfaction as the cause, not a symptom, of eating disorders. And if we keep the focus of eating disorder conversations on women’s bodies, we’re doing exactly what women with eating disorders do to themselves.

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I am writing to you, not so much to seek advice but for the release of putting something down, putting it out there. I am in my 20s, clever, well-educated, feminist and successful. I also have an eating disorder.

I know what I need to do to overcome this disorder. I just need to get over it and eat healthily and according to the principles in which my intellectual mind believes. This shouldn't be hard. For whatever reason, I don't seem to be doing it.

My disorder is not that bad in the scale of things. I eat too little and am moderately underweight (BMI around 17.5-18). Over the past few years, I have been losing weight. I was never fat, but it has improved my health and appearance and was not a problem initially. The problem is that I am continually resetting the goalposts of what is an acceptable weight for me. For a while (about a year and a half) I was quite comfortable with my new, much slimmer frame. I watched what I ate and so on, but I didn't feel constantly hungry or anything -- I felt quite healthy and satisfied and had treats when I felt like it. But over the past few months, I've become obsessed with achieving a new, even lighter weight. And the disturbing thing is that there isn't even a solid figure in my mind -- I just want to lose, lose, lose and never stop losing, the idea of putting on or even maintaining weight appalls me. So I count calories, I exercise compulsively, I obsess and obsess and spend hours every day thinking about food and then I get really hungry and I binge and binge and eat mountains of food that is bad for me, food that doesn't belong to me, food that will make me uncomfortable and sick. (I've tried throwing up, but I'm not any good at it.) And then after the binge my hunger is satiated and I go back to starving for a couple of days and then the cycle repeats itself, except that the binges have been getting more frequent lately, and it's hurting me and making me sad.

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Yesterday, I read about a new study suggesting that sausage, cheesecake and other tasty, fatty foods might actually be addictive -- I mean, cocaine-like addictive, where addicts have trouble feeling pleasure without them. Rats, when fed junk food all day long, showed the same kind of chemical changes in their brain that are common with addictions. We've seen claims of this sort before -- about sugar, about corn syrup -- and, while I can't quibble with the science, it's simply not reasonable to think that we respond to hot dogs the same way we respond to cocaine. Most of us can enjoy these foods safely in some kind of moderation, just as most can enjoy a drink without being alcoholics. So I filed the story away under "Interesting but not earth-shattering." But for some reason, the story kept creeping back up on me. I kept thinking about it, and seeing food in the dark light of addiction finally filled me with a confused sadness.

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ZOMG this shit has calories! And fat! Even light stuff isn't safe! Aieeeeeeee!

Fortunately, our starvation-obsessed -- and uniformly slender -- ladies have a choice. As they head down the aisle groaning with Campbell's Select Harvest Light, they cheer up, "Wow! 80 calories!" chirps one happy lady. "And no fat!" trills another. Oh boy, no cutting myself in the office ladies room for lunch again today!

In her righteous takedown of the campaign on her Deus Ex Machinatio blog this week, Andrea Phillips calls Campbell's "a pro-ana company," and she sure seems to have a point. Are the food choices for women – those pathetically unseeing supermarket cart pushers – really supposed to be limited to "light" and "lighter than thou"? Phillips asks, "Since when is 340 calories a completely unacceptable amount to eat for a meal?"

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In her new memoir, "Hungry: A Young Model's Story of Appetite, Ambition, and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves" (co-written with Marjorie Ingall), Renn tells the story of how she lost 70 pounds and landed a quarter-million-dollar modeling contract at 16 -- which was not her happy ending but the gateway to her personal hell. Renn developed anorexia and exercise bulimia, subsisting for years on "lettuce with a side of batshit," and joining two gyms so that no one would notice her working out up to eight hours a day.

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As you'll no doubt recall, just a little over a year ago Spears wobbled around in her underwear onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards in a performance universally dubbed disastrous -- from her lackluster dancing to her inability to remember the words to her own song (that she was lip-syncing). Among Britney's much-lamented MTV gaffes: Her scantily clad body didn't look exactly like it did before she had her two sons. (Did anyone need another reminder that the maternal body gets no respect in our culture? Right, I didn't think so.)

Well, guess what, folks? Now, apparently Britney's lost a bunch of weight, so it's time to revel in the sordid details of her long-rumored disordered eating! According to a source close to one of her bodyguards  quoted in Star magazine -- and every celeb gossip blog, not to mention the Sydney Morning Herald -- Britney has been bingeing and purging and abusing diuretic diet pills in pursuit of her newly svelte figure.

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I was so proud of this diet that I went to school and told all my girlfriends -- about calories and cellulite and why blueberry muffins were deadly. I practically held court on the playground, as little girls listened with rapt attention to the hell that would happen to their thighs if they ate another Bomb pop. What strikes me about this story is: 1) Wow, that is all kind of sad. 2) Back then, the idea of diets and calorie consumption and starvation diets were foreign to kids, at least the ones I grew up around. 3) I somehow internalized the idea that it was cool to diet, something I really didn't let go of until much later in life.

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Now, brace yourselves for the results of this survey of 4,023: Sixty-five percent of women ages 25 to 45 engage in disordered eating, "such as skipping meals or cutting out food groups." (If skipping a meal doesn't register as particularly unhealthy, note that these are cases in which the women say it's "associated with emotional and physical distress.") In addition, 10 percent of women report behaviors consistent with anorexia, bulimia and binging. Other findings, as summarized by the press release:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/25/eating_2/feed/ 56 http://www.salon.com/2008/04/23/chalked_up/ http://www.salon.com/2008/04/23/chalked_up/#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:26:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2008/04/23/chalked_up In the years between Mary Lou Retton's historic victory at the 1984 Olympics and Kim Zmeskal's dominance in the early 1990s, American gymnastics was in a bad way. Most of our gymnasts lacked the finesse of their counterparts in Eastern Bloc states like Russia and Romania, where children were plucked from their homes almost as soon as they could walk, and U.S. coaches struggled to produce another breakout star. Jennifer Sey was one of their best hopes.

At 15, Sey left her New Jersey home for the Parkettes National Gymnastic Training Center in Allentown, Pa., where she boarded alone in an unheated room in exchange for a chance to become a champion. Under the tutelage of Bill and Donna Strauss, a husband-and-wife coaching team notorious for producing winners by any means necessary, she accomplished just that -- nabbing the U.S. National title in 1986. But Sey was never quite talented or powerful enough to be hailed as the second coming of Retton and eventually, burned out by the pressure to stay skinny and the pain of competing on barely healed broken bones, she retired.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/23/chalked_up/feed/ 54 http://www.salon.com/2008/04/21/john_prescott/ http://www.salon.com/2008/04/21/john_prescott/#comments Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:50:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/04/21/john_prescott "Does John Prescott's admission that he suffered from bulimia while deputy prime minister deserve sympathy, suspicion or ridicule?" asks the Guardian's Matthew Weaver, introducing a roundup of the British media's coverage of Prescott's recent revelation. Unlike Princess Diana, the last famous British bulimic I can recall hearing about all the way over here, Prescott is old, male and fat -- triply turning our stereotypical image of a person with an eating disorder on its head. Predictably, this means the coverage includes mockery from those who think the portly politician must not have been trying hard enough at bulimia, as well as endless variations on the theme of, "But ... but ... eating disorders are for girls!"

While shame is a hallmark of bulimia in general, Prescott notes that his own embarrassment stemmed specifically from the emasculating aspect of having a disorder that's typically associated with young girls. Of his first visit to a bulimia specialist, Prescott has written, "I turned up and found his waiting room full of young women. I was the only man there. I felt a right twerp." Former bulimic and professional weirdo Uri Geller, quoted in Weaver's roundup, puts an even finer point on it: "No one expects a man, especially a successful one, to have an eating disorder. It seems such a weakness."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/21/john_prescott/feed/ 52 http://www.salon.com/2008/04/16/anorexia_2/ http://www.salon.com/2008/04/16/anorexia_2/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/04/16/anorexia Imagine, for a minute, that the webmasters behind pro-anorexia Web sites could be thrown behind bars. That could become a reality if a bill passed Tuesday by the French parliament's lower house makes it through the Senate; the measure would make it illegal for anyone to incite "others to deprive themselves of food" to an "excessive" degree. Offenders could be jailed for up to three years or fined up to $47,000. "Encouraging young girls to lie to their doctors, advising them on foods that are easier to regurgitate and inciting them to beat themselves up each time they eat is not freedom of expression," said France's Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot. "These messages are death messages. Our country must be able to prosecute those who are hiding behind these websites."

But the bill is broad enough that designers, advertisers and fashion magazines could be plausibly targeted as well. For instance, a magazine or designer could be fined for holding a photo shoot with a starved-skinny model. The fashion industry is, of course, outraged. Didier Grumbach, president of the French Federation of Couture, said: "Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny. That doesn't exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/16/anorexia_2/feed/ 28 http://www.salon.com/2008/03/28/sweet_valley_high/ http://www.salon.com/2008/03/28/sweet_valley_high/#comments Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/03/28/sweet_valley_high I never read Sweet Valley High books. And I'm not being snobby here; I wish I had. I feel as though I missed out on a cultural moment of the 1980s, as if I were in the bathroom when Michael Jackson first did the moonwalk. The lightweight, juicy paperbacks about twins Jessica and Elizabeth may have had the nutritive value of frosting on fudge, but they were the guilty pleasure of nearly every 1980s middle-school girl. Back then, we didn't have "The Hills" and "Gossip Girl." We had to walk a mile in a row of card catalogs just to find a cheap, tawdry sex scene.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/03/28/sweet_valley_high/feed/ 38 http://www.salon.com/2008/03/03/drunkorexia/ http://www.salon.com/2008/03/03/drunkorexia/#comments Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/03/03/drunkorexia Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the hottest non-medical buzzword for an eating disorder since "manorexia." It's drunkorexia!

The New York Times reports that drunkorexia is "a disturbing blend of behaviors: self-imposed starvation or bingeing and purging, combined with alcohol abuse." There is a rainbow's array of drunkorexics, reports the Times. There is the college girl who starves herself during the day to make up for the calories she consumes during nighttime drinking binges, the young woman who binges on both food and alcohol before purging, or the anorexic who uses alcohol to numb the pain of having eaten to perceived excess.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/03/03/drunkorexia/feed/ 39 http://www.salon.com/2008/02/29/skinny_models/ http://www.salon.com/2008/02/29/skinny_models/#comments Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:25:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/02/29/skinny_models Damn, I'm not one to use high fashion as a barometer of women's emancipation, but last year's growing movement against emaciated models whetted my appetite for change. With Milan and Madrid's discussions of instituting body-mass-index requirements and certain brazen designers throwing caution to the wind by including a normal-size woman in their shows, the industry that has built its aesthetic around concentration camp chic seemed to be poised for change.

But according to a story in the Wall Street Journal Online, the gestures away from cadaverous children were as ephemeral as the bulimic farts on the runway. This year, say observers, thin is back with a vengeance. "I think it's gotten worse," Nina Garcia, Elle fashion director and "Project Runway" judge told the WSJ. The story centers on the fall from fame of 17-year-old Ali Michael, the rail-thin star of last year's fashion shows, who suddenly found herself with only one spot at Paris Fashion Week after gaining 5 pounds and being told that her legs were "plump."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/02/29/skinny_models/feed/ 34 http://www.salon.com/2008/02/12/spain/ http://www.salon.com/2008/02/12/spain/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/02/12/spain News flash: After a year of research, Spain's Health Ministry has concluded that clothing designed for towering, stick-thin models doesn't fit most women.

As obvious as that finding may seem, the study's methods were fairly high-tech: Researchers took laser scans of 10,415 women ages 12 to 70. They found that 41 percent of the women struggled to find well-fitting clothing and most had an hourglass, pear or cylinder body type. The Health Ministry has campaigned for standardized clothing sizes since last March, an effort this research is meant to support. Still, it will take an additional year or two before the overhaul is finished. But when the standardization is complete, clothing will have chest, waist and hip measurements, rather than a single size.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/02/12/spain/feed/ 30 http://www.salon.com/2008/02/11/skinny_bitch/ http://www.salon.com/2008/02/11/skinny_bitch/#comments Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2008/02/11/skinny_bitch The bestselling diet book provocatively titled "Skinny Bitch" features on its cover a line drawing of a lithe fashionista in a little black dress. Also on its cover is a pitch to "savvy girls" to "stop eating crap and start looking fabulous!" Nowhere on the outside of the book, however, does the copy suggest its agenda to make vegans of women seeking tiny butts; that's just a sneaky surprise. Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, the authors of "Skinny Bitch" and its recently released follow-up cookbook, "Skinny Bitch in the Kitch," have surpassed Jessica Seinfeld's broccoli-spiked brownies to create the bait-and-switch diet book of the year. This book is a PETA pamphlet in chick-lit clothing and an innovative fusion of animal rights activism with punitive dieting tactics that prey on women's insecurities about their bodies.

The "Skinny Bitch" empire has proven so popular, in fact, that soon men will be part of the franchise, with Freedman and Barnouin's guy-targeted sequel, "Skinny Bastard," slated for release in 2009 (no word on whether Vincent Gallo will be the cover model).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/02/11/skinny_bitch/feed/ 177 http://www.salon.com/2007/12/06/anorexia_genetics/ http://www.salon.com/2007/12/06/anorexia_genetics/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2007/12/06/anorexia_genetics Now I know why my thin and lanky husband sometimes lingers in front of the mirror, studying his well-defined rib cage and complaining that he's fat. He has a twin sister, that's why!

If this sounds like I'm suffering from end-of-the-year non sequitur, read on. While women suffer from anorexia at 10 times the rate of men, one recent study found that some men share about the same risk as women. According to a new study published in the December issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, men who have a twin sister are more prone to anorexia nervosa than other guys. In fact, they are almost as likely to develop anorexia as females.

There's no conclusive evidence as to what causes this. But researchers, who analyzed data from a study of Swedish twins born between 1935 and 1958, guess that exposure to female sex hormones in utero may raise men's risk. "A plausible explanation for this phenomenon is that in pregnancies bearing a female fetus, a substance is produced, probably hormonal, that increases the risk of having anorexia nervosa in adulthood," the study's authors wrote in a press release. "The most likely candidates are sex steroid hormones."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/12/06/anorexia_genetics/feed/ 20 http://www.salon.com/2007/11/08/diabulimia/ http://www.salon.com/2007/11/08/diabulimia/#comments Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:03:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2007/11/08/diabulimia Imagine you have a medical condition that causes you to lose weight. And miraculously, the more you eat, the more you lose. Pastry for breakfast, pasta with clam sauce for lunch, a five-course dinner with crusty bread and any dessert you like, plus snacks in between -- the sweeter the better. Follow this diet and you can drop five pounds by tomorrow morning, shrink a dress size for the weekend, show up at your high school reunion enviably trim.

There are a few downsides: Your hair will fall out, you'll be tired all the time, your mind will be muddled, and your extremities might tingle strangely. Over time, you'll likely go blind, lose a limb, end up on dialysis, or suffer a sudden heart attack. But in the meantime, you'd be able to eat anything you want and wear a size 2.

Thousands of the approximately 1 million people with Type 1 (or juvenile-onset) diabetes are willing to take the risk. Mostly teenagers and young women, they suffer from a unique eating disorder called diabulimia.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/11/08/diabulimia/feed/ 63 http://www.salon.com/2007/10/04/anorexia/ http://www.salon.com/2007/10/04/anorexia/#comments Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:50:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2007/10/04/anorexia Any toddler knows that Halloween costumes are supposed to be scary, offensive and disgusting, right? So the professionals must have felt they hit on a winner with -- as they put it -- "this unique costume." Introducing every self-respecting woman's worst nightmare: Sexy Anna Rexia.

The costume consists of a skintight black dress with a skeleton print, accompanied by several rib-busting accessories: a choker that looks like a tape measure, an Anna Rexia heart badge and a ribbon belt resembling a tape measure! But of course, it's not supposed to be repugnant and chilling, but sexy and so, so fun. "You can never be too rich or too thin," the costume description reminds us. Ha ha ha! This is no doubt especially hilarious to those shopping the plus sizes.

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