Anorexia Nervosa in Stick Figure A Diary of My Former Self

The book Stick Figure A Diary Of My Former Self is a personal journal written by Lori Gottlieb when she was 11 years old suffering from anorexia nervosa. “Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that causes people to obsess about their weight and the food they eat.” (mayclinic.com) Most eating disorders are physiological due to friends and family, stress, and the social media. Anorexia nervosa, like all other eating disorders, is extremely dangerous and unhealthy for the human body to endure. Although eating disorders are destructive to one's life, is there explainable reasoning behind why a person may have one?
“I wish to be the thinnest girl at school, or maybe the thinnest 11 year old on the entire planet.” (Lori Gottlieb) Lori is a fun, loving, and intelligent straight A student. In fact, she is so intelligent that even adults consider her to be an outcast. She grows up in Beverly Hills, California with her self-centered mother, distant father, careless brother, and best friend, Chrissy, whom is a parakeet. Through her self-conscious mother, maturing friends, and her friend’s mother’s obsession with dieting, she becomes more aware of her body and physical appearance. Something that once meant nothing to Lori now is her entire world. She started off by just skipping breakfast on her family vacation to Washington, D.C., soon to escalate to one meal a day, and eventually hardly anything other than a few glasses of water. Lori’s friends at school begin to compliment her weight loss and beg for her advice on how she did so. But as Lori once read in one of her many dieting books, her dieting skills are her “little secret”, and she intends on keeping it that way. It is said, “Women continue to follow the standards of the ideal thi...

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...e writes “I figured most of my blood was in my heart, but all my ribs were in the way, I swear I have like a thousand ribs. But then I felt my stomach, and I knew exactly where to cut. I wanted to cut all the fat off my body so people like Leslie wouldn’t say I looked fat at my funeral.” (Gottlieb, 191)

Works Cited

Citations

“Definition.” Mayo Clinic. ED. Mayo Clinic Staff. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 05 Jan.2012. Web. 03 Dec 2013.

Williams, Alex. “Before Spring Break, The Anorexic Challenge.” Race, Class, and Gender In the United States. Ninth ed. New York: Worth, 2014. 468-71. Print.

Hesse-Biber, Sharlene. “Am I Thin Enough Yet?” Race, Class, and Gender In The United States. Ninth Ed. New York: Worth, 2014. 595-602. Print.

Gottlieb, Lori. Stick Figure A Diary Of My Former Self. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2000. Print.