Great story about an adolescent male who has, thus far, battled anorexia successfully...
A second chance
http://www.skagitvalleyherald.com/articles/2004/12/25/sports/sports01.txt"...
"Parents do not cause anorexia nervosa, and children do not chose to have it." That is the philosophy of the Kartini Clinic, one of the nation's leading treatment centers for eating disorders.
Anorexia is a genetic condition, one that is triggered by an outside force.
The condition clouds judgment, causing the afflicted to make poor decisions about diet and exercise. It begins in the brain, not with the digestive system, and affects how the brain interacts with the body.
"What most people don't know is that it's a disease, not a choice," Stephens said. "It wasn't my choice to do it. I wasn't doing it for control reasons, body issues or anything like that. It wasn't something I understood. In general people don't decide to do it. It's just horrible. It's a life-threatening disease. People don't get into it to starve themselves and hurt their bodies." Twenty years ago, the ratio of women with eating disorders to men with such illnesses was 20-to-1.
In 2001, the American Journal of Psychiatry placed the ratio at 4-to-1. Other estimates range up to 10-to-1, but they all say the same thing — while women are more prone to have eating disorders, men are at risk as well. Stephens had been under the impression that eating disorders affected only women, right up to the day he was diagnosed.
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