Non Fiction
Issue #2
The 10 Commandments of Ana
The Ten Commandments of Ana.
Being thin is more important than being healthy.
No one respects anyone for being healthy, it won’t get you a bloke or make you better than the person sat next to you. Besides Ana thinks she is practically obese, she thinks she could do with losing a few stone.
Sit up straight – it burns 10% more calories.
Ana tries to, she really does but the hunger pangs are so bad, like someone taking a carving knife to her stomach the way she wish she could herself, to butcher out the fat.
Turn down the temperature by 10 degrees.
Ana is not so good at this one, she tried but her mother caught her. It wasn’t easy to explain. So she drinks ice-water, takes cold showers and deliberately left her coat on the school bus.
Eat alone. Never do anything at the same time as eating.
Ana needs to concentrate, she is a ‘straight A’ student but this is harder than trigonometry without a calculator. She cuts her food up into tiny pieces so her fork makes more trips to her mouth – psychology, you see. Eats off a black plate, I don’t know why, I doubt she does but to Ana anything is worth a try.
Punish a binge with a purge. There’s always syrup of ipecac.
Ana sometimes fails, she eats an amount bigger than her fist. Spinning like a little girl playing ‘magic carpets’ makes her sick and if that doesn’t work syrup of ipecac is her chemical alternative. It kills. Ana isn’t stupid she knows this. She also knows that if she dies now she won’t look thin enough in her coffin.
Don’t get caught.
Ana feels like ‘they’ are against her, her parents, friends, the people who love her. She pretends to eat and spits the food into her cup while pretending to drink. ‘They’ want her to stay fat, ‘they’ are jealous.
Ok, so that is only six, the figure she aspires to be, six stone, a size six. But I think six is enough to paint a portrait of Ana though it wouldn’t need a large canvas. Ana has more than Ten Commandments but high numbers scare her, make her think of dirty things, like the number of calories in a Mars bar (327 if you’re interested).
She is frightened. It stopped being about food a long time ago, she is afraid of food, of what other people think, of the scales. The strange fact is that she is not afraid of death. Soon her heart will stop because she has metabolised the muscle. That won’t necessarily stop her abiding by her commandments.
You know her, you just might not realise you do. She is everywhere. I pray for her.
Ana please don’t do it.