Recovered anorexic Leslie Lipton no longer rushes off “to take a shower” after having dinner with her parents in their Park Avenue apartment.
Showering after dinner, or at least telling her parents that’s what she was doing, was one of the tricks Leslie, now 20, picked up on pro-anorexia Web sites.
It helped her conceal the real reason for her trip to the bathroom – to purge herself of what she had just eaten.
“Basically, I didn’t eat, and when I did, I threw up,” said Leslie, now a Barnard College sophomore and the author of “Unwell,” a recently published novel about a teenage anorexic.
In high school, Leslie starved and purged herself to lose weight. She dropped 30 pounds – slipping below 100 – in less than a year, and was still trying to lose more.
To achieve her dramatic – and dangerous – weight loss, she went on the ‘Net for ideas and encouragement – to “thinspiration” sites with photos of near-skeletal young women.
“They would show either models who were very, very thin, celebrities or someone in the media . . . or emaciated people, sometimes Holocaust victims, as something to emulate,” Leslie said.
She also frequented online message boards where young anorexics offer support and tips.
“They talked about ways to fool doctors into thinking you’re gaining weight . . . and about ways to mask the fact that you’re throwing up,” Leslie said.
“What the Web sites do most,” Leslie said, “is encourage [anorexia] as a lifestyle choice, when it’s not. It’s not a diet, it’s a disease, and the sites don’t talk about getting healthy or recovering. They talk about how you’ll feel included if you lose weight, and how you’ll be part of their community,” she said.
Leslie’s nightmare fling with anorexia started when she was a ninth-grader at a prestigious Manhattan private school, and it lasted through the 11th grade.
After losing 30 pounds, she was hospitalized for treatment of her eating disorder – and regained 20 pounds in six weeks.
But she wasn’t cured. She resumed her dieting and purging routine, again dropped under 100 pounds and was facing another hospital stint when she got her act together.
“What I finally did was I got a kitten, Cleo,” she said.
“It allowed me to have something to nurture and care for, and I knew if I went back into the hospital, I wouldn’t be able to be there for her . . . I never went back into the hospital again.”
But “that wasn’t the end of it – it was a struggle not to say, ‘Life is hard, I’m going to go back.’ ”
Her recovery involved “getting the depression under control, which allowed me to get the eating under control,” she said.
“It was a slow process,” she said. “I’m far happier now than when I was starving myself. I’m normal now, I eat three meals a day, whatever I want. And I don’t ‘shower’ after dinner.”
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True fiction
Excerpts from “Unwell,” a novel by Leslie Lipton:
“Dear God . . . please help me. Please let me lose a lot of weight . . . Please show me the way to do this. Please give me a reason to believe. Please let me lose a lot of weight and soon.”
“Everyone seemed to be impressed . . . Her mom encouraged her, saying how great it was that Stefanie was trying to make herself more ‘fit.’ Her dad complimented her on how gorgeous she looked. Her friends were jealous . . . ”