"Beauty comes from pain" ???

holy crap.

i don't know why i'm surprised that places like this exist, but i must say, i'm shocked.

http://community.livejournal.com/proanorexia

over the years, probably from age 14-20, i had sporadic anorexia fantasies. after a bad day at school, or getting turned down by a boy i liked--whatever--i'd lay in bed at night, blinking through my first bouts with insomnia, and promise myself, "tomorrow i will stop eating. i'll become anorexic and lose all this weight and that'll show them!" i know it sounds horrid, but welcome to the mind of a teenager that ranked on the popularity scale somewhere between the mathletes and that boy with the headgear who farted really loud in gym class.

of course it never happened. i possess a personality cocktail of food-loving/lack-of-willpower that would never have enabled an anorexic lifestyle. alcoholic, maybe. but that's another story.

however, let me say this. thank god the internet didn't exist when i was young, dumb and impressionable. well, i'm still dumb and impressionable, but fortunately age has given me a smidge of wisdom. because years ago, if i had access to these "pro ana" sites, i might have fallen prey to wisdom like this:

-don´t just give up every night and say "i´ll start tomorrow". it never works..
-instead start around 5 or 6 pm. then you will get hungry at night and you don´t feel it when you sleep.
-don´t wake up too early and stay busy so that u wont have time to eat breakfast. curl your hair for example.
-it´s easy to be at school because there you can´t binge. just say that you ate so much breakfast that you are still full!
-don´t go home straight from school. hang out with your friends somewhere where you can´t eat.
-then when you go home and your parents want you to eat say that you had dinner with your friend."

OR, this:

Im wanting to start the juice fast, but how long should i do it for so no one will notice i was thinking about 3 weeks. My GW is 70lbs and im currently 97 (massive i know). Do you think this will work ? Plus does anyone know what will work if you get hungry on the juice fast as i really want it to work . I really need it to work.

OR, this:

only 8 more hours till I can go to bed and finally rest
Im fasting, and feeling sooo good!
but Im just so exhausted. I want to sleep but ive got loads of hw!
I hate school.

these are high school girls, it's clear from their posts. some of them have photos of themselves, or of nicole richie, or the desperate housewives. i don't have anything else to say, except... this is really goddamn heartbreaking.