Pro Ana sites: discipline to retreat into starvation

Pro ana sites glorify anorexia as a lifestyle choice, playing directly into the psychology of its victims. How do I know this? I was one of them.

Another topic on the pro-ana sites was titled ‘my upper arms are disgusting,’ which featured an uploaded image of a malnourished woman picking at her triceps in the mirror. She gets the support she craves.

These people understand what she’s going through; they understand the self-hatred and fear and shame that crashes over her. They discuss their own flaws, their “chubby stomach,” “broad, flabby shoulders,” and their “tiny thigh gaps.” She is comforted by them as they tell her she looks so beautifully thin. I can feel the relief she must feel as she is validated, the loosening of her chest just for a moment.

It must be really difficult for someone without an eating disorder to understand the allure of a Pro Ana site. I was never a member of any pro-ana sites, but you didn’t have to be to view all of the content. I was also very sporadic in using this site, but when I would arrive back, it felt like someone was giving me the needle so I could inject my addiction. Sweet and pure.

These pro-ana sites also condemn therapists, dieticians, and family members, who are ‘meddling’ in something that’s none of their business. These thoughts were already in my head, these twisted concepts that snarled at the idea of needing to ‘get help.’ Pro-Ana sites reaffirmed these beliefs and helped me find workarounds. The site members regularly discuss tactics on how to engage in eating disorder behaviors, whatever they were, without getting caught.

Now, for me anyways, pro-ana sites were not the source of my illness, but every time I committed to ridding myself of this crushing, so-called pro-ana lifestyle, this was always a last-ditch attempt to hold onto it. I’d be a week into the tears and blinding fear of recovery when I’d find myself on my laptop, soaking up the security of my eating disorder. All at once, I felt relief and safety, and comfort. And the discipline to retreat into starvation.

When I was an in-patient in a psych ward for eating disorders, they didn’t take our phones away. I could see other patients scrolling through the forums. I didn’t judge; just like me, their coping mechanism was ripped from them.

The closest analogy to this in-patient experience is if you imagine you are scuba diving, and then without warning, somehow, the oxygen tank floats away. You’re so far underwater that you have no way of knowing which way is up. Panic sets in. But suddenly you’re forced to trust a stranger, a professional. 

Although everyone told us the professionals were leading us toward the sun, they were not the voices that screamed in our heads at night that were adamant we wouldn’t survive.

It felt like an exorcism.

People with eating disorders find it difficult to help their loved ones understand what they’re experiencing. Research has found that anorexic sufferers have unusually high scores of alexithymia, a personality construct centered around a person’s inability to identify and describe their emotions.

It’s not easy to explain you feel fat to someone, that you’re having a panic attack because your thighs are too big. How can a rational person understand the biting fear? How can your family and friends relate to this? They can’t, so we turn to those who do understand on pro-ana websites.

My eating disorder was always ten times louder on one of these pro-ana websites after an hour. When life was too stressful, I’d use this distraction. My life became more straightforward for a while as not eating became the priority.

Looking back, I don’t understand why I was given free rein to hurt myself the way I did. I think there might be more stigma than many people, even myself, realize with eating disorders.

The race to the bottom of the scales had nothing to do with vanity. I saw little in my life worth pursuing rather than my goal to be thin. And when I found myself in secret competition with others whose bodies were shutting down from malnutrition, there was no moderator.

On these pro-ana sites, education, careers, having a family, socializing, it can all wait. The eating disorder comes first. It must be appeased, but it is insatiable. It claws sink deeper and deeper, as the mind tracks neural pathways so that living with an eating disorder becomes instinctive.

Starving yourself becomes instinctive. And all these other users on pro-ana sites appear to be managing. Their BMIs lower, and their prideful stories of how they ate only apple skins that day made me want to do worse. The diets here are not diets; they’re torture mechanisms for people who don’t think they deserve anything in life.