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discomfort, but because … food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.” The men became extremely disturbed by the idea of weight gain, and their reactions included pathological self-harm. One participant amputated three of his own fingers with an axe.
     
    Unless you’ve been very hungry for a long time yourself, you can’t imagine what prolonged malnutrition does to your mind – never mind how obsessive you started off, you’ll soon start thinking in tiny repetitive circles about everything. You’ll become anxious, tearful, constantly on edge, and this is an evolved reaction – in response to what it perceives as famine, the lizard-brain becomes hyper-focused, wanting you to stay awake searching for something, anything, to eat. Little habits, distractions – smoking, gum-chewing, booze, caffeine, uppers – become addictions. You can’t sit still, you can’t concentrate. You become angry, irrational, paranoid, fearful. Your grades and work performance start slipping, you’ve lost all your hopes and ambitions, because all you can think about is food and how to avoid it. You can feel your thoughts moving more slowly, like in those dreams when you’re running through thick sludge away from some nameless terror. All the while, part of you feels invincible. You feel that you might perform any physical or intellectual feat, running a marathon or writing a symphony or hammering in railroad tracks – when in reality you have made yourself socially and functionally useless. You have taken the work of self-negation and under-consumption that promised to make you the perfect worker, the perfect student, the perfect wife, but in doing so you have destroyed your capacity to work or love or function in society in any sustained manner.
     
    All of these are merely the physiological effects of prolonged starvation. But this is the state to which a culture saturated with dieting imperatives, rake-thin role models and liposuction adverts on bus hoardings attempts to reduce its most powerful women and an increasing number of its young men. The perverse and pervasive rhetoric of thinness is an enforced surrendering of personal power – the shame and discipline of the patriarchal capitalist conception of women forcibly enacted on the body in the cruellest and most insulting of ways.
     
Personal/political
    Making rhetorical points which start with the phrase “when I was anorexic” is always fraught with difficulty. How can I talk about the real, messy human pain of disintegration and recovery without making myself sound attention-seeking? It’s almost impossible, so I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I am not proud of my anorexia. When I look back at the years I wasted starving myself to the point of death, what I feel is anger, resentment and shame. It was a miserable time. No pictures of me remain from that time, and if they did you still wouldn’t be getting to see them, because they would show you nothing new: by now we all know what anorexia looks like. I was not a special and fragile princess. I was a stupid, suicidal child, and I nearly broke my family’s heart.
     
    I say this not out of masochism, but because somebody needs to tell the truth. The trivialisation of women with eating disorders in the popular press – painting us at once as helpless victims and as silly little girls obsessed with celebrity – does a great disservice to women and to people of all genders who struggle to feed themselves. Women are not powerless beings without agency, even in this circumscribed culture, and only by acknowledging that fact will we ever achieve full adult emancipation, or ever save ourselves from the hell of narcissistic self-negation. We need to take responsibility for our part in the cruel machine of enforced feminine starvation psychosis. To do