Another death from anorexia, another New Year's Eve of misery for millions of women...
The news that Isabelle Caro, who modelled on those infamous anorexia awareness billboards, displayed during Milan fashion week a few years ago, has died was sad, but expected. Of all psychiatric illnesses, anorexia nervosa is the hardest to recover from, and has the most fatalities. Isabelle's decision to pose naked, revealing every painful, obscene bone in her spine and pelvis, was incredibly brave. It is not often we get to see the reality of what anorexia does to the human body. I had a friend called Sophie, a cartoonist, and went to visit her shortly before she too died from the disease, aged only in her early forties. I was shocked when one of her teeth fell from her mouth to the floor as she was talking. So much is talked about how damaging being overweight is to our health, but to be undernourished destroys and then kills just as surely.
I remember asking Sophie what had triggered her illness, and she said it was a calorie counting chart from Boots. Sometimes the fashion industry is to blame, sometimes it is not. But I can't help noticing all those glossy magazine cover lines screaming at us at this time of year to detox, to lose 10 pounds, to find the New You now that it is the New Year. Having endured all the ads over Christmas for chocolate, and disgusting frozen desserts, as well as watched all those cookery shows where they ladle fat over everything, we are now being bombarded with ads for WeightWatchers and Special K. There is Martine McCutcheon in the ad for Activia yogurt, encouraging us all to log on to the web site for our own personal diet sheet. How many women do you think are, over the next two days, stuffing their faces before they face the doom and gloom that is New Year's Day, when they yet again, for the umpteenth year running, vow to eat healthily, and shift that weight, and drop that all-important dress size' It's a cycle that has extremes, such as that experienced by Isabelle and Sophie, but that also has so many other victims who don't become anorexic, but who are trapped in bodies they hate, who are engaged in a constant battle to take the weight off before they inevitably put it back on again, and then some.
Isabelle's story is a tragic one. But so too is the fact that, at this time of year, so many women aren't feeling optimistic about the new year, but are instead preparing to flagellate themselves. Isn't it time someone broke this vicious circle? How many more deaths do we need before someone, somewhere is able to persuade women that the figure on the scales is not what is the most important thing about them? Before we can celebrate the stroke of midnight, rather than being filled with dread?
