“For breakfast three wholewheat biscuits forty calories each. At lunch, three carrots à la julienne with lemon dressing and fifty grams of chicken for dinner. No sugar in the coffee, at least half an hour of tapis roulant each day. This, was my first diet “. Serena, now 45 pounds, enormous eyes and sunken bone cheeks, her face lined by her long hazel-coloured hair, she As we speak, she timidly glances at the walls of the room, and betrays an expression of despair. For her, Cavalry hill began three years ago, something so widespread as misunderstood: that of anorexia.
She has skinny legs: wears extra-small for jeans, which nevertheless don’t even bind her calves. Her skin, just like her jeans, doesn’t seem to adhere completely to her clavicle: ” I lost the first chilos involuntarily: I returned from summer vacations slightly slimmer. My thighs have never been a real problem for me, I was always hiding them wearing looser jerseys. But my friends used to compliment me on this and everyone, including my father, used to tell me that I looked so much better. It appeared to me the perfect opportunity to start a new phase of my life: thinner, more beautiful and more popular. I lost more weight within a few months. It seems absurd, but I kept seeing myself fat “.
Today is World Food Day, and among the thousand aspects relating to the topic, there is also bad eating habits: In Italy more than three million people suffer from it and its effects are the major causes of death in the world leading to psychiatric problems. But too often, those who experience this problem and those who observe it on the outside are divided by a huge wall made of misunderstandings and fears: “my father seems completely indifferent – Serena continues – the few times that he drops his gaze on my body he looks confused, maybe a little scared. But he is a person that works very hard and he’s already had too many setbacks in life. Which is why I don’t ask him for help and I try to go on with my ow tow legs. Perhaps he sees this only as a passing teenage phase. ”
But anorexia is not an adolescent whim nor a simple appetite disorder: “The obsession that revolves around food and body weight,” explains Simona Cesar of Aba (Associazione bulimia anorexia) – is a way to communicate an inner suffering. Compulsively keeping contro lover their body becomes an anesthetic that prevents any feeling to be felt “. And to be affected are not only young women: 85% of cases affect children, adult women and teenage girls, and for some years now the problem seems to affect more and more men too.
“My whole life revolves around the meals I skip – explains Serena again: I have learnt with time to leave around peach pips and biscuit crumbs to show my family that I had eaten, and I don’t remember when I have last gone out with my friends. Together with the kilos, I have lost energy, aiminng for ‘ perfection ‘ is a real lifestyle. With time, happiness and determination began to confuse in a profound loss of self-esteem and despair: there are days when I feel invulnerable, having full control of my body. And evenings when, I devour everything I have at hand only to bring it up again, prey to weeping and feeling guilty “.
To assist in spreading this “virus” that is so pervasive, in addition to the “fame” of love and attention, there is the web: the many forums that lurk behind become the only meeting point for all young women, who, in the absence of a reference of a reference point, navigate in deep seas, Simona from Aba explains: “we are working all over the country, but what we do every day is an almost solitary undertaking”. A slap to the institutions, whose help is still very limited.
“You can fight anorexia – ends Serena – but it leave scars in the heart and on the skin. At first, I wouldn’t listen to anyone who wanted to pull me off from the pitch dark tunnel: I was afraid of getting fat and losing control of my life. But outside the home, I found that listening enabled me to transform into words all that emptiness inside of me that I always tried to anesthetize with contro lover my body. I still can’t accept many types of food: I select the colors, smells and even shapes. I can’t take medicine, eat cakes and any sort of drink that is not water. In the face of my body, it looks like a threat. But the desire to return to live is becoming all the more stronger above anything else. I ‘m only twenty and one day, hopefully, I’ll be able to speak about the journey which too often makes you forget the way back “.
