Dear Ballerina,
You wrote "I know totally what you are going through". It is customary on this forum for people to act like the issues of anorexics are akin to the issues of the morbidly obese. They are not and I can't live with the fiction.

You do not know what it feels like to weigh 300 pounds and lose 20 and have to live with the fact that those 20 pounds make absolutely no difference to your appearance. You don't know what it is like to weigh 300 pounds even though you don't eat more than a normal amount of food each day. You don't know what it feels like to get denied jobs because of your appearance, get pushed to the back of the crowd for group photos, to be denied committee chairmanships in your volunteer work . . . folks don't say it is becauseyou are fat but it is. You don't know what it is like to be totally invisible to members of the opposite sex. Many, many men don't even see fat females . . . and when lyou have to work with these clowns anyway. . . . Well, you just don't know what it is like.

If you lost 20 pounds, which it sure doesn't look like you need to, everyone in your life would see startling results.

My daughter, who worked for years to achieve a career as a professional modern dancer, has suffered from anorexia/bulimia for five years. Anorexia/bulimia, as studies at Cornell have clearly established, are really the same illness on a spectrum. My daughter has not been able to dance since her first bout of anorexia. She started out weighing about 135, starved off 50 pounds in about three months. She, too, likes to think that she knows just how I feel when I have lost 50 pounds. I can't believe she is so naive.

I sure don't know what it feels like to lose 50 pounds when I wasn't fat to begin with, to drop to 85 pounds and be hospitalized because of heart arrthmias (sp?), to faint on the dance floor in the middle of a performance. My daughter would be furious with me if I dared to suggest that I know what heer experience has been like and yet, in her young adult naivete, she thinks she knows my reality.

As to body image confusion, it is well documented that anorexic/bulimics have serious problems with distorted body image. My point is that studying fat people is less appealing to scientists and studies have not been done around the distorted body images of the morbidly obese.

I am sorry if I sound harsh towards you. I am deeply sorry that you have struggled with anorexia and pray that you learn how to live not just with a normal weight but with the weight that is right for your body. Another thing we don't hear about is that different bodies have different healthy weights. My daughter wants to be model/dancer thin but the fact is she has voluptuous breasts and hips and it is her body's type to be a curvaceous hotty.

Now, off my soap box. Best wishes to you on your path to welness.