Laxatives for Dessert

Eating disorders like anorexia have become a real problem in India, among not just teenagers, but also girls as young as 12

Not all addictions are intakes. People get addicted to substances; I, on the other hand, got addicted to the sight of my hideous body disappearing, inch by inch. I wanted to be perfect. I was 45 kg, and promised myself that I would stop when I could count my ribs. But it was only when my weight fell to 37 kg and I found myself living on a diet of just water and an orange a day that I realised I had a problem.

How did this unrealistic idea of perfection, of the ‘ideal’ body, get framed in my mind? Well, isn’t it true that each time we open a newspaper or magazine, switch on the television or radio, the notion that ‘thinness equals happiness’ is drilled into us, creating discontent with ourselves and the way we look? It’s human nature to want to look good. Each one of us would like to fix something about ourselves: the way we laugh, or that little belly that peeks out from under a T-shirt. Sometimes, this preoccupation with being thin reaches a stage where one would knowingly compromise one’s life for it. That is what I became a victim of—anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder in which people intentionally starve themselves to lose weight. I could attribute a clear face to the monster beneath my bed: food.

I am 17 years old. Anorexia among teenagers is a topic that has been much spoken about and is now dusted under the carpet. But I know girls not just my own age but even 10 and 12 years old who have been diagnosed with anorexia. I find that quite astounding and perplexing. In my mind, at that age concepts like body image must be intangible and the only thing that ought to matter is that second bar of chocolate.

A 12-year-old girl I know in Delhi skipped her meals and survived on fruits and water for three weeks before collapsing due to lack of energy. When asked how the idea of weight loss entered her head, she said, “I don’t quite know. Often my friends used to tease me for being fat and would not talk to me properly. I was always the outsider in my friends circle. Plus, everything pretty seems to be thin, so I thought if I just lost weight, I would be good enough.”

This girl is often seen with measuring tapes and weighing scales, and after checking her weight, she sulks. She is skinny, but thinks otherwise. According to her, curvy actresses like Bipasha Basu are “fat”. Her obsession with weight loss is such that no matter how much weight she loses, “It’s not enough.” Her mother claims that “It’s not her fault; she lives in an age where beauty lies in being just bones.”

Another friend of hers, who is 13 years old, has also been anorexic for the past one-and-a-half years now and has undergone intensive therapy sessions. She used to see her mother dieting since she didn’t “want to be fat and ugly”. Soon, she too started cutting down on chocolates and carbohydrates and was eventually living on an orange or apple a day.

From 38 kg, her weight dropped to 28 kg, and she had to be hospitalised for three weeks. Even then, she refused to eat and had to be given nutrition intravenously. After returning home, her cycle resumed. Now that her parents were aware of the severity of the situation, they forced her to eat. Initially, she plotted ways of hiding the food but got found out. “It was my worst nightmare and my fondest dream. You see, my taste buds longed for the delicious kaju ki barfi, but at the same time, I felt terribly guilty after eating. So I adopted a new method: I ate and then for dessert I would have laxatives,” she says. Soon, she could not control her bowel movements, her weight dropped drastically and she started having bad stomach aches. “Both laxatives and anorexia were so concealed in my daughter that I could barely figure out the warning signs,” says her mother, “At least laxatives are pills that I found in her drawers, but anorexia is a phenomenon which hardly has an exterior appearance until it’s too late. It was not until her [Body Mass Index] fell so low that she couldn’t walk that I suspected that something was amiss—because general weight loss can be attributed to growing up or exercising.”

After her mother discovered the teenager’s new solace, laxatives, she was not allowed to step out of the house and was always accompanied by her maid. The 13-year-old threw fits and rebelled against the basic idea of food. She says, “I did not want to eat. It is my life and I was so annoyed that my parents were encroaching on my personal space.” Finally, her parents took her to a psychiatrist. It took several therapy sessions and a mild dosage of anti-depressants to convince her to eat properly.

The turning point in her mind came when she realised that her metabolism would eventually fail her and even an apple could make her fat. The remedy, it turns out, was her fear of getting fat. Even now, when she claims to be perfectly well, she still follows a stringent diet of only boiled food and vegetables. She says, “This is the only way I can feel better about eating.”

Both friends have sunken eyes and dry skin, and are noticeably lethargic. They often wear baggy clothes as they think themselves “too fat” for snugfit clothes. “Anorexia starts off as a drive for perfection but ends as the ugliest form of imperfection,” says the mother of the 12-year-old.

“Anorexia among preteens is not all that bewildering; it generally starts off at the age of 13,” says Dr Vipul Rastogi, a pychiatrist at Medanta Hospital in Delhi. He adds, “Fifteen per cent of the patients get better, 15 per cent don’t, and the rest just keep fluctuating. In India, the rates of anorexia are gradually increasing as we now see slimmer and slimmer actresses and role models. Most of my cases are people [of such a] social background, where terms like ‘dieting’ and ‘body image’ are considered colloquial. As for the recovery, we have a lot of restrictions on forcing the intake of food, thus the only route open for us is to first make the patient come to terms with the fact that they have an illness and then gradually make them eat.”

People often say that anorexia is an obsession with losing weight, but a 17-year-old from Delhi with an eating disorder, who does not want to be identified, presents a counterclaim: “No, I am not obsessed with weight loss. On the face of it, it might seem so, but actually I am obsessed with the need to control myself. Since I can’t control situational factors that affect my life, I control how much I weigh. Every time I binge, I feel like I have betrayed myself and feel powerless. For me, my stringent diet is all I have to weave my life the way I want to.”

Reckless eating has become a common phenomena nowadays, whether it’s a crash diet or stress bingeing. Anorexia seems like nothing more than an exaggerated form of dieting, but there is a thin line between the two. Healthy dieting starts off with a fixed goal and terminates when that is achieved. But for an anorectic, every time a goal is achieved, another one is formed. One major event that happens on the path that leads a dieter to an eating disorder is that the relationship she shares with food changes. Initially, food is seen as something that needs to be controlled, but later food becomes the very embodiment of Satan that needs to be avoided at all costs.

In 2010, the world saw the death of Isabelle Caro, a young French model who had suffered from the disorder. The emaciated Caro had earlier posed nude for a photo campaign titled ‘No Anorexia’ to raise awareness of the disorder. She’d then said, “I have hidden my body for too long. I know that the sight of it may arouse repugnance or disgust but I feel that I need to do this.” In an article published in The Chicago Tribune, Caro was quoted as saying, “The idea was to shock people into awareness. I decided to do it to warn girls about the danger of diets and of fashion commandments.”

Eating disorders prey on the most intimate fears in their victims. I know now that it curbed my power to think straight; the only thing I could think of was the calories I was taking in. I love food, and my struggle was between my yearning for food and the desire to stay thin. I wanted to eat like a normal person, I wanted that slice of cake lying in my fridge, but I needed to see my bones too. As I starved myself, the hunger thirsted for attention, which I quenched with water. I knew I was hungry, but then pretty girls can’t get hungry.

The recovery was excruciating. After prolonged periods of hunger being your best friend, taking up food again was tough. Initially, I refused to believe that I had an illness since I still perceived myself as this colossal weight walking the earth. It was only when I couldn’t walk anymore that I realised I needed help. At first, I didn’t want to recover. This translated into becoming fat, and every pound I gained was like a slap on my face. I felt like I was losing grip on my life, and I relapsed. Each time there was a relapse, I welcomed my anorexia back with open arms; I cherished it.

At its core, anorexia was my lack of self-confidence and my habit of measuring success with the numbers on a weighing scale. I now believe that being ‘pretty’ is the most elaborate form of self-harm. Even now, though I have recovered, I am extremely sceptical about my weight. And that I believe is something that will never go away. I believe that it was the elimination of my insecurities that pulled me through. It was only when I realised that my effort to control my life was actually letting anorexia control it that I accepted the fact that, often, losing so much weight means losing yourself. Eating disorders are hard to give up, but harder to live with.

About The Author

Saru Gupta