How to lose your love handles.

Make Me Beautiful

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I call myself ProAna because I have an eating disorder, and I am choosing not to seek help for it. That is the general definition of ProAna, and you will find most people that use the term for themselves (and some that do not) fall into this category.

There are a few people who consider ProAna a “lifestyle” or “religious” choice, but they are rare. I am not one of those people, although I do believe there are choices involved with becoming ProAna.

As for lifestylers, it is true that someone could choose to use dangerous crash-dieting methods for weight loss without having an eating disorder. Someone who does this frequently throughout their lives, however, probably has an eating disorder they are unaware of. They may be “making a choice”, but the likelihood is that they are motivated by reasons that are not just to “be skinny”.

I do not believe an Eating Disorder is curable. I believe you are born with your brain “wired” this way, and cannot be changed. It can be made better or worse by your environment and experiences, which is why some people have more “severe” eating disorders than others. I do believe a person can “be in recovery”, by refocusing whatever it is that drives their eating disorder into more healthy actions. The most recent research, in fact, backs me up.

You can ignore Anorexia, and it’ll be an issue all your life, or kill you. You can try to stop it. Tell the person that they’ll just have to “learn to deal” - just “get over it”. You can treat just the symptoms - force feed the person, give them some pills, and send them home.

You can go on the path they call “Recovery”, probably the healthiest path, by learning to understand how Anorexia works, why you have it. Learn your triggers, the elements in your past and the genetic factors that are the root cause of your eating disorder. Then you can work around it, by changing your lifestyle (ie, by directing your anxiety into something more constructive).

Or you can learn to work with it. That’s the choice. That’s ProAna.

Anorexia is a struggle. A struggle to lose weight, and then a struggle not to go too far. I refuse to accept the way I look. I’ll probably always be fighting with my body. Maybe I’ll succeed, maybe I won’t.

Why not learn to enjoy the struggle?

And I do enjoy it. The obsession, the romance, the idealism, all appeal to me. It gives me something to focus on, something to be good at, something to be mine and mine alone. Others may judge me for it, because they wouldn’t want to dedicate their lives to the same things, but how does that make me “wrong”? It’s just the way my brain is wired - I’ll never be happy focusing on “normal” things.

Life isn’t what happens to you, it’s how you deal with it.

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14/4/2011 . 7 notes . Reblog