Incredulity would not even begin to describe how I felt when I learn about the existence of a Pro-Anorexia movement. The underground association that promotes a latest diet bandwagon: starvation. Yes, you heard it right. They starve because according to them, after a few days of not eating, you’ll not only look better … but you feel better. Talk about being warped. Coming from someone who goes weak at the sight of chocolates or better marked as all-food-sinful, this is more than ancient greek to me. I mean why would people do this? We are all aware of starvation led by poverty is something Third World Nations are unfortunately plagued with. Having a collective group of people from First World environment to come together in a deliberate conscious effort to starve themselves is a concept I cannot grapple with.

My friend sent me a link not too long ago to a web site I’ve never heard before. On the screen were pictures of pitifully emaciated girls. Phrases like “anorexic queen” and “never too thin” bombarded my baffled mind as I tried to figure out what this site was about. The result are more than disturbing, I was looking at a website which actually promotes eating disorders. Investigating this further, I realized that the Pro-Anorexia movement also known as “Pro-ana”, an underground affiliation of websites devoted to aggressively promote anorexia nervosa – the most fatal of all eating disorders. The Pro-Anorexia movement has build what they call an Anorexic Nation, fulfilling creeds, which perhaps even Karen Carpenter cannot languish. To the followers of “Pro-ana”, their creed is simple. Food is evil, nutritionists are liars and obesity is one epidemic conspiracy insidiously put forth by the medical community.

Try typing in “Pro-anorexia” in your search engines, and chances your search results will return with a brief list on the subject, mostly being dead-links or providing little information on the topic. This is because most websites advocating the Pro-Anorexia movement have been deleted. The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD) have in the summer of 2001, issued a campaign to several web hosting services to ban pro-anorexia sites. The ANAD forwards that accommodating such sites is an infringement of the term of service, which states that hosted websites portray no danger to minors. Companies like Yahoo! have de-listed more than 100 pages from its directory and kicked another 200 from their Geocities server.

On the surface, the ANAD can indeed stake claim on triumph for their campaign against the “Pro-anas” as many of their forums have been killed off and the “Pro-anas” sites are no longer listed on major search engines. But this does not mean that the Pro-ana sites have been silenced completely, it has instead triggered a more severe festering of these offending sites to go underground. Recovery experts are now confronted with a greater challenge having to locate these websites which have now become only the more dedicated.

- an excerpt from the Feature “Never a Morsel”
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