My little sister is anorexic. And not because she was pressured to be skinny, cause she’s always been slim, but because she scared herself into being overly healthy. Yea. She became so paranoid of eating unhealthy things that she wouldn’t let herself eat at all, because NOTHING is 100% healthy. Almost EVERYTHING in excess CAN be unhealthy. She dropped from 87 pounds last fall (which is already quite light for her 5′2″ frame) to 70 pounds. That gives her a BMI of about 13. How frightening is that. It’s just unfathomable. She refuses to eat, and whenever my mom, my dad, or I bring up food, she gets angry. She says she never even feels full anymore, although she has also admitted that it may just be psychological and that she just forces herself never to eat. She doesn’t even know if she likes fries/mash potatoes/yummy goodness anymore. She hasn’t gotten her period since December.

It is just so far beyond me how she let herself do this. Food is great. Being healthy is great. Indulging every once in a while (or even a whole lot of the time) is perfectly OKAY!

And she stresses herself out all day, keeping a “food journal” obsessively because the doctor told her too. But it doesn’t help much. In fact, I’m not sure if it helps at all. Now, at every meal time, she scrutinizes her servings, trying to figure out how many grams of chicken she has eaten, how many servings of grains she has had that day, or how many cups of broccoli she has had. Every meal is a battle. And, although she always acts like she’s the martyr, eating food when we ask her to or make her, she’s not helping herself at all! Until we no longer have to force her to eat, she will always be anorexic, and she will always have an eating disorder, and she will always be mentally ill.

But another part of her stress is that she feels constant guilt for worrying all of us. (But even despite this, her eating habits do not change. Once again, she needs to be eating right for HERSELF, not for anyone else. I don’t think she understands.) My mother is always losing sleep over her not eating, and since my father does not do so well as a father, she has to commute to New York City every day for work from New Jersey (about two hours of commute daily), come home and cook (and have my sister basically not eat anything), finish up her endless amounts of work, struggle to make my sister eat, and then stay up until who knows when worrying. And my grandfather, the sweetest man you will EVER meet, whom I call every day, is also worried SICK. One of the things he asks me every day is if my sister is eating more. I haven’t the heart to tell him that “No, she hasn’t really improved that much at all,” so I always assure him that yes, she’s improving and that no, he needn’t worry. But I know he does. We all do. And I worry doubly, both about her, how skeletal she looks (Even kid’s size 12 jeans are baggy on her for heaven’s sake), how really, if she keeps this up, she could very well die, and about my parents and grandparents, because they shouldn’t be under this much stress right now, they shouldn’t have to worry ALL THE TIME.

It just makes me sad. Truly, truly sad. I wish I could fix it all.