Lifestyle or Disease?

The media often portrays pro-ana sites as promoting eating disorders as a "lifestyle" which can be "learned." That's often cited as a reason for parents and professionals to be up-in-arms against these sites, and in the worst instances forming the online equivalent of a pitchfork-and-torch-bearing mob.

Personally, I believe that anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders are diseases. Do they fit the definition of a lifestyle? Well, mostly. They are a "style of living which reflects the values and attitudes of a certain group." It's no surprise that anorexics value thinness, and that many of us hold a certain attitude about food and our bodies.

But are they a "style of living"? No. They are a style of dying. Unlike a lifestyle, such as the goth lifestyle, eating disorders are deadly. I don't see anyone entering recovery to unlearn goth fashion, but I do see people hospitalized to relearn how to eat.

Also, lifestyles are choices. Last time I looked, no one chooses to become anorexic or bulimic, or to binge eat, or to exercise emotionally. That's another misconception about pro-ana. No one wakes up one morning and decides that she will forever hate her body, poke and prod and pinch at the thin layer of skin on her elbow that she sees as fat, or starve and exercise to the point of passing out just to burn off the lone M&M she allowed herself to have the day before.

Lifestyles don't make you wake up each morning, despite going to bed each night praying that you won't.

Lifestyles don't land you in the hospital with a nasogastric feeding tube.

Anorexia is a disease, a mental illness. 10-20% of those with anorexia will die from it. Not Otherwise Specified, a phenomenal pro-reality site, contains in its pages a record of a woman who died during a binge-and-purge session. It is graphic and greatly disturbing, especially the picture, but if any of you believe that eating disorders are lifestyles, then check out this page.