"Ireally gotta start losing weight before spring break," a 15-year-old from Long Island wrote in her blog on Xanga.com, a social networking site. "Basically today I went 24 hours without food and then I ate green beans and a little baked ziti. Frankly I'm proud of myself, not to mention the 100 situps on the yoga ball and the 100 I'll do before sleep Yey for me."
A Californian, 18, wrote: "I'm at 108 pounds (49kg) right now. Spring break is in about 3 weeks and I want to be down to at least 99 pounds (44.9kg) -100 pounds (45.4kg). That can easily be done."
From a writer identifying herself as Workhardgetskinny: "I only did 100 crunches but I'm trying to do 200 more before bed. 2 full days till spring break!"
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The discussion took place in one of Xanga's blog rings, a string of Web logs connected by a common theme, in this case a spring break challenge, in which young women pledged to shed a lot of weight before their trips to the beaches of Florida and Mexico.
Their home pages were decorated with images of gaunt supermodels and pipe-cleaner-thin celebrities like Nicole Richie. Declarations like "Food Is Poison" and "Diet Coke Is Love" blared like banner advertisements across screens. Participants also shared their daily indulgences. One writer confessed to eating "one cracker, one strawberry and a little bit of soup" in a 24-hour period. Another recounted a lunch that consisted of a slice of mango and a stick of gum. For most students spring break represents the promise of a beer-soaked respite from Northern cold and midterm stress, a time to let go and revive. But for a subculture of students with eating disorders, this annual weeklong bacchanalia, unfolding across Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean during March and this month, represents the summit of deprivation and self-denial.
Though not widely discussed -- sufferers of eating disorders often spend years in denial about their condition, and therapists treating them can rarely isolate any single reason for these complex psychological syndromes -- those who treat eating disorders say spring break is one of the most dangerous times of the year for young women struggling with their weight and eating.
"This is a trigger time for youth to start to obsess about weight and body image," said Margo Maine, a clinical psychologist in West Hartford, Connecticut, who specializes in eating disorders. She said she observes a spike in weight anxiety every year among her younger patients before spring break. "By the beginning of February people are starting to talk about their bodies and getting ready for spring break. Even girls who are simply around that talk can't get away from it."
The fantasy of achieving a "bikini-ready" body on a deadline is an intoxicating incentive, according to those who have experienced and observed the behavior. And in a school setting, in which tightly knit groups of young women are all vacationing together, diets easily become competitive or, as Maine put it, contagious.
For Ashley Filipp, a recent college graduate and recovering anorexic and bulimic, the warmup to spring break when she was a student in Colorado represented, she said, "the big time of the year." She added, "You start realizing that you have been packing on the winter pounds, the insulation, and now it's time to lose them."
Starting in her senior year of high school, Filipp, 24, recalled preparing for her annual spring break trip to Mexico at least 100 days beforehand. "As soon as we would make our plans, my best friend and I would start counting `How many days to Cancun?"' recalled Filipp, who now works as a crisis help-line counselor for the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders in Highland Park, Illinois.
By the time Filipp entered college, she said, there was no shortage of students eager to join her in what became a pre-spring-break ritual. In January and February, she said, the scene inside her sorority house at times resembled an Olympics of extreme weight loss. Some students would subsist on little more than lettuce flavored with calorie-free spray butter flavoring. Others would purge by vomiting or swallowing laxatives. Obsessive exercise was common.
The group dieting that is relatively ad hoc among friends and sorority sisters takes a more organized form on the Internet, where spring break has become a popular topic on Web sites and message boards maintained by devotees of a controversial underground movement known as "pro-ana," or pro-anorexia, who sometimes identify themselves in public by wearing red bracelets. There are hundreds of pro-ana Web sites promoting and supporting the "anorexic lifestyle," despite aggressive efforts to shut them down by eating-disorder activists. In addition the pro-anas are also present on social network sites like MySpace.com, Xanga and Livejournal.com, where blog rings' topics range as widely as emo music and parasailing.
On Xanga, groups of pro-ana members who link their blogs by a common interest in extreme weight loss sometimes participate in a perverse distortion of Weight Watchers. Instead of accumulating points for food eaten, points are granted for restraint: a point for every day survived under 500 calories; six points for every day under 100 calories; two points for each diet pill taken; a point for every photo of a skinny celebrity on a home page, known as "thinspiration" or "thinspo." The points are gained during group challenges aimed at losing weight before spring break. Other challenges have focused on prom season, the holidays and summer.
The online pro-ana networks can be especially dangerous, experts say, because participants can offer irresponsible advice behind a mask of anonymity. Several eating-disorder therapists interviewed said they considered all the pro-ana material on the Web highly dangerous, particularly when spiced with the spirit of a contest.
Some therapists said the letting-go ethic of spring break in general can also serve as a dangerous excuse for students to push the frontiers of good sense and self-preservation. Bulimics in particular are at risk, Bunnell of the Renfrew Center said, since they tend to be drawn to extremes, as exemplified by their binge and purge cycles. Anorexics, by contrast, are generally motivated by issues of control; they are often reserved, socially anxious perfectionists, who attempt to master their food intake because they feel they cannot control other aspects of their lives. For them, he said, "anything that intensifies body image anxiety will encourage them to be symptomatic."
The difficulty for parents and educators is to distinguish between routine pre-spring break dieting and something worse. "If a child is just going on a spring diet to lose a few pounds, she'll be in a fine mood," said Maria Rago, a clinical psychologist and the director of the eating disorders program at Linden Oaks Hospital at Edward Hospital, a mental health center in Naperville, Illinois. By contrast dieters slipping into dangerous territory "will become irritable, preoccupied," she said. "They'll skip meals, and stop eating with the family. It's an entire change of mood and mind-set."
Sometimes that change of mood can happen right after spring break, as opposed to before.
On a Xanga blog ring called the Bikini Coming Soon Challenge, one 19-year-old related the anxieties she was experiencing only days after returning from a week on the beach with friends: "Tonight I was looking on Facebook at people's albums from spring break. I saw the guy's album that I kind of was starting to like before spring break. In his album were pictures of all these pretty girls -- tan, skinny, looked perfect in their bikinis -- and all these guys were commenting on the pics: `She is so hot!' or `wooowww!!' Stuff like that. Seriously, that's what I want.
"This just makes me want to lose so much weight and then have those guys see me."
She concluded: "I hate boys, I hate my body. Goodnight."
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