Anorexia Nervosa: Never Being Skinny Enough

There was a ninth-grade girl who seemed to be like every other ninth-grade girl, but she was different from the rest. She was five-foot four and weighed a mere ninety-five pounds. Her bones were visible through a thin layer of coarse skin, but there was no muscle to be found. Despite being asked if she had a problem, she lied to everyone. This girl didn’t eat a healthy diet, didn’t exercise her body in a healthy way, and was slowly withering away into a walking corpse. This girl was me. I was suffering from a disease known as anorexia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is a disease that has three main features: refusal to maintain a healthy body weight, a strong fear of gaining weight, and a distorted body image (Anorexia Nervosa). Anorexia nervosa is a difficult-to-treat disease that affects both the body and the mind. Anorexia nervosa is a disease that revolves around the thought of "never being skinny enough." Once someone starts living an anorexic lifestyle, nothing else in their life matters anymore. Family, friends, and other activities are pushed aside because all that matters to someone with anorexia is losing weight (Anorexia Nervosa). However, anorexia isn't just about eating unhealthy. It's about malnutrition, excessive weight loss, and starvation of the body. Anorexia isn't a very common disease, as it appears in less than one percent of girls (Rosen, Meghan). My anorexia developed because I wanted to be beautiful, and I believed that being skinny was the only way to achieve it. I aimed to impress my parents, friends, and a boy I had a crush on. I believed that the boy didn't like me because I wasn't pretty enough, so I thought that being skinny would make me more attractive to him.