Please Eat: A Mother's Struggle to Free Her Teenage Son from Anorexia

THE TROUBLE WITH ANOREXIA is that many people just don’t “get it”. As a result you can feel terribly alone, as if you’re living in a parallel world to everyone else.

Have I had enough? Have I done enough? Should I go home? Am I doing enough for it? Is supper too big? Was my lunch too big? Why am I doing nothing? Is it too late to eat? Was what I had for lunch actually the right amount? Should I eat more?

thought about food and exercise all the time. I couldn’t focus on anything else, not school work, not social life, not hobbies, not anything. I couldn’t even have fun, because that would be wasted time when I could be exercising. I was incredibly lonely and - ironically - the only thing that took my mind off this new loneliness was thinking about food and exercising.

Living with anorexia is like living in a surreal world: a world where you pretend that everything is just fine when in reality you are falling off a cliff.

I’m quickly realising that anorexia isn’t something you can just “snap out of” or a “diet gone too far”.

With anorexia it’s as if someone else takes over your mind. Someone that taunts you all the time, telling you you’re fat and that you’ll never be popular until you get thin.

Anorexia has you pinching the skin on your skinny stomach, taunting you that it’s rolls of flab.

I wish they’d ban those darn nutritional labels because Ben seems more interested in them than in the food the packaging contains.