Four courses leading towards the "small anorexia"

(Le Monde/the WORLD) 21.11.03

Certain women and girls follow so strict modes that they lead them towards a thinness close to the anorexia. Investigations carried out under the direction of Jean-Pierre Corbel, sociologist of the Tours food (the Indre-and-Loire), made it possible to distinguish four routes (thus four populations) different leading to this "small anorexia" - very different from the anorexia nervosa of the girl, with the consequences much more serious.
The first category of women who have this behavior rather gathers people close to ecology seeking an equality compared to the men, advances the researcher. Their request leads them to deny part of their femininity while accentuating a side androgyne. "Their lightness, their thinness, then seems to them a condition of their social effectiveness" , explains the sociologist. They refuse greases and consume only reduced products and green vegetables cooked with the vapor.

The second gathers young women without culinary culture inherited their mother and who leave the family residence to find themselves only in urban environment in order to follow an occupation, to follow a training or to continue studies. Their meals fast, brief and are taken in an irregular way. These women are satisfied to consume loan-with-to eat: small salads, sections of ham without fat, yoghourts to 0 %, sometimes a chocolate a cereal fruit or bar. However, they drink many water, sodas light or herb teas. And, like, at the same time, "they confabulate on the bodies of the mannequins", they end up eating less and less, until reaching the stage of the anorexia sometimes.

The third category uses the thinness to build a capacity within the family. A behavior which Muriel Darmon in its work Devenir anorexic dismounts, a sociological approach (the Discovery). These women, says it, know that their " skeletal" thinness worries their close relations and gives birth to a compassion very developing, since the entourage protects them and that the rate/rhythm of the meals depends on their complex relation to food.


Lastly, the last class of women concerns rather young individuals, whose thinness originates in a doubled malnutrition of a "culture of street" , where they are found in competition with the boys in a logic of band. They then create for themselves a body of " guy ", are made muscles "as hard as the bone" by working the bicycle, the body-building, the race with foot or the contemporary dance. Because, for them, the body must be summarized with its simple structure and be removed from "perishable of the soft parts".