Eating disorders: warning signs and symptoms

Carla is 14 years old. She’s in class looking out the window. She has stopped paying attention to what the teacher says for a while now. She feels slightly dizzy and her belly growls.She had a coffee with milk and told her mother that she would eat in the school’s dining.

But the truth is she packs her own menu: an apple. She eats it slowly, reluctantly, in the yard away from the dishes and tuppers of her companions. Sometimes, they make a comment but most go unnoticed. The reality is that she is not the only one of her companions with “little appetite” and knows that more than one envy her mood.When leaving class she walks slowly to the bus stop. The sun hits hard even though it’s late. She drinks some water. When she sits down on the bus, takes out Abzurdah of the backpack, a novel she borrowed from a friend. In it, a twelve years old girl falls in love with a much older guy, he doesn’t love her back. The protagonist enters a self-destructive loop. But Carla is a girl too and she does not see it. She can only feel identify with that protagonist who suffers and says “I was always a zero, very round and fat”.
While reading, she opens the backpack, it’s like a reflex, she does not even realize it. Her faithful ally is a plastic straw that she chews frantically. It was the substitute for the gum that she read somewhere that arouses hunger.
When she gets home, leaves the book. Turns on the computer to watch a new episode of Gossip Girl. On the screen, Blair leaves the gourmet restaurant table and kneels in her designer dress. She is locked up throwing up in the bathroom. Blair. And Carla too. The plastic straw is also useful for that. Because she was very hungry and opened the refrigerator and ate it all. She could not control it.
And she gets angry and cries. Because she knows that vomiting does not work, because she vomits and vomits but does not lose weight. The solution is not eating but she lacks will. She holds the pendant that hangs around her neck and makes a prayer. It is a heart, the charm can be opened and the stones inside are exchangeable. On the front side it looks red with colorful flowers, the back side is hidden. It’s says Ana and Mia in black marker. She asks them for help, to accompany her, to not let her succumb.
She found out about Ana and Mia thanks to the book. Sometimes she wonders if her friend has lent it to her on purpose. If her friend saw her as fat or what it would mean to lend such a book. It was a success in sales. But nobody talked about Ana and Mia in person, neither in class nor at recess. Carla went online and read the comments of other girls on the blogs, her messages of support and her confessions of relapses. Ana for anorexia, Mia for bulimia. The argentinians tend to make saints out of anyone. The believers prayed to them, others, like Carla, had them as guides. As something beyond, a presence. Maybe they found it easier to believe being in that limbo, on the verge of constant fainting, where everything moves slower and things lose color.