Friday, September 25, 2009

PROTRUDING VEINS...THE TWISTED, BLUE ROADMAP: IN VENAE VERITAS

anorexia, anorexic, arm, woman Forearm of an anorexic woman

In venae veritas (In veins, there is truth)...
...the palpable evidence that starvation has robbed you of all body fat, leaving a roadmap of protruding, twisted, blue veins all over your body.

Pretty, it's not.

And if you continue starving yourself to attain what you perceive to be that "perfect body," this will be you. I promise.



anorexia, anorexic, thighs, leg, woman

anorexia, anorexic, leg, woman

anorexia, anorexic, leg, woman


anorexia, anorexic, foot, woman


anorexia, anorexic, arm, woman

anorexia, anorexic, body, woman

anorexic, anorexia, body, woman

(This woman's breast implants are not only encapsulated, but have travelled east & west)

anorexia, anorexic, woman, hand

(Hand & thumb of a 46-year-old anorexic woman)

Follow on Buzz

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

EMILY'S BATTLE WITH ANOREXIA: "I DON'T FEEL I DESERVE TO EAT...THE COUNTING IS HARD...A PLATE OF RITUAL"...[UPDATED !]


Emily & Tiffany, identical twins


Emily, pre-anorexia


Emily now





Tiffany now


From the Intervention series on A&E is this story of Emily, who has been suffering from anorexia for 8 years, and the desperate attempts of her family and identical twin, Tiffany, to help her. At the time of filming, Emily, who is 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighed only 94 pounds, 56 pounds less than her twin, Tiffany.



Emily




Emily & Tiffany, identical twins...


PART 1:






Emily exercising in the shower

Tension and frustration...

PART 2:







Food counting: "A plate of ritual"...

PART 3:






The intervention: "You're not going to love her to death"...

PART 4:





"The way we started life is the way I want it ended -- with you at my side" (Tiffany to Emily)

PART 5:





UPDATE!



Emily, March 2009

Intervention did a follow-up on Emily in March of 2009. Click the link below to watch the video. It's amazing...


INTERVENTION: UPDATE ON EMILY

Follow on Buzz

Sunday, September 13, 2009

THE LIGHTERLIFE DIET, STARVATION, AND ANOTHER DEATH...


Lighterlife+founder+Jackie+Cox A picture of LighterLife founder, Jackie Cox, in all her finery
(and this is not a pre-weight-loss picture)



It should really be called "The Loss-of-Life Diet."

Deaths are mounting, and terrible side effects of this starvation diet are being felt by many who follow it.


The Lighterlife diet is eerily reminiscent of the Kimkins starvation diet.

Any diet program which recommends its followers eat no more than 500 calories a day is not only scandalous but deadly. Many of those who followed Lighterlife and Kimkins now suffer from eating disorders, and other major health problems.

Like Lighterlife's founder, Jackie Cox, the Kimkins diet was developed by the morbidly obese Heidi Diaz, aka Kimmer.


Heidi Diaz, Kimmer, Kimkins

Heidi Diaz (aka Kimmer) who never followed her own diet, but that didn't stop her from telling others to starve themselves

And here are the women who tragically died while following the Lighterlife diet:


Samantha Clowe:

Samantha Clowe

Samantha Clowe

Samantha and her fiancé, Andrew

34-year-old Samantha Clowe collapsed at her home in Leeds, UK from heart failure in June of 2009 after following the LighterLife diet for 11 weeks.

Samantha weighed 17st 6 lb (244 lbs) when she started the diet, and had lost three stone (42 lbs) by following the strict plan, desperate to be slender in time for her wedding to fiancé, Andrew Smith.



Jacqueline Henson:

Jacqueline Henson Jacqueline and Brian Henson on their wedding day


Jacqueline Henson

Jacqueline & her grandson

"Jacqueline Henson, 40, was ‘over the moon’ when she shed 11 and a half pounds in the first week on the Lighter-Life diet, which involves drinking four litres of water a day..

‘Jacqui was told by the slimming consultant that the more water she drank the more weight she would lose.

'It wasn’t made clear to her that you had to spread the drinking through the day.’

A post mortem examination revealed Mrs Henson died from swelling of the brain caused by saturating the body with too much water. "


Matilda Callaghan:

Matilda Callaghan


Matilda Callaghan, 25, died in January 2006 after losing 10 stone (140 pounds) in six months on the Lighterlife diet.

A post-mortem found Matilda died from heart arrhythmia – when a heartbeat is not allowed sufficient time to ‘recover’ and the next beat interrupts.

For six months Matilda lived on only 500 calories a day, 1,500 less than the recommended daily amount, and was drinking between four and six litres of water daily.

~~~~~

So, so sad. All these deaths, and Lighterlife continues to thrive and Jackie Cox keeps raking in the money. Scandalous.


To read the full stories on Samantha, Jacqueline and Matilda, click these links below:

Jacqueline Henson




And here's a great article on Lighterlife's founder, Jackie Cox:

Jackie Cox, The Obese Woman...



Rest in peace, Samantha, Jacqueline and Matilda.



For more information about Kimkins and Heidi Diaz, click here:

Mariasol

Follow on Buzz

Saturday, September 12, 2009

ANYTHING YOU'D LIKE TO SAY TO "ANONYMOUS"?

...OTHER THAN...





I just received the following comment on one of my posts about Aimee Moore:

"Anonymous said...

Girls who "suffer" from anorexia are nothing more than spoiled brats who want attention. Anorexia is not a "disorder" - it is a choice young women make. Aimee Moore is an especially pitiful woman because she is bringing down her entire family with her. Shame on her!

These women don't need treatment. They need a good swift kick in the rear. If they don't straighten up then their families should wash their hands of them.

Aimee Moore and others like her should be shipped off to a place like the Sudan to see real suffering and be forced to work with the people there who have endured real hardship. That would probably jolt her out of her narcissistic, self-serving, selfish, bratty behavior. Paleeze, I have no patience for these ridiculous, woe-is-me, pity-party girls. Group up!

September 12, 2009 3:26 PM"

I truly wonder how many other ignoramuses in the world believe this.

UPDATE: And this further comment just in from Anonymous:

Anonymous said...

"I meant, "Grow up!"

I'm hardly ignorant about these matters since I suffered through a year of this nonsense with an old girlfriend. She was a whiny, spoiled-rotten, self-centered girl who just needed a stern talking to.

If anorexia is an "illness" why is it not prevalent in third world countries? And why is it so commonplace in the US? Because girls in the US are spoiled rich kids who haven't suffered real tragedy. Many children living in poverty in African nations, for example, are concerned about their next meal, finding a roof over their heads, living in the midst of civil unrest. They don't have time to sit around and hold a pity party for themselves.

Aimee Moore is a brat. Her family should boot her out the door and wish her good riddance. She contributes nothing to society. Though her freak show antics provide hours of warped entertainment.

September 12, 2009 5:03 PM"

I'm not going to post any more of Anonymous's crap. I don't like feeding trolls. It's frightening to know that there are people out there who are of the same mindset as Anonymous.

Oh, and here's the link to Anonymous's comments on my post about Aimee (scroll to the bottom):

Follow on Buzz

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

CRYSTAL RENN: NO LONGER HUNGRY...

Crystal Renn Crystal Renn (2008), age 21, 11st 8lb (162 lbs.)

Crystal Renn

Crystal Renn (2002), age 15, 95 to 105 lbs, at the height of her eating disorder

(Photos from the author's personal collection)



Crystal Renn, Hungry

Introduction from Hungry...


"This is a story about two pictures.

Gisele Bundchen, Vogue 2000
Gisele Bundchen, 2000 (Vogue)


"The first is a photograph of the supermodel Gisele. Taken by the photographer Steven Meisel, it appeared in Vogue in 2000. Gisele is in a clingy white gown, posing in a studio against a seamless gray backdrop. Her skin is golden and gleaming. Her hair is windblown, as if she's been surprised by a breeze from an open window just out of view. Her hands, her eyes, the curve of her back -- everything is graceful and expressive. She's mesmerizing.

I was fourteen years old when I saw that picture. It was the first time I'd ever leafed through a copy of Vogue. I'd never cared about any fashion magazine; I'd looked at that one only because a man I'll call The Scout had handed me a copy. He was working for a major modeling agency -- let's just call it The Agency -- in New York. His job was to troll the back roads of America, visiting junior high schools and suburban malls, in a ceaseless quest for the next top model.

I had never met anyone like The Scout before. He was urbane and kind, smooth-talking yet sincere. I was dazzled by his shirt. Tailored to perfection, it was probably more expensive than my entire wardrobe. When he opened Vogue to Gisele's picture, he knew exactly what he was doing. He was planting a fantasy. In the few seconds it took me to absorb all of Gisele's beauty and allure, I'd constructed a new idea of female perfection. It was Gisele.

That's when the Scout said, "This could be you."

And even though I was only fourteen and weighed sixty pounds more than Gisele and had all the sophistication of a girl from Clinton, Mississippi, population twenty-three thousand, I believed The Scout.


Crystal Renn

Crystal Renn by Ruven Afanador


The second photograph is from 2007. It shows the naked back of a curvy woman, her dark hair curling into tendrils at the nape of her neck. Her body is half draped in rich red fabric. She's gazing off into the distance, lit from the side in a soft northern light. She looks like a Greek goddess or an Old Master painting -- a Vermeer, a Titian. There's an eye-catching weightiness to her. As she leans slightly to her right, two modest folds of flesh collect at her waist. (If you were a snarky sort, you might call this lush abundance "back fat.") The picture was taken by photographer Ruven Afanador for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. It was a public service ad, designed to look timeless but also of the moment. The objective was to show beauty and strength, to offer hope of a healthy future for all women. It ran in every major women's magazine, from Vogue to O to Bon Appétit to Prevention. The woman in that photograph is me.

Hungry is the story of how I got from the first photograph to the second.

A straight line may well be the shortest distance between two points, but for me, the journey from the first picture to the second crossed continents and set the numbers on my bathroom scale spinning backward and then forward like a time-lapse sequence in a 1930s black-and-white melodrama. The interim was a time of triumphs and humiliations, a jagged line of drastic weight loss and brushes with fame and success and failure and emaciation and eating disorders, until I finally said: Enough.

I started to eat. I stopped churning mindless circles on an elliptical cross-trainer for seven or eight hours a day, my arms and legs jerking like a marionette's. I stopped obsessing about chewing a single stick of sugar-free gum. I got heavier. I put on pounds by the dozen and leap frogged dress sizes -- from 00 to 12. But I honestly didn't mind the weight gain and the loss of my matchstick limbs. I made a choice to stop starving.

Here's the strange part: Call it crazy or ironic or simply perfect justice, but when I stopped starving myself, my career took off. That was when I shot five international editions of Vogue and the covers of international editions of Harper's Bazaar and Elle. That was when I starred in Dolce & Gabbana's ad campaign. That was when I worked the runway as the final model in Jean Paul Gaultier's prĂŞt-Ă -porter show in a gauzy, breathtaking, form-fitting fairy-tale dress covered in an explosion of tissue-paper-thin silk flowers. That was when I appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. That was when I became the highest-paid plus-size model in America. That was when I became a favorite model of the man who took that amazing picture of Gisele in 2000: the great Steven Meisel. And I did it all at the weight my body wanted to be.

I was hardly alone in my descent into weight obsession and madness. Five to ten million Americans have eating disorders. A 2005 study found that over half of all teenage girls and nearly a third of teenage boys use unhealthy methods to try to be thin, such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes for the express purpose of losing weight, vomiting, and taking laxatives. Even women without clinical disorders spend a heartbreaking amount of time obsessing about their weight, hating their bodies, and thinking that if they were only thinner, their lives would be richer, fuller, happier.

I'm the embodiment of the truth that it doesn't have to be that way. You can learn to love the size you're supposed to be. I had to lose seventy pounds (along with lumps of hair, muscle mass, the ability to concentrate, and any sense of joy) before finding my sanity. I regained the weight and, in the process, became an infinitely more successful model. My self-acceptance led to a return of the intellectual curiosity I'd had as a child, before I got on the weight-loss express. It led to a better career. It led to romance. I'm proof that life doesn't have to wait until you're skinny."


To purchase Crystal's book, click the link!




Watch Crystal's interview on ABC:



And below are excerpts from an interview of Crystal by Katie Hintz-Zambrano for Stylelist on August, 24, 2009:

"When Crystal Renn aspired to be a model as a 14-year-old in Mississippi, an agent (not from Ford) told her she had to lose 9 inches off of her hips first. Renn ended up doing that, and then some, going from 175 lbs and 5' 8" to 95 lbs and an inch and a half taller in two years, eventually moving to New York City and launching a successful modeling career.

After conquering the eating disorder that transformed her body, Renn, now 23, is happy to call herself a size 12 plus-size model, who, with her new curvy figure has walked the runway for Gaultier, graced the pages of Vogue and starred in ads for Dolce & Gabbana.

Renn's new book about her intriguing journey, titled "Hungry," comes out September 8 (pre-order it at Amazon.com).

We landed an exclusive interview with Renn in which the beauty opens up to StyleList about the dark side of modeling, accepting her body and coming out on top.

StyleList: Why did you decide to write this book?
Crystal Renn: I could only reach a certain number of people through magazine interviews and I wanted to take it to the next level and go into greater depths about my story. One of the messages I wanted to get out was that no matter who you are or where you are, you can accomplish your dreams. I'm a girl from Clinton, Mississippi, and here I am in New York. I also wanted to talk about body acceptance and help women feel empowered.

SL: How did your eating disorder develop once you were trying to achieve the model shape?
CR: It started gradually. I switched to whole wheat bread or eating eggs instead of beef. Just making everything lower in fat. Then it came to cutting out desserts completely. I ended up losing 30 lbs in 2 months, but then I plateaued. That's when it got pretty serious. I started exercising everyday between 1 hour and 8 hours. I wouldn't eat above a thousand calories. And the weight started coming off again. And this was all before I was even modeling yet. I was 15.

SL: Once you were in New York booking jobs and maintaining a weight between 105 and 95 lbs, did your agency and the people around you know what was happening?
CR: I think you had to be aware that something was wrong -- the veins coming out of my arms, the lack of energy, the hair falling out, being in a sullen dark place all the time. That's not normal for a 16-year-old girl. But they pushed me harder and even set me up with a very expensive trainer. I think they turned the other way.

SL: Did you notice the same issues happening with the models around you?
CR: The thing about anorexia is it's a really private thing. People who share openly think they are going to be judged. But I did meet other girls that I knew were suffering with it. I had a roommate and we were eating disorder buddies. And at shoots girls would share tips and it was really quite twisted. One girl said, "When I really want dessert I just eat fat-free Jell-o and I just eat tons of it." Or there were tips on drinking Diet Coke or eating just the peel of apples.

SL: What was your own diet like?
CR: I was probably eating 600 or 700 calories a day. I would steam vegetables and eat them with fat-free dressing for breakfast, for lunch it was lettuce with balsamic vinegar, for dinner maybe the same thing. Everything was always fat-free or sugar-free.

SL: What made you stop?
CR: At 17 my body completely rebelled. I couldn't lose more weight and I realized I was going to die for a job. The next day I was completely chastised by my agency for my size and one agent pulled me aside and said, "There's an option for you. You can either go plus-size or do commercial work." And I asked, "What's plus-size modeling? I've never heard of that." And she said, "Well it means you can be whatever size you want and model." But she said it was for old women! But for whatever reason, everything made sense and I knew this was the route I had to take. I went and had a salad with salmon and walnuts and olive oil. I gave into what my body needed. I could be healthy and happy and still model.

SL: Then you switched agencies to Ford's plus-size division and you've had a successful career. Do you think the enduring waif aesthetic in fashion will ever change?
CR: I believe it'll change because fashion is always changing. A hundred years ago, heavier women were more ideal and now it's a size 0. I think it's a cycle and I think that women want to see themselves in the pictures -- they want to see their size, color and height. I think if that happens, it'll make women feel more empowered and they'll love themselves more. In fashion, it starts with the sample sizes and I think designers are becoming more aware. But I think there have been many positive changes. I've done all of the Vogue's and Dolce & Gabbana ads. It's just a matter of time before it's brought back to mainstream."


Crystal, you're an inspiration. Congratulations on your recovery and on your book, Hungry.
~ Medusa



Links:

Follow on Buzz

Monday, September 7, 2009

DYING TO BE THIN...[UPDATED]


Shelly Guillory


The startling HBO documentary, THIN, in its entirety.


From HBO:

Thin

Eating disorders affect five million people in the U.S., and more than 10% of those diagnosed with anorexia nervosa will die from the disease. Seeking to put a human face on these sobering statistics, acclaimed photographer Lauren Greenfield went inside a Florida treatment center to tell the stories of four women who are literally dying to be thin. The devastating HBO documentary THIN reveals what she found there - and explores the issues underlying their illness.

UPDATE: HBO expresses its deepest sympathy to the family of Polly Williams for their tragic loss.

THIN:

UPDATE: The documentary, THIN, has been removed from previous links to other sites I had provided in this post due to claims of copyright infringement.

I do, however, have a personal copy of the documentary. If you would like to view it, please write me at gorgon@2medusa.com.


Click below to read more about Shelly Guillory and Polly Williams:

~ and ~

Follow on Buzz

Friday, September 4, 2009

IN LOVING MEMORY: POLLY ANN WILLIAMS

Polly Ann Williams


Holly Huber's beautiful and moving tribute to Pollack "Polly" Ann Williams, who was featured in the HBO documentary Thin.


Polly suffered from anorexia nervosa for many years, and was only 33 when she died in February 2008 from an overdose of sleeping pills, a suicide that her sister, Bebe Reed, said was "a direct result of her internal battle with the eating disorder. She said she could not fight the fight any longer."






More about Polly...


ANOREXIA: AN UPDATE FROM SHELLY FROM THE HBO DOCUMENTARY, THIN...

and


POLLY WILLIAMS, REST IN PEACE ~ CORRECTION

Follow on Buzz