Blog 3- Eating Disorders

Pro-ana websites and blogs should be shut down because it lets young girls who are just surfing the Internet read about these older girls and women who are happy being as thin as supermodels. The women who are anorexic usually have low self-esteem or a false sense of beauty, because they may be underweight, but they still see themselves as fat. Wanting to be as thin as supermodels is an unrealistic goal because not every girl was meant to be that small. Some women are angry with themselves because they feel as if they will never be the weight they aim for and decide to punish their bodies and then write about it on these sites. When young, impressionable girls read their stories, they might look at their self in a mirror and think they, too, are not as small as they would like to be. If a young girl reads the blog of Chaos they would see she is an overachiever and skip over the fact that she has an illness. With the school, job, and musical talent, they could think in order to achieve as much as Chaos, they need to be thin like her.


Pro-ana websites and blogs should not be shut down because it is an outlet for girls with eating disorders to come together and support one another. Some girls develop eating disorders because they feel out in school and think no one likes them because they are not thin enough. They look at supermodels that are well liked and decide in order to be well liked; they have to be thin, too. Some women on the sites or blogs give advice on how they are trying to get better and develop healthier lives, and that could help someone who wants to become healthy also. In Mim Udovitch's, "A Secret Society of the Starving," one of the girls she spoke with told a doctor: “Show me a coping mechanism that works and I’ll trade my eating disorder for it in a minute.” A girl who has found a way to get better could upload it to a site or blog and others could follow in her footsteps.


Pro-ana websites and blogs should not be shut down, but at the same time should be carefully posted with many blocks that make it hard for under-aged surfers to get to them. While the sites and blogs form an outlet for anorexic girls to talk to one another, it could also influence a young girl to pick up those habits and become ill. If the sites and blogs remain on the internet, ads for clinics that help girls with eating disorders should remain on a side at all times. That way, if a girl is fed up with her life revolving around her anorexia, she has a solution for the illness.