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Would you starve yourself in order NOT to look like your body was aging?
April 14, 2009
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I was floored (FLOORED) when I read this story.
I mean, I’m willing to go far to look as good as I can as I age, but I’d never dream of starving myself so my body would look decades younger. Let me explain myself, I strongly believe in eating good quality foods and exercising and adopting healthy lifestyle choices, but under eating is not an option in my world.
It’s obvious that having a healthy body weight as you age will serve you better than being overweight or having eating problems.
I know that anorexia is often linked to the desire of many women to feel that there is something in your life they control … in this case their weight, what they eat, what they don’t eat, the quantities of food they eat and if they choose to purge the food they’ve consumed by visiting the toilet to throw up, but I had never (EVER) heard of grown women who are so terrified of growing up and who purposely underfeed themselves to keep the body of a tween!
I’ve got to say that I never get tired of reading the Web pages of Daily Mail and when I landed on this article a few days ago, I was stunned, floored, shocked and disturbed.
The story recounts the efforts a women of 23 (the article calls her the female Peter Pan) who is so afraid of becoming an adult that she underfeeds herself to end up with a body of a 12 year old!
Vikki Hensley from the U.K. is playing with her health in such a serious way, it’s not even funny. She’s screwing up her organs, reproductive system and brain function by choosing to under eat.
If you saw photos of her … she positively looks like a teenager and you’d never things she was in her early 20s.
In fact the article explains that because Vikki was anorexic when she hit puberty (and I guess remains severely anorexic today) she’s never had her period and her breasts have never developed.
She eats a strict diet of less than 1,000 calories per day. Her diet consists of bags of raw vegetables, cooked swede (yellow turnip), tiny portions of tuna and the occasional square of chocolate.
The interesting thing about Vikki is that she’s still managed to finish at to the top of her class … she’s doing a biomedical science degree at King’s College London. It’s ironic that a functional anorexic like her would choose to study biomedicine.
It seems that more and more younger women either overeat and end up with serious obesity problems or they are so desperate to control their weight that they turn to under eating, bulimia or not eating at all to control how thin they remain.
Both sides of the pendulum will give way to a long list of serious illnesses that are usually associated with elderly people who suffer from poor health.
I think it’s sad to be in your teens or in your early 20s and have such a terrible relationship with food that it causes this kind of havoc on your long term health.
Food is a wonderful thing and learning how to eat is the key to avoid these types of eating disorders.
You can read the full Daily Mail story about Vikki Hensley here: The female Peter Pan: How a woman of 23 terrified of growing up has taken to extreme dieting to give her the body of a 12-year-old
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