"Pro-anorexia and bulimia websites are a slap in the face to people who have legitimate diagnoses.
" In today's world, we can scarcely picture our lives without the internet - we love the immediate access to news, research, mail, Facebook.
Yet we know from recent reports about predators roaming MySpace that the internet can be an extremely dangerous entity as well.
Imagine a website encouraging alcoholism.
This site would provide tips on how to stay an alcoholic, ways to hide the dependence on booze, a forum for users to share tips.
It sounds deranged, and almost suicidal.
How many lives would such a site affect? What about sites that play into other diseases? Unfortunately, many sites encourage the development and maintaining of disorders, particularly eating disorders.
Many people already know of pro-anorexia and bulimia sites, but fail to recognize the danger they hold for viewers.
One such site is above others in advocating for eating disorders, recognizing the symptoms of anorexia and bulimia as "lifestyle choices".
This site is not unlike others in offering "thinspiration" for viewers, consisting of pictures of and poems about becoming emaciated to put viewers in the "mood for anorexia".
There's also a handy food chart, proclaiming the calories in most foods.
This particular site offers a list of twelve different diets for its followers to use - diets like the "Rainbow" diet, which consists of about 700 calories for an entire week, and the "Russian Gymnast" diet, said to drop eleven pounds in a week.
There are also food plans found in published autobiographies of now-recovered anorectics.
This same website lists the lowest weights of professed anorexics in a tab called "Celebrity Stats".
Calista Flockhart, Karen Carpenter, and Victoria Beckham's lowest weights are amongst those broadcast.
One weight is of a native Minnesotan, who authored a brilliant exposé of eating disorders - a woman who has one of the dreadful "diets" named after her, a woman I've had the pleasure of meeting and who would be appalled at the site's reverence of her illness.
This woman holds the spot for being the "thinnest" of them all, weighing in (at her worst) at fifty-two pounds.
Young women are admiring this? This is osteoporosis, sterility, death.
Not beauty.
These young women are making and seeking advice from these websites to become thinner - and to eventually be warranted as "anorexic".
Does anyone desire schizophrenia or bipolar disorder? Doubtful.
Anorexia and bulimia, unlike schizophrenia, have an excessive amount of media coverage.
Many people have trouble separating celebrity eating disorders from fame and success.
Pro-anorexia and bulimia websites are a slap in the face to people who have legitimate diagnoses - that's not to say that people who visit these sites wanting to become "more anorexic" aren't legitimate.
The fact that these disorders are addictive diseases becomes trivialized.
It feeds into the idea that Americans can get whatever they want, even if their desire is to be disordered.
Peopl visiting pro-anorexia/bulimia sites may potentially spend a lifetime battling an obsessive desire to be just a little thinner, to take up just a bit less space.