The Choices We Make

The Science of Starving

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Starving. That's what I was doing. Hungry for someone to notice my pain and actually care. Starving my body as a way to punish myself for what I was doing. My mind was obviously warped. No one in their right mind would think thoughts like that. And Jesus had already died for my sins, so now I realize that, in a way, I was insulting him by trying to pay the price he already had.

Any doctor will tell you that anorexia always has an underlying cause. Usually that cause is unrelated and has something to do with emotional trauma. Many girls who are sexually abused become anorexic because they feel dirty for what has happened to them. They feel like it was their fault, and therefore try to "purify" themselves by refusing to eat.

Any doctor will also tell you that if a person is truly anorexic they will experience an endorphin rush when their body is in starvation mode. Put simply, they get a certan high from being hungry. Like all other addictions, it is terribly hard to stop. While your body is screaming for food, your mind is giving you the opposite message. You start to feel strong because you can live without food and you know that most others wouldn't be able to do that. Eventually, though, you are in for a rude awakening when all the bad side effects of self-starvation start to catch up with you.

I couldn't pay attention in class; my eyelids were always drooping and ruining my concentration. I got distracted easily.  The loud grumbling in my stomach eventually went away as my body began to realize that it wasn't going to be given an adequate amount of food, no matter how much it begged. I became used to living with the high of food deprivation.

Damien, realizing what I was doing to myself, began encouraging my problem.  He would starve himself with me and even began calling himself anorexic. "We can be anorexic together," he told me.