Free Thin by Grace Bowman

(10 per cent of eating disorder cases are male 4 ), although the average agefor the onset of anorexia is between sixteen and eighteen years. This is a time of huge physical and emotional change. 5 This transitional period involves: leaving home, moving away from what childhood represents, and developing sexual and adult relationships – changes which many teenagers feel they don’t know how to handle.
    In post-pubescent anorexics, weight loss is often a physical manifestation of the rejection and fear of growing up. During puberty, the body changes. In girls, body fat increases to provide the tissue for fertility and menstruation. 6 Anorexia forcibly stops this growth and reverses it; amenorrhoea (absence of menstruation) occurs and the body slides back to a pre-pubescent state. Physically, the anorexic is stating that she doesn’t want to be, or look like, an adult.
    In my case, at eighteen years old all of a sudden, I didn’t feel right about impending adult changes in my life. I felt uncertain about things, I felt there would be no going back to my own bed, in my own home, where I had lived all my life with my brother and sisters and my mum and dad. I felt like things were shifting and moving and growing, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to grow with them. Whereas some people, when they are dealing with adolescence and growth, go out and rebel, or become moody, smoke, drink or take drugs, I did not know what to do, I did not know how to react. I did not feel that I should react, being the gold-starred girl that I was. There was a vulnerability within me, which was exposed and which meant that I was less able to deal with taking ownership of the changes within me than other people going through the same experience. Paradoxically (and anorexia is full of such paradoxes), I was desperate for my independence, but the freedom I so craved was a theoretical one. I believed myself to be mature but it was an intellectualized independence, not a practical, lived-through one. (I passed my driving test but was scared of driving, Iachieved my A levels but wasn’t ready to go to university.)
    A flicker of my fear turned to action and into a controlled, rigorous diet. The initial diet, I thought, was a means to lose a bit of weight but, in fact, it became more about evading the pressure and anxiety in my life. Focusing on my gradual path to self-starvation made me feel better temporarily and therefore, I thought, better able to deal with my life changes, but in fact it was the inverse.
    The question is then why did I, and many others, use self-starving as the supposed answer to that uncertainty? A part of this answer tends to come straight to the issue that in our society being thin means being popular (very important things to a young person). The answer to all the growing-up issues is simply and neatly packaged in a smaller, more slender body. It is an answer that is also dangerously internalized. A diet might be discussed, but anorexia is rarely something shared with friends. It is a secret, personal and private territory. In fact, many teenagers seem to identify with the sense of cerebral and bodily enclosure that anorexia effects. Some anorexics have written about how special they think they are and how anorexia has answered their feelings of being detached and disengaged from the world. I think this has led to a horrible glamorization of eating disorders and of being young, thin and aloof. I have heard and read on more than one occasion about young teenagers who have admitted to being inspired to actually start an eating disorder. They have recognized a set of feelings about the world in other anorexics’ descriptions, and have made some sort of confused decision from there, without understanding what the dreadful implications are. Anorexics come to the (wrong and misplaced) conclusion that their shape is their identity, and that it is their shape that controls their future. Of course, it does end up controlling their future,