Faithful to Ana

National | CULTURAL: Websites are helping girls embrace a "lifestyle" of eating disorders | Lynn Vincent

WARNING: THIS PAGE CONtains graphic material. Do you still wish to enter?" The advisory isn't for a pornographic website. Instead it warns off Web-surfers who don't wish to see "bone pictures"—photos of women who have starved themselves skeletal. What follows are eight pages of women posing, often proudly, with sunken eyes, jutting clavicles, cage-like torsos, and arms so thin they look like chicken drumsticks with the flesh gone.

This is the world of "pro ana/pro mia," the term used by young women (and some men) who embrace eating disorders (ED) as a lifestyle. Historically, ED victims have suffered alone, slowly starving themselves in secret. But the Internet has provided a meeting place where "pro anorexia" and "pro bulimia" people trade tips and encourage each other to "stay faithful to 'Ana,'" the personified name for anorexia nervosa.

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November 29, 2003, Vol. 18, No. 46

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