Quotes & Sayings About Anorexia

When it's quiet in my head like this, that's when the voice doesn't need to tell me how pathetic I am. I know it in the deepest part of me. When it's quiet like this, that's when I truly hate myself. — Portia De Rossi

There are so few who 'walk the talk'..
No wonder the World is plagued with 'Talk Obesity' and 'Walk Anorexia'..
Walk the Talk Amnesia? — Abha Maryada Banerjee

Soon I'll be thinner than all of you, she swore to herself. And then I'll be the winner. The thinner is the winner. — Steven Levenkron

The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity. — Kathryn Harrison

I finally understood that by being on a perpetual diet, I had practiced a "disordered" form of eating my whole life. I restricted when I was hungry and in need of nutrition and binged when I was so grotesquely full I couldn't be comfortable in any position by lying down. Diets that tell people what to eat or when to eat are the practices inbetween. And dieting, I discovered, was another form of disordered eating, just as anorexia and bulimia similarly disrupt the natural order of eating. — Portia De Rossi

People, especially women, are judged on their bodies. And food, far from being a source of energy and enjoyment, becomes a battleground of guilt and shame and excess and deprivation. Everywhere we look, success and sexiness and happiness seem to belong to the thin. — Emma Woolf

No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge. — Geneen Roth

Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body - waiflike, angular - that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it, strips away all the ancillary signs of sexuality, strips away breasts and hips and butt and leaves in their place a garish caricature, a cruel cartoon of flesh and bone. — Caroline Knapp

Eating disorders are like a gun that's formed by genetics, loaded by a culture and family ideals, and triggered by unbearable distress. — Aimee Liu

Anorexia is, without doubt, a serious eating disorder, but there is a hell of a lot of mainstream disordered eating going on out there. — Emma Woolf

I am too big and too small and too much and not enough and too frightened to change and too sad to stay the same. — Nancy Tucker

Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness - these are the only things that are real. — J.P. Delaney

I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I don't want to die. I want to eat like a normal person eats, but I need to see my bones or I will hate myself even more and I might cut my heart out or take every pill that was ever made. — Laurie Halse Anderson

You deserve the place you have in this world. Do not let the eating disorder take that from you. — Rae Smith

I think it's very important what young people see in pictures or on TV or in magazines. Drugs, violence, anorexia. All of the things that I absolutely do not reference in my photos. — Karl Lagerfeld

Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia. — Peter Kreeft

I had a very public battle with anorexia. — Tracey Gold

I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're thin. — Marya Hornbacher

I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can't quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death. — Marya Hornbacher

In summary, the research literature suggests that two forms of outpatient psychotherapy may be effective for anorexia: family therapy based on the Maudsley approach and EOIT as developed by Robin and colleagues. Up to this point, family treatment has received greater attention and has more evidence to support it. However, the tradition of psychodynamic psychotherapy lends additional credibility to EOIT. — James E. Lock

It's so easy to focus on the anguish and the misery; it's harder, somehow, to acknowledge the positive, maybe for fear of jinxing it, bringing the nightmare back down on our heads. — Harriet Brown

She was afraid of losing her shape, spreading out, not being able to contain herself any longer, beginning (that would be worst of all) to talk a lot, to tell everybody, to cry. — Margaret Atwood

I guess I will never come back all the way, a fog will always stand between the person I am and the person I should have been. — Sophie Glynn

I must fight my demons, they are illogical and irrational, yet they seem to beat me each time they strike. — Sophie Glynn

If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me. — Bethany Pierce

Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior. — Carol Lee

I was anorexic in the '60s and '70s, although it wasn't called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn't high on my agenda. But it is now. — Marianne Faithfull

I think anorexia is a metaphor. It is a young woman's statement that she will become what the culture asks of its women, which is that they be thin and nonthreatening. Anorexia signifies that a young woman is so delicate that, like the women of China with their tiny broken feet, she needs a man to shelter and protect her from a world she cannot handle. Anorexic women signal with their bodies "I will take up only a small amount of space. I won't get in the way." They signal "I won't be intimidating or threatening." (Who is afraid of a seventy-pound adult?) — Mary Pipher

Around eighth grade Margot started getting really sensitive about her weight, even though she wasn't remotely fat - just a little round-faced. So Margot did what any normal fourteen-year-old girl would do. She started puking on purpose, every day after fifth period. Of course now, she does more than puke. But we don't talk about that. Because real friends don't judge each other for what they do to survive in hell. — Isobel Irons

Anorexia isn't about being fat, it's about having fat. — Caroline Kettlewell

Doesn' t she care what she does to her family? ' people will ask.
' How can she starve herself like that? '
She has fallen into bad company, been influenced from within by something she thought she could control, but which has ended up controlling her.
Experts who have spent years working with anoresia suffreres see the illness as a means of expressing distress - a symptom, not a cause. One doctor describes anorexia as a solution to an individual's problem, so by treating the solution life is made more difficult.
This would explain why Emma is ruthless in protecting her illness, as if it were her life, rather than the thing which is destroying her. — Carol Lee

Anorexia was my attempt to have control over my body and manipulate my body and starve my body and shape my body. It was not a very good relationship. It was the sort of relationship my father had to my body. It was a tyrannical, "you'll do what I tell you" relationship. — Eve Ensler

I've experienced the tabloids when I had anorexia. — Tracey Gold

Anorexia is a disease that happens to people, mostly women and girls, who have obsessive, perfectionist personalities. — Crystal Renn

She lay on her back and walked her fingers down her ribs, skipped them over her abdomen, and landed on her pelvic bones. She tapped them with her Knuckles. [ ... ] I can hear my bones, she thought. Her fingers moved up from her pelvic bones to her waist. The elastic of her underpants barely touched the center of her abdomen. The bridge is almost finished, she thought. The elastic hung loosely around each thigh. More progress. She put her knees together and raised them in the air. No matter how tightly she pressed them together, her thighs did not touch. — Steven Levenkron

Fooling the body into thinking it's full on only a thousand calories can be difficult. The trick is to chew the food until it's pretty much liquid. This way, vomiting after burns less — J. Matthew Nespoli

She'd lost two more pounds. A picture of the models she'd cut out of the magazine flashed through Kessa's mind. And the winner is ... seventy-three! — Steven Levenkron

Well, Kessa, I am glad to see that you're taking your body seriously. I shudder when I see the girls leaving class and heading for the nearest hamburger, coke, and French fry station.The thought of them pouring all those dead calories into themselves makes me want to cry. You'd think after a rigorous dance class they'd have more respect for their bodies. — Steven Levenkron

I wanted to make a film about anorexia. I thought about it for a long time, but then gave up on this idea as I felt that this theme would be so hermetic and closed that it would not reach an audience. However, the plot about the character of Olga and the idea that a body has a lot of different meanings were still present in my mind. — Malgorzata Szumowska

When I was 19 years old, I came down with anorexia. I had it for about a year before it became public. And it had a lot to do with my self-esteem. — Tracey Gold

In the 1980s, research on post traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans was regarded as important, noble, and useful. When the same researchers looked at the same problem in children who had been sexually abused, a tremendous controversy ensued a controversy that persists to this day. There were those who disputed the extent and severity of the sexual abuse that had been uncovered. — Patrick J. Carnes

Anorexia is such a self-consuming, selfish disease. It's all about you. Becoming a mother, all of a sudden it wasn't about me anymore. — Tracey Gold

She began to be reassured by these pains, tangible symbols of her success in becoming thinner than anyone else. Her only identity was being "the skinniest." She had to feel it. — Steven Levenkron

Turning something over to the Holy Spirit is a leap of faith that lets go of attempting to control outcomes. The core of alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia, smoking and a host of things the world calls addictions is control. The little willingness the Holy Spirit asks is the key to letting go of the attempt to manage the body and the world, which is the insane attempt to maintain a self-concept image that God did not create. An idea to contemplate from the Course is this: "Seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world." The requirement is to change your thinking, not to focus on behavior and form. Behavior flows from thought, and transformation of the mind is synonymous with changing thought patterns from ego-based to Spirit-based. — David Hoffmeister

When in a state of hunger, one ought not to undertake labor. — Hippocrates

I don't understand anorexia; I'm too greedy to ever not eat ... I just can't do it. — Keshia Knight Pulliam

I unwittingly became sort of this anorexia spokeswoman. — Tracey Gold

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The other thing that's happened with writing is that I'm not afraid it will go away. Up until a couple of years ago, I feared that sitting down with paper and pencil revealed too much desire and that for such ambition I would be punished. My vocabulary would contract anorexia, ideas would be born autistic, even titles would not come to flirt with me anymore. I suppose this was tied to that internal judge, the serpent who eats her own tail. She insinuates you're not good enough; you believe her and try less, ratifying her assessment; so you try even less; and on and on. This snake survives on your dying. Finally, now, the elided words of my wisest writing teacher, the poet David Wojahn, make sense. "Be ambitious," he said, "for the work." Not for the in-dwelling editor. That bitch was impossible to please anyway. — Marsha L. Larsen

As far as stimulus from the visual arts specifically, there is today in most of us a visual appetite that is hungry, that is acutely undernourished. One might go so far as to say that Protestants in particular suffer from a form of visual anorexia. It is not that there is a lack of visual stimuli, but rather a lack of wholesomeness of form and content amidst the all-pervasive sensory overload. — John Walford

I was very obsessed. I mean, I could tell you the fat content and the calorie content in absolutely anything. — Victoria Beckham

I've been blamed for everything, from smoking to heroin to anorexia. — Kate Moss

She ran her hands over her body as if to bid it good-bye. The hipbones rising from a shrunken stomach were razor-sharp. Would they be lost in a sea of fat? She counted her ribs bone by bone. Where would they go? — Steven Levenkron

I think my anorexia was to do with being a teenager, not being in films. — Christina Ricci

Anorexia taught me to love life and to realise that starving yourself to death is a bloody waste of time. It's awful, and it hurts so many people around you. It's a terribly selfish thing to do. — Celia Imrie

Then I took a shower, unlocked the door, and set out on destroying myself. — Emma Woolf

I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame. I have an eating disorder. — Jena Morrow

yet still I crave the sight of my own hypnotic gaze reflecting out at me from the shared mirror of anorexia and bulimia, number to life and reality, existing only in my self-made tortured state — Carol Lee

They taught me not to harm myself by taking away anything that could be used to cause harm, by analysing my every move and studying every centimetre of my naked body on Thursday afternoons. They taught me to eat and love myself by imposing fear of consequence. When the fear vanished, I knew I would forget. They taught me nothing. — Sophie Glynn

Willow sees her before any of the others. A walking skeleton, the victim of some terrible wasting disease, like something out of the history books, a death camp survivor. It takes Willow a moment to realize that the girl is none of those things. She's just a girl, a girl like Willow, who's chosen to inflict terrible pain on herself. Only this girl's weapon isn't a razor, it's starvation. — Julia Hoban

I was my thinnest when doing 35 fashion shows a week in different countries because I didn't have time to eat. I've never bought the idea that models in fashion magazines cause readers to have anorexia and bulimia. And you can't be a model if you've got those conditions anyway, because you'll get acne and hair all over your body. — Jerry Hall

The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds. — Caroline Kettlewell

I used to refer to myself as a 'theoretical anorexic,' just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do - they're smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too? — Ayelet Waldman

I had always liked my anorexic reflection. It meant seeing the parts instead of the whole. Each connection, each articulation of muscle, skin, and bone made explicit. Gert said that we all had distorted images of ourselves. Either fatter or skinnier than we really were. She said we hated our bodies, hated ourselves. I had never thought so. — Stephanie Grant

She held up three hangers inside a vinyl garment bag and hooked them sideways on the coatrack to unzip. "Raw silk. Vintage. Sort of a purple-black."
"Aubergine," he declared and cracked the opening wider.
"I love a man who can make colors sound dirty." She grinned.
"Cross-dyed." He wondered if Trip had helped pick this out, if he'd seen her model it and convinced her to splurge. "Great suit."
"I gotta stand next to J.R. Ward. Feel me?" She fluttered her short nails at him. "Baby, I went and bought a pair of Givenchy boots I cannot even afford because the Warden is gonna be there in full effect, and you know what that means!"
He didn't really, but he got the gist. "So you want nighttime for daytime."
"Extra vampy, hold the trampy. Like, more Lust For Dracula than Breaking Dawn." Rina squeezed her shoulders together to amp her cleavage. "If I'm hauling the girls out, no way can I do sparkly anorexia. — Damon Suede

One weekend it rained for 48 hours without stopping. The rain beat like bony fingers against the window panes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Fungus was growing on the walls. I polished off a bottle of gin sitting huddled over the two-bar electric fire and wrote a poem, one of the few that has lasted through the moves and the years. It is called 'Where Can I Go?'
If this is not the place where tears are understood where do I go to cry?
If this is not the place where my spirits can take wing where do I go to fly?
If this is not the place where my feelings can be heard where do I go to speak?
If this is not the place where you'll accept me as I am where can I go to be me?
If this is not the place where I can try and learn and grow where can I go to laugh and cry? — Alice Jamieson

Anorexia and bulimia seem to be getting much more common in boys, men, and women of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds; they are also becoming more common in racial groups previously thought to be impervious to the problem. — Marya Hornbacher

Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March.
...
I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world ... I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.
I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness ... Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.
I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.
There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.
I am thawing. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I was anorexic-bulimic when I was 16-17. It was a top secret that time, but these things always are. — Peta Wilson

Anorexics never have boyfriends ... That's one way to know you don't have anorexia, if you have a boyfriend. — Ann Coulter

Many women who have anorexia put their hearts in a compromised situation. — Carre Otis

Kessa ran her fingers over her stomach. Flat. But was it flat enough? Not quite. She still had some way to go. Just to be safe, she told herself. Still, it was nice the way her pelvic bones rose like sharp hills on either side of her stomach. I love bones. Bones are beautiful. — Steven Levenkron

Basically, when it comes to women, both aging and eating are somehow shameful. — Emma Woolf

I know what you're thinking. 'How the hell does this broke ass piece of trailer trash know words like caveat,' right? Well guess what? I've read every single book on the New York Times list of 'Top 100 Literary Classics,' not to mention every Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath or Bronte sisters' book ever written. And fuck you very much for judging me, by the way. — Isobel Irons

Anorexia, you starve yourself. Bulimia, you binge and purge. You eat huge amounts of food until you're sick and then you throw up. And anorexia, you just deny yourself. It's about control. — Tracey Gold

We are so used to our own history, we do not see it as remarkable or out of the ordinary, whereas others might see it as horrendous. Further, we tend to minimize that which we feel shameful about. — Patrick J. Carnes

Kessa began to cut her meat into tiny pieces. As a whole it was unmanageable, frightening; but divided and arranged, the meat could be controlled. She cut four pieces. She'd count to four between each bite. — Steven Levenkron

I don't think you can get really out of anorexia (or any addiction, for that matter) until you simply have no other choice, until the sense that your back's against the wall grows too strong and too irrefutable, until you are simply in too much pain - too desperate and deeply bored and unhappy - to go on. — Caroline Knapp

In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled eggs to eat. Life is essentially trivial. You either decide you will take the trite business of life and give yourself the option of doing something really cool, or you decide you will opt for the Grand Epic of eating disorders and dedicate your life to being seriously trivial. — Marya Hornbacher

But I know that if I don't at least try, I'll stay the way I am till it kills me. Till I kill me, I mean. I never really accept that that's what I'm doing - I say it, but I don't believe it. — Deborah Hautzig

Emma says her illness was a kind of self-hypnosis which obliterated the outside world, a way of escaping life and reducing its proportions to what she could manage. — Carol Lee

He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall. — Marya Hornbacher

If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl. — John Green

I've never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the boney chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I've come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been [me]. It wasn't. It's not. — Harriet Brown

Love - the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete - is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something. — Caroline Knapp

I had been on this insane diet for almost 17 years to maintain the weight that was demanded of me when I was modeling. My diet was really starvation. I am not naturally that thin. — Carre Otis

I was a very lonely child and it's funy but the first word that comes to my head is "starved". I felt starved of affection, starved of love and I felt that it wasn't OK to ask for it. Maybe there was a sense that if I deserved it, it would be there. There must be something I'd done which meant I didn't deserve it. — Carol Lee

From the newsstands a dozen models smiled up at her from a dozen magazine covers, smiled in thin-faced, high-cheekboned agreement to Kessa's new discovery. They knew the secret too. They knew thin was good, thin was strong; thin was safe. — Steven Levenkron

Every time a girl refuses to eat, she one-ups Eve. — Jennifer Traig

I did extensive research on media and anorexia and found out that the fashion magazines are to blame in a way. They project an image of a woman that is completely absurd, but girls and women believe they should be very skinny. They don't look like real woman anymore. — Oliviero Toscani

Most dancers have no awareness of how they look; half of them think they're fat. There is anorexia in the ballet world; there are those things. — Benjamin Millepied

Now I'm being blamed not only for anorexia but for lung cancer. - On being a social smoker. — Kate Moss

Putting it another way: A group of fat teenagers who lost 25 percent of their body weight were in worse health than teenagers with anorexia. It — Rebecca Jane Weinstein

I don't want to feel I'm responsible for anorexia across the country. — Courteney Cox

Yesterday's dirt and mistakes have moved through me. I am shiny and pink inside, clean. Empty is good. Empty is strong. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle. — Margaret Atwood

When I was seventeen I found a man, or maybe he found me. Away from home for the first time, out of reach of my father's archaic restrictions and my mother's culinary insistence, I cut off my hair, dropped my Christian name, wore black and toyed with anorexia, passing incognito among the city workers, just another ant in that vast heap. — Nell Grey

Let me explain. Say you have an eating disorder like anorexia - you've probably been hiding the condition for a long time. After months or years, you face your demons, with or without therapy, you admit you're ill and eventually decide you want to recover. But this is only half the battle. Once start to eat again, once you begin to gain weight, it's unbelievably stressful. Having gone from absolute control over every calorie which goes into your mouth, you're now being forced to double, maybe even triple that amount. You're being forced to consume unsafe substances like butter, oil, nuts. Every mouthful takes a colossal effort. In your rigid anorexic mindset, not being underweight equates to being overweight. Not being hungry equates to greed. Giving up an eating disorder is frightening. It is almost impossible to imagine that the process will ever be ok. — Emma Woolf

I always felt that anorexia was the form of breakdown most readily available to adolescent girls. — Kate Beckinsale

You're only popular with anorexia. — Tori Amos