Chapter Five: Ana and Mia
Content Warning: Discussion of eating disorder behaviors. People struggling with eating disorders or with a history of eating disorders may be triggered by this essay.
Long before Instagram, “wellness influencers,” and #fitspo there were Ana/Mia blogs on Livejournal. Ana was short for anorexia and Mia was short for bulimia. And these blogs were literally handbooks about how to have an eating disorder. The people who followed these blogs created an online community that encouraged and supported having an eating disorder. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not.
I spent a year of my life absolutely obsessed with and deeply embedded in a secretive, tight-knit online community that taught me how to take my eating disorder from amateur to professional.
I stumbled upon Ana/Mia blogs late at night, curled in my bed, staring at the screen of my ancient laptop, while searching for “thinspo” or “thinspiration” — basically, pictures of tiny women whose bodies I aspired to have that I could stare at whenever I was hungry to remind myself of the goal I was trying to achieve. Like most blogging platforms, Livejournal had a function that allowed users to search for blogs related to their interests, and I would frequently use the function to search for dieting blogs, fitness blogs, and thinspo blogs.
I found my first Ana blog linked in a thinspo blog. Most thinspo blogs were just collections of images with captions like “Goal weight” or “God I wish I looked like this.” Though the obsession with thinness and achieving it at any cost was apparent in thinspo blogs, there wasn’t really much discussion of the mechanics of weight loss and exercise. I don’t recall exactly what the link in the thinspo blog said, but it had something to do with weight loss tips or tricks. I clicked it thinking that it would redirect me to a diet or fitness blog.
Instead, I found the gateway to the community that would send me into the abyss.
The blog I landed on laid out the philosophy that most Ana/Mia bloggers subscribed to — that having an eating disorder was a lifestyle choice, not a mental illness. As such, on Ana/Mia blogs, sharing tips and tricks about how to engage in extreme calorie restriction, intense exercise, and purging behaviors was essentially the same as sharing diet tips, exercise regimens, and fitness advice. But instead of sharing information like which foods supposedly help you burn fat, Ana/Mia blogs shared information about how to slowly restrict your caloric intake until you could fast for multiple days in a row. Instead of sharing a 20-minute “tone your abs” workout, Ana/Mia blogs shared tips about how to avoid passing out during your workout when your caloric intake was low.
I voraciously read all of the posts on the blog I found and began searching for more Ana/Mia blogs. Soon, I began to find blogs where you could become a member of the blog’s community. These blogs functioned more like old school Internet message boards. Users who were members of the community posted their own blogs or mini-blogs, sharing their experiences, tips, questions, and, of course, their stats.
Stats posts were posts where community members shared their current weight, current body measurements, goal weight, goal measurements, and losses since their last post. Sometimes these posts included before and after pictures that served as thinspo for the other members of the community.
Often a stats post was required before you were allowed to join an Ana/Mia community. For the blogs that required an application process through a moderator, you answered some questions that basically assessed whether you were truly committed to your eating disorder, and once you were approved you made a stats post. For the open blogs, all you had to do was introduce yourself in a stats post.
I lurked in the Ana/Mia community for a long time before I introduced myself. I didn’t feel like my budding eating disorder was yet worthy of being part of the community. I wanted to be able to say that I was already doing what they all were doing before I spoke up. So, I started implementing every tip and trick I found on the Ana/Mia blogs I’d followed. And, of course, my weight plummeted.
When I finally felt like I was “Ana” enough to be a part of the community, I posted my first stats posts on a few different blogs and waited. Within hours, people began replying to my posts in exactly the ways I’d hoped — they praised my weight loss, called me a thinspiration, told me I belonged. I felt like I had found my people and my people had welcomed me with open, thin, arms.
From there, I plunged into the deep end of the Ana/Mia community not caring whether I would drown. I posted updated stats every day along with questions about how I could cut more calories, how I could hide how little I was consuming from my family and friends, and which workouts I could do when I felt too faint to get on a treadmill. My Ana/Mia family always had the answers and words of encouragement I needed. They were there to congratulate me when I lost another pound. They were there to console me when I went on a massive binge or when I absolutely had to eat so that no one would be suspicious. They were there to cheer me on when I felt like maintaining my eating disorder was getting too difficult. They were there for me no matter what.
I feel like it’s important to point out that I wasn’t lacking community at the time that I got deeply involved in the Ana/Mia community. I was a member of a church that I’d attended literally since I was born where there were adults I considered to be backup parents and other teens I considered to be siblings — or cousins at the very least. I had a tight-knit group of friends, filled with drama, of course, as high school friends groups are. But we loved each other nonetheless. I was the Assistant Director of my school’s theater club. I was by no means a loner.
But I never truly believed that I belonged in any of those communities. I believed that I had to hide who I truly was from all those people because who I really was — on the inside — was too screwed up, too broken, to be accepted by any community. I learned to live a double life, playing one role that people could see, and living another life in the shadows.
In the Ana/Mia community, I didn’t have to hide my shadow self. I could share it with other people’s shadow selves and we could bond over our secret lives. There was even a more secret corner in the community where the drunkorexics shared the best ways to drink without consuming too many calories so you could get drunk and maintain your calorie goals, which was the perfect niche for me as my alcoholism and eating disorder escalated hand in hand.
All the parts of me that I felt like I had to hide from everyone else in my life were on full display in the Ana/Mia community and the people there still loved me — as much as you can love a stranger through a computer screen.
If the choice had been mine, I can’t say with any certainty whether I would have given up the Ana/Mia community on my own. Fortunately, the choice wasn’t left up to me. When I went off to college, hiding my eating disorder became impossible. I lived in a suite with five other girls, and they noticed pretty quickly that I never seemed to eat. When I started randomly passing out, a few of them confronted me. They made me swear that I would see a therapist, and I did, because above all, I was a people pleaser.
Of course, the therapist asked me to stop reading and posting on Ana/Mia blogs. And that’s when I found out that the community I’d loved so dearly didn’t really love me at all.
In a truly dramatic fashion, I posted goodbye posts on all my regular Ana/Mia blogs, saying that my roommates had staged an intervention and gotten me into treatment. I promised myself I wouldn’t read any new blogs, that I would only read replies to my goodbye posts. I was expecting some sad, heartfelt messages from some of the people I’d corresponded with regularly and I couldn’t leave them hanging. I didn’t want them to think I didn’t care about their responses.
What I got instead was the rejection I’d always feared would come from everyone else, not from them. I was called a quitter. I was told that I wasn’t strong enough to be part of the community. The kindest messages I got were the ones encouraging me to continue engaging in eating disorder behaviors secretly while I was undergoing treatment with offers to coach me through hiding my eating disorder from treatment professionals.
The community I thought loved me, didn’t love me; they loved my eating disorder. And when I couldn’t love my eating disorder anymore, it became clear that they’d never loved me.
