Larissa Tolley: Anorexia Nervosa

Larissa Tolley was just 12 years old when she developed anorexia nervosa. She had just moved with her family to a small, unfamiliar town. She felt as if she had been put on a pedestal by the kids her age; she was under a spotlight and they were watching and waiting for her to fail. Larissa felt under pressure to seem perfect in front of the girls and boys, and this led her to begin restricting the calories she was eating each day. It was a gradual process, but when Larissa limited her food intake, she felt as if it was the one aspect of her life that she could control. Soon she was eating only 700 calories a day or less while a girl her age should be eating 1,800 to 2,200 calories each day. Larissa did not realize that how she was acting negatively
Evelyn Kelly describes eating disorders as “complex, chronic illnesses that fill a person’s life with obsessions about food and body image” (1). According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, anorexia, also referred to as DMS-III, is a psychological disorder that affects both the body and mind (Klumph 2). Richard Morton generally receives credit for recognizing anorexia nervosa, which he did in 1689, but his discovery was not connected to the eating disorder until years later (Klumph 3). Anorexia nervosa will lead to both the destruction of physical and mental health, but steps can be taken to treat and even prevent this
Joel Yager and Arnold Andersen state that the “medical complications resulting from semi-starvation . . . affect virtually every organ system” (1482). The physical effects are not limited to just weight loss, but when an anorexic starves herself, she is robbing her body of the vitamins it needs to operate accurately (Wexler 51-52). This results in many noticeable symptoms, some only lasting until weight is regained. Heart rate, blood pressure, and metabolic rate are all lowered as the body attempts to counteract not receiving adequate energy from food (Walsh 1387). Other physical effects of anorexia include the nails and hair becoming brittle, skin drying out as the body takes nutrients from it because it is not receiving them from food, and muscle mass reduction (Wexler; Kelly 52;2). Amenorrhea, the absence of the menstrual cycle for at least three consecutive months, will occur in females as well as the growth of lanugo, a thin hair that grows to keep an anorexic’s body warm because it has lost almost all of its fat (Klumph; Wexler 2;52). One of the most substantial effects is an anorexic’s “heightened desire to lose more weight” (Yager and Andersen 1482) When weight loss becomes evident, it is an achievement to an anorexic, but this thought process leads to the desire of more weight loss which creates the downward spiral of the destruction of the physical body