Would you risk everything just to be skinny? Just to be what you thought people wanted you to be? Even if it meant losing you life? Up to twenty-four million people have an eating disorder in the United States alone. The body type known as ideal is possessed by only 5% of American females ("E.D." Anad.org). The average model weighs twenty-three percent less than the average women; the medical standard for anorexia is fifteen percent underweight (Thompson).
For Laurie, things were very difficult. Her whole childhood, she was always called fat. Her teacher even made a reference to her saying that she used to be as big as Laurie. She hated her weight. She hated shopping. Every time she went she had to get bigger sizes. When she was eleven, she was 155 pounds, and a size fourteen. She wanted to start losing weight so she did sit-ups and ate healthier. She started at the beginning of summer and two months after school started she was a size 9. By Christmas time, her parents told her to stop and that she had lost enough weight. She started doing sit-ups in the bathroom in private. She realized it was useless to sneak around, so she stopped exercising and ate less. Eventually during summer, she became a size 00, the smallest size in the junior section. She was thirteen now. When she went back to school, she got called down to the nurse's office to get weighed. She was 97 pounds. Laurie's parents made her go to a therapist. Unfortunately, she was inexperienced and said that she was not anorexia but had OCD. They left that therapist, so she kept losing weight. Months later, they finally went to another therapist. She tried to help, tried to get her to eat. Laurie wouldn't budge. She also met with a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with anorexia, which was brought on by her OCD (Lasser). Many people all over the world are affected by eating disorders. They can really hurt a person's physical as well as mental state.
