Lenten sacrifice can hide eating disorders

For the six weeks of Lent, I joined a friend in fasting once a week. A Pooh-like growling tummy sent me to the Internet for tips. There I fell into a rabbit hole occupied by anorexic teens. It turns out that while for Christians Lent is a solemn season of penitence and abstention, something to be endured-has it only been four weeks?-for those with eating disorders, it’s a welcome cover that can’t last long enough.

”Who’s excited for Lent?” asked one girl posting on a “pro-ana” website, part of an online community for girls who believe self-starvation is a lifestyle choice, not a disease. Others there, answering the question “What are you giving up for Lent?”, answered “solid food” with disturbing frequency.

I’d stumbled upon a “pro-ana” community, comprised of thin girls who want to be emaciated. These “friends of Ana”-anorexia nervosa-are a minority in a nation in which two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. Hounded by parents and doctors, they have found solace and camaraderie online, where they can buy “Lent: A great way to diet” T-shirts and red beaded pro-ana bracelets that slyly broadcast their secret.

Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder, but that does not matter in the pro-ana world. Ana’s maxim is “It’s more important to be thin than healthy,” and no matter how many fashion models die of the disease, there arise a hundred more in their slight shadows.

It’s sadly predictable that the media glitterati encourage adolescents dieting themselves to death, but a curious twist if religion, that old-time healer of souls, might also be spurring them there. “Lent, Ramadan, Yom Kippur, any kind of ritualistic fasting, gives people with an eating disorder an ostensibly religious excuse,” said Lori Ciotti, director of the Renfrew Center in Boston, which provides intensive outpatient treatment for people with eating disorders. ”It gives reinforcement to the idea that the needs of our bodies are not pure, and some higher spiritual place is going to be achieved by starving oneself.”

And that’s exactly the purpose of fasting in spiritual practice. “Do not pamper yourself, but love fasting,” was the advice of St. Benedict. “Feed your soul, strengthen your spirit and renew your body” is the promise of Susan Gregory’s The Daniel Fast, which advocates eating only plants, seeds, and water for three weeks or more. “Sometimes you are so hungry that the only way you can be fed is to fast,” Gregory writes.

Any time fasting moves from bottom shelf of the culture to eye level, if only temporarily, those who treat eating disorders pay attention, as should parents of alarmingly thin teens if they are wearing pretty red bracelets and suddenly express a renewed religious devotion. For anyone struggling with an eating disorder, there are other paths to piety.

”Don’t give up anything. Or give up lipstick. Don’t make it food-related,” says Lynn Grefe, president and CEO of the National Eating Disorder Association.

Perspective, Pages 92 on 04/13/2014

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