"Nothing tastes as good as thin feels!"

Have you ever heard this quote? I hate it. I know that it's supposed to be a motivational quote for people trying to lose weight by dieting, but I always think, Yeah, I bet starving people in third-world countries would much prefer the feeling of their stomachs growling to the taste of a crisp, juicy apple.

I often see it scattered around on journal communities, when I'm surfing random journals and am unfortunate enough to come across one of those stupid diet journals. If you aren't familiar with the sort, here's an example of every entry:

Recently I did a search of LiveJournal users who listed "ana" as an interest. The results disgust me: 417 independent users, and what's worse, 413 communities endorse this form of self-harm. (Though twenty or so of the communities were actual support groups or anti-ana communities, making many of the same points I'm making in this piece.)

I support online communities for people with eating disorders who seek help living with it, conquering it, and realizing that they're not alone in their struggles. However, communities for self-absorbed little shits who want to put their lives at risk just to lose a few pounds, who make a mockery of the disorder, are nothing more than a waste of server space.

I've plucked the most infuriating usernames from the list and chucked them here.

_1ststopanaads - ANOREXIA COMMUNITY ADVERTISING ONLY
This is a community whose sole purpose is to advertise other communities. These are pointless. If some circus reject is actually looking to join a pro-anorexia community, all she'd have to do to find at least four hundred of them is type "anorexia" into the search string, like I did.

0nlyforyou - Ana's Wannabe - [ We *will* be thinner than you ]
skinny_envy - Someday, we will be thinner than YOU.
Goody for you - but I won't have to hide my food in my napkin when I go out to dinner with friends; I won't have to make up excuses before or after I go to the bathroom to purge; I won't have the taste of vomit permanently clogging my throat; and, I'll probably live longer. 0wned.

_____thinisin - thinner than you.
Oh, I bet you aren't - and if you are, you ought not to be proud of yourselves, because I'm already so thin that people tell me I look like I need to eat more, and I don't even try. In any event, life isn't a fucking "beauty" contest. Also, what's with all the underscores at the beginning of the latter? Perhaps they represent how thin this community's members aspire to be.

ana_for_dummies - How to Ana
Intentional ana is always for dummies.

thin_skinned - the intelligent ana community
That's a laugh. See above.

_lost_ - I WANT TO BE SKINNY!
I want a million dollars, but starving, purging, and laxatives won't get me that either. Some things in life require some hard work. For me, this might mean creating a company from scratch, from the bottom up, and working long hours to ensure its success. For you, this might mean mapping out a healthy diet and exercise routine, and working out, sweating, jogging, lifting weights, for hours until you can see your toes again. Hollering on a message board is no place to start.

__antifat - :::fat and hating it
To be frigid and unforgiving for a minute, bulimia is for lazy, insecure shits. Maybe if you spent more time on the treadmill and less time whining in pathetic online communities about what scraps of food you swallowed, you wouldn't be "fat." Here's a news flash: nobody cares that you're fat more than you do. Most real, non-shallow people, myself included, couldn't give one fig less if you're "fat." If people make fun of you for your weight, they don't deserve to know you.

anastinydancers - Tiny Dancers
Now I find a group of people who do get plenty of exercise, and still feel that they need to cut inches from their hips to be beautiful. But is there anything more beautiful than a dancer in fluid motion? If I wanted to watch stick figures move around, I'd go to a puppet show, or look up into a tree on a windy day. Dancing is when real, live men and women do amazing things with their bodies. I couldn't care less what the figures weigh, what their bodies are shaped like. For this community, I almost blame the big-wigs high up in the dance industry, for forever pushing their talented employees to be thinner so as to attract audiences. If customers won't come to see an "overweight" dancer, though, are they customers with whom you really want to do business?

war_on_cookies - Can you fight the war?
How 'bout you fight while I lose on purpose? War sucks. Cookies rule.

painfully_thin - I want to be so thin it hurts
Go for it... but who will be in the most pain? You, or your family as they watch you waste away, feeling utterly without power?

_dizzy4ana_ - ...we will be beautiful
Look at yourself... you already are. Look around you, for someone - your father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, son, daughter, grandfather, or husband - who loves you, and realize that that person thinks you are the most beautiful person they have ever laid eyes upon. You may not fit this shallow society's conventional definition of the word, but not many of us do, and we should be proud of that! Myself, I would rather be a unique individual than a Britney Spears clone. If I could choose to look like her or myself, I would choose me, because this is who I am. I have created my own appearance to reflect who I am inside.

_perfectstoic - __anorexic_beauty
Every time I look at photos of emaciated women whose ribs I can count, whose cheeks are sunken, whose eyes seem abnormally large, and whose elbows and kneecaps are covered only by skin, I totally spring a woody. No! The vast majority of those who are attracted to women do not desire these features. They want soft flesh, prominent curves. They want a woman who is huggable, not breakable. This made me think of those women who have had implanted or elected to keep tapeworms in their intestines to help them manage their weight. __tapeworm_beauty... now that's delicious.

ana_diaries - ana is beautiful, thin is godly
I challenge you to fill me in on which exact aspect of anorexia is "beautiful" or "sexy." Forcing your finger so far down your throat that you vomit? (Vomit is yummy!) Being able to count your ribs, see your veins, through your skin, being afraid that your bones will pop through if you bend over? (That's why, instead of masturbating late at night to those 1-900 girly-line commercials, men whack off to televised sponsorship pleas depicting starving children.) I'm not even a believer, but I'm highly insulted by the second comment as well - because I believe that if there is a god, one's physical appearance is irrelevant to it.

lovealways_ana - Starving but Beautiful
Yup... the vanity is worth it! Oh, well, look on the bright side - a shark wouldn't want to eat you.

sexy_anorexia - ~*The Definition of Sexy*~
For a lark, I typed "sexy" into my electronic dictionary. Synonyms were: alluring, enticing, erotic, exciting, seductive, tempting. Curiously, waif wasn't listed. I then searched for antonyms, and none of the following words appeared: buxom, chubby, fat, fleshy, heavy, obese, overweight, plump, stout.

iwant2beperfect - Perfection comes in a size 0
This insults me, because I'm not a size zero. Who is a size zero? I've heard that the average Canadian female is a size twelve. I'm a size six, and if I got any thinner I think my parents would have committed. I held up a pair of size zero pants once, and I couldn't have squeezed one thigh into them. Face it - not everyone can physically be a size zero. Bone structure has a large part to play in the reasons for this, among other things we humans have no control over. Oh, and scrap that hope of being perfect, because no one is and no one will ever be.

angels_of_ana - Captivated, Obsessed, Passionate about Ana
How pathetic is this? These are words I would use in a romantic poem about a person with whom I've fallen deeply in love!

_perfect_pain_ - ~.:*Light As A Feather*:.~
Good - now blow away in the wind.

as_we_disappear - Evanesce
Yes, please do.

whiney_ana - my life is hell and i love it!
wow_i_wuv_ana - Ana rocks my socks!
Um... oookay. What saddens me most about these two names is the fact that their cheeriness and sheer stupidity suggest that they were concocted by thirteen-year-olds - a peer group who, in my old-fashioned opinion, need to be concerned with what boys think of their bodies even less than any other.

ana_moms - ana_moms
Is this the example you want to set for your children? Will you teach your four-year-old daughter how to purge her mashed peas and carrots so that the other kids in preschool won't make fun of her baby fat? Don't you realize that your children look up to you, that they need you to help them realize their own self-worth? How will you lead by example when it's obvious that your own self-esteem is in the dumps? I hope your children are taken away by Social Services.

thinspire_me_mk - thinspiring pictures of marykate olsen.
ana_mk - supporting mary-kates thinness
This may as well read: "Supporting Michael J. Fox's Slow Death Due to Parkinson's Disease." How insensitive of the creators of these communities. Something tells me that Ashley isn't a member of this community, nor is anyone else in the Olsen family who watched in anguish as Mary-Kate struggled to cling to life.

ana_elitists - Fuck off, Fakers
I hate elitists of all walks of life (namely elitist so-called "goths" and "punks"), but this takes the cake. Haha! Note my food reference there? What's the matter? You can't find a more productive talent, so you cling to your fucking eating disorder as if it's your greatest accomplishment?! I sincerely hope your "achievement" is clearly written on your headstone.

Here are a few I did like: asphyxiaoflife, bonesnotbeauty, and dietingisdeath - though dieting itself is not death, but excessive dieting is.

I sincerely think that public schools and awareness societies need to take a good, hard look at this disgusting issue. We need to bring up this society's youth with much healthier senses of their self-worth than this. If more emphasis was placed on the beauty within, young people wouldn't be so vulnerable to the pressure to look like magazine fodder, such as Paris Hilton or Mischa Barton. I firmly believe that this would also lower the teen pregnancy rate, because fewer young girls would resort to bedding any willing man to feel, for one fleeting moment in someone's eyes, beautiful.