Anorexia: Portrait of a Hunger Artist by Emily Troscianko

Article summary:

In the article, “Portrait of a Hunger Artist”, author Emily Troscianko chronicles her battle with anorexia. As soon she began to suffer from the disorder, Troscianko couldn’t imagine life without it. To her, the anorexia felt like her closest friend. She didn’t even want to have a life without this “friend”. She longed for control over hunger, and loved the sense of power it gave her.

Troscianko begins with the end of her story: what made her finally overcome anorexia. She starts out stating that when her mother was going to be moving to a new home with her partner, her anorexia wasn’t welcome in that new home. Initially she is devastated, but after a few months she finally decides to start the steps of recovery. As Troscianko recounts, she isn’t sure where her anorexia of ten years began, but she knows it had something to do with a ski trip in which she got a stomach illness. When she was sick, she couldn’t stomach much of anything but a few chips every once in a while, and this, she believes, is where she began to feel like deferring eating was a sort of triumph. This starvation kept perpetuating. She would hold off from having a small morsel for longer and longer periods of time. Feeling this made her stronger, she kept going.

What she loved is that by starving herself more and more, that one small, infrequent indulgence she would serve herself tasted better and better. The longer she sustained, the more pleasure she found in eating one small piece of something at last. The cause of it all, she says, was something that had always been in her mind. The ski trip incident serving only as a kickstarter. It was partly inherited, she says. Her mother was notorious for suffering badly from guilt, and her father wa...

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...ioned people of third-world countries. Maybe if people actually took some consideration, and were less concerned with themselves, they’d realize how well they are living and that they have no reason to feel bad about their lives. Then we might not have such a huge epidemic of anorexia.

Aside from that, people just need to realize how we are all exposed to such a big, false depiction of how you should look. People need to be educated more on what body images are actually within reason, and perhaps focus on some more positive role models that have realistic image and appeal. I feel that to put an end to the anorexia problem, people will have to face and fight against the ridiculous standards of success and appeal we are all objected to. It’s what has to happen if we don’t want to see anymore victims succombing to this disorder — one that can so easily be prevented.