I think it happens for a few reasons. First, I think many non ed people see eating disorders as a quick diet to lose weight so they get involved in the pro eating disorder internet communities looking for tips, promoting behaviors, but the majority of them stop or fall out when they realize it isn't easy and isn't as romantic as they thought it was. Also, I think the whole advent of social media has made it safer and easier to connect with people suffering with the same condition. I mean, it's easier to divulge your secrets to someone on the internet because the risk of rejection isn't as high. I also think more people have a knowledge of what eating disorders are nowadays, due to movements to reduce the stigma and educate people.

The biggest reason for the romanticizing and glorification about eating disorders is that while people are more educated on what they are right now, they don't really get the pain eating disorders cause, both mental and physical. They just see eating disorders as an extreme way to lose weight and maintain an image, that for the most part is not the reason for the disorders. All I know is I try to distance myself from that, no matter where I'm at or not in recovery. I can't fathom anyone actually suffering promoting the behaviors in another. Although I'm sure it occurs to some extent.

I completely agree with your post. I starting purging when I was 15, No one new. I didn't talk about it 24/7 online. I didn't have a "thinspo" blog. I didn't "like" or "tag" Pro Ana/Mia pictures and quotes. It feels more like a religion now. Cult like, with "ana/Mia" as gods. It's sick.

I wonder the same thing. How many of these young girls have ED"s? How many are just trying to "diet". How far is to far? Where is the line now? The more public this becomes the more Eating Disorders seem like a joke. Like a bunch of little insecure girls trying to diet there way into Hollywood standards. It's so sad because so many really suffer from eating disorders.

IDK who is in it for attention and who is effected anymore.

I personally feel that a lot of younger girls do it because it has been"glamorized' more in the media and socially than what it use to be.

I think posting about one's eating disorder on the internet is not actually so far off from trying to hide. Yes, it is a way to unfortunately glamorize the illness, but at the same time, the internet is an incredibly anonymous place. In the case of pro ED sites, it provides a community for "like-minded" individuals while ALSO allowing for anonymity. I think everyone who has posted is correct, but I also think the ability to hide behind a computer screen while anonymously creating an online persona among others who aren't going to judge you for your thoughts and actions should not be ignored. The secrecy is still there, but the internet allows for another layer.

Attention seeking. Plain and simple.

When I was diagnosed first, over 20 years ago, I hid it and was disgusted I'd been found out. I hid my body under layers and layers of baggy clothing, in the hope of bulking up. To have anorexia was shameful, not a fashion statement. A friend of mine works in this area and she said the number of attention-seeking EDs and other self-harm, is rising at an alarming rate. Mental illnesses are seen as cool now. Although I don't believe we should feel ashamed for having this condition, too much acceptance doesn't make one very motivated to change, IMHO.

Another thing that really gets to me is these pro-ana sites where girls look for support with fasting! Eh... To me that'd be like an alcoholic looking for support with drinking! For me, starving is the easy part - eating is the hard part!

i completely understand everyone's points of view in this thread, but thought maybe it couldn't hurt to add mine to the mix to offer a different perspective. just to warn ya, this is gonna be lengthy haha! no pressure to read, but i figure if i'm going to try to explain my perspective i might as well do it right, so that more people can understand.

i'm about to turn 27, but consider myself someone who grew up in the generation of "pro-ana" because when i first started truly eating in a disordered manner (8th grade), my research into eating disorders led me to a number of the early pro-ED websites, and trust me, there were a lot of them even back then. i was depressed and anxious, but didn't know what it was or that it was of concern or mattered, and because i put on a happy facade no one figured it out for years. i became obsessed with eating disorders and with losing weight, i was a wannarexic. i believe i may have even joined a forum that had "wannarexic" in the title.

growing up, i always found that i would become obsessed with a specific topic, and read all of the books about it in the library, and then once i was completely educated and understood as much as possible, i would move on to the next topic. reading about eating disorders was the one i next became obsessed with, and unfortunately it's an obsession that never went away. it's worth noting that in 7th grade, some of my classmates and i did a class project on eating disorders and modern beauty standards. everyone thought we were so daring, pushing the envelope. there were five girls in the group, and three of us who are still in contact. of those three, all three of us have been in treatment or currently are in treatment for an eating disorder. one girl was in the hospital severely underweight by the summer after 7th grade, and she still struggles to this day. the other later found herself in treatment later for binge eating disorder, in a cycle for years of bingeing and starving and crying. i remember the mother of the girl who was hospitalized a few times in middle school found a study that she shared with us that suggested kids in middle school shouldn't learn about eating disorders, because they aren't old enough yet to be able to comprehend or process the implications, and tend to end up selectively only hearing the apparent "positives" and then mimicking the behavior. i do remember that all of us were crushed at learning that, but it still didn't mean we suddenly grew up or could understand.

it's also worth noting that at the time that i began researching eating disorders, most of the books out there were fairly superficial, or glossed over how boring indeed an eating disorder is, or featured girls who recovered and their lives were for the better due to their struggle. even in "wasted" (which was for me and many many others i met in treatment essentially a how-to manual), she reaches a turning point, a very distinct turning point, which changes everything. even today there is very little out there that conveys the misery of the tedium of an eating disorder. everything is sensationalized. it just is. tragically, eating disorders sell.

i spent most of high school dieting, and then bingeing, tracking my weight loss up and down and becoming increasingly more upset. it was both normal in high school to be on a diet though, and to eat a ton of junk food in one sitting, so nobody thought anything of my behavior. everyone else was doing it! every once in awhile i would purge, but it was a huge rarity. there were drunken confessionals where my friends and i would tell each other about how we had tried to purge before, and then in sobriety we never spoke of it again.

by the time i got to college, my depression had gotten so bad that i was extremely suicidal and couldn't maintain friendships. still, i didn't feel able to talk about it, so i didn't and nobody knew. i also was distraught after moving across the country to discover that, as an adult, i had absolutely no idea how to eat normally. i certainly at that time didn't fit any criteria for an eating disorder, but my relationship with food was a huge mess, and i was incapable of fixing it. one evening that first semester i purged after eating more than i had wanted. i thought it would be fine, because i had done it before and i still didn't have an eating disorder, so why should that change? this time, though, i became addicted, and pretty quickly fit the criteria for bulimia, which i felt bad about because to me it meant i had failed at being thin. i became even more active in the online community of pro-EDs. i had so few friends in my real life, but online, there were people who cared about me. sure, we were encouraging each other to lose weight, but at least i could be honest with them about how sad i was, and at least i had somebody in the world to talk to. i was so lonely. it gave me a sense of normalcy, and made me feel like less of an invisible person, although the big problem with that is that it's pretty easy for the pro-ED community and just generally the online community of people with eating disorders to become your "new normal" -- your baseline. the people who were successful in extreme weight loss were so admired, they were the role models. it was hard for me, since i had nobody to hang out with at school and nobody who really thought highly of me, to not end up striving for popularity and admiration on the internet. in my mind, either way my relationship with food was ****ed up, and there was nothing i could do about it -- might as well be thin.

there were people online who all felt the same as you guys now do, and as i now do as well. but they in my mind at that time were looking down on the rest of us, the peons, the unworthy. they hated the pro-ana movement (because it sucks, obviously, i know that now) and told me that you couldn't "want" yourself into an eating disorder, and after years of hearing this, i was convinced that i was immune to truly developing an eating disorder, so i could do whatever i wanted. i began losing weight as well -- i had tried so many times before and it had never stuck, why should this time be any different? but this time, i didn't stop. by the end of sophomore i was extremely underweight and very sick. and still, nobody in the real world noticed, so i figured it wasn't real and i wasn't actually sick, because i was incapable of developing a "real" eating disorder. i worried that i had lost too much weight, but so few people acknowledged the weight drop in my real life, and i still got compliments occasionally on my body size, so i convinced myself that it was all in my head, and i wasn't actually too thin. i was also a master of secrecy, and lies, with everyone around me. the internet was the only place i felt like i could be myself, and anyone would care, so i saw no reason to hide my true feelings there.

it wasn't until i was back home the summer after my sophomore year, that my parents caught on. and it wasn't because they thought i was scary skinny, it was because they thought i was a little on the thin side, and it didn't match up with how much they saw me eat (due to the b/ping). i remember, when my mom figured out and confronted me, and i had admitted that maybe i was having a little bit of a hard time, that she said that at least it wasn't like my hair was falling out and everything, that at least i wasn't /that/ bad yet. i was, at this time, well below even a minimally healthy weight. i don't want to list numbers because i don't think they're helpful, but it had gotten to the point that even the people in my online eating disorder community were terrified for my health, and i was avoiding even talking to them because all they would talk about was how scared they were for me and how upset they were that nobody in my real life seemed to notice. but it was true, nobody in my real life actually thought i was too thin. they just thought i was on the thin side, but not too bad. not like those girls on Dr. Phil or in the news or anything. this to me just shows how distorted society's view of a healthy weight is. when we're only presented with emaciated teenage runway models, that is what we begin to consider still kind of healthy. everyone on TV who has anorexia only confesses to eating lettuce, so nobody who eats anything else could be anorexic.

when i called the local treatment center to set up an appointment for an intake, they asked me if i could come in that following morning, and told me to pack some things because i would probably be going inpatient. i honestly just didn't believe that it could be true and that someone could be acknowledging how i knew i was dying, so i and my parents as well were in shock.

it began a cycle of inpatient-outpatient for the next couple years, but i'm now considered recovered and haven't even been in ED treatment now for a few years, and i currently spend a lot of my time trying to provide encouragement for people who are still stuck in that trap. reassuring them that there is an "other side." i still see a therapist for my depression and anxiety, but that's about it. i've been at a healthy weight for so many years now i've lost track. i have no recollection of the last time i purged or of the last time i binged. i have no "fear" foods versus "safe" foods. i eat whatever i want to, and i see no intrinsic value in being very skinny and i now barely ever think about wanting to be thin. i did gain some extra weight over the last couple years due to a psychiatric medication i was on that i recently stopped, hence why i joined MFP. i want to lose the weight in a healthy manner, because i know my higher weight isn't my healthiest weight, but there is no way i'm going to let myself get sucked back into Ed's nasty world.

anyway, i guess basically i think it's more of a generational difference than a disorder difference. plenty of people in the pro-ED community will never actually develop an eating disorder, and will eventually move on their merry way. but plenty of people won't. i think the huge uptick in the number of people in the world with eating disorders has a lot to do with the publicity of eating disorders over the past couple decades, and the much more prominent acceptance of emaciation as a normal goal. eating disorders in and of themselves have been around forever, but these days experts say it's an epidemic. it's this huge flurry of activity in the media and online that vulnerable people get sucked into, and that eventually manifests (should they have the genetic predisposition or the other predicting factors) as a serious eating disorder that is somehow considered normal and acceptable and desired.

basically, eating disorders, no matter how they initially present themselves, suck. ED SUCKS.

For me everyone in my life, the people who know me in person, don't know about my ed save one very close friend. However, online, I'm open about it. I used to have a blog with thinspo and I didn't consider myself pro-ed, but I felt safe knowing there was a community of people who understood the way I felt and thought. For once I didn't have to try and scramble for excuses for why I kept going to the bathroom, why I ate so much/little. It was nice. I go back and fourth on recovery. I have a recovery blog and I still haven't worked up the strength to delete my thinspo blog or throw away my ED journal. Online you can be open about the pain you're going through becasue you can be anonymous online.

I think that allot of these young girls are just attention seeking,and others are trying to find help and someone to care. I've posted pictures online,but the weren't "lets get skinny" or "see how thin I am" they were posted so that the people who I have learned to trust and who care about me can see how I'm actually doing and can help combat my body dis-morphia. I would never put pro-ana or mia on them though.

I've also seen girls who have been obsessed with the "pro-ana movement" to the point of actually developing an ED and regretting how lightly they treated their behaviors when they first found these sites.