I have struggled for a few years with eating disordered habits. That is, I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, but my relationship with food and my drive to lose weight have been, in the past, nothing but unhealthy. And of all the times I've tried to lose weight, it only worked twice, including this time. And both times, it was done the healthy way!
That said, back in the day, I had a blog where I would track how much I ate, how much I exercised, and include a few blurbs about how I was feeling that day. I would surf around to view and comment other blogs, and what I saw there made me kind of sick. I'm talking "pro-ana" stuff. For those of you who don't know about the "pro-ana" movement on the internet, it's basically pages and pages of material dedicated towards a promotion of an "ana" or "anorexic" lifestyle. Tips and tricks on how to starve yourself, how to hide it. Images of emaciated young women. In fact, I saw one picture, once, of a girl who happened to have died just a few weeks after the picture was taken, of anorexia-related complications.
What I noticed about these types of blogs was that it was billed as a "support group", but could not have been more negative. Girls would count down the number of hours they fasted with pride, and go on a self-deprecating tirade if they failed. They would purge in fits of self-loathing. There were girls who regularly kept a calorie count of under five hundred. They encouraged each other to "stay strong", which of course, meant, "don't eat". To them, life as a "fat person" wasn't worth living, even though some of them were already well under 130 pounds, a respectable weight for someone of virtually any height.
I don't believe I was ever as bad as these girls. I knew they were very ill, and they were wrong. I liked to look at pictures of smaller girls for inspiration, and I still do, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I hated seeing girls whose bones looked like they were about to burst through the skin - and inevitably, there would be captions under such pictures, like, "Oh, I wish I had her ribs!"
3FC is the first online community to which I have belonged that has actually been healthfully supportive. People here are encouraging. No one would dream of suggesting I just not eat today, or the next day. No one is ogling images of starving thirteen-year-olds, wanting to be like them.
It has been a long time since I regularly visited such sites, but today, the relationship between myself and these sites, versus myself and 3FC, kind of struck me. Amazing, how I'm losing weight with so much more ease and without feeling bad about myself, in a place where I can get healthy advice and share milestones in a place that is nothing but positive.
I thought I'd post this in the 20-somethings section, as I know that most of the young women who get caught up in this "pro-ana" nonsense tend to be around this age. I was wondering if any others have been there, and noticed this difference. And I guess I also just wanted to share. ^___^