You fantasise about walking down the aisles of your favourite grocery shop, filling your trolley with huge quantities of everything you could ever imagine wanting to eat, to binge on, to need, to give comfort emotionally—or restoratively afterwards.

Which do you want more, to binge or be thin?

Which do you enjoy more?

Other senses in which ana is less dangerous:

• There’s nothing intrinsically unhealthy about being underweight: under a BMI of 19 “risk increases due to the possibility of concurrent illnesses that cause loss of weight, such as cancer or complications of malnutrition” (Mary E. Barasi, 2007).

• Bulimia is supposedly harder to treat. (Is this because people tend to be older?)

Remember that no-one helps bulimics.

In that sense ana is less dangerous.

You feel so, so sick. You don’t want to have to do this ever again.

You want a special dispensation from God to avoid food.

When you start on food after all that restricting, you realise you have no idea how to use it effectively. You are totally out of control.

You think: it’s quite probable you’d have fewer health problems if you didn’t eat at all, even taking into account hospitalisation when your body weight drops. On the one hand — no energy, no time, constant gastrointestinal distress, financial strain. On the other — no energy, but time, wasting and weakness, but spare money. Both unsustainable.

And so you restrict.

There are many roads that lead to anorexia, but there’s an anorexic type: people who, once they have started restricting, find it good to abstain from food. They are sustained by their abstinence. It’s a brain thing. Just is.

Then some people exhibit anorexic behaviour without this. They’re just as anorexic — anorexia’s a syndrome — but the biomedical side of the illness is different. They are two distinct strains of anorexia.

Bulimia has more to do with the second. These are the cultural eating disorders. They really are influenced by magazines and expectations of beauty and emotional mess leading to misdirected coping mechanisms and misdirected self-manipulation in quest for other people’s love.

Is there also a biomedical type for bulimia?

The pleasure from food feeds on food. After abstaining you don’t want it or enjoy it — that’s pleasure snatched away. The solution to not eating is not eating. Both bingeing and restricting behaviours are runaways.

Anorexics have a stronger pleasure in not eating. Bulimics desire the sensual and earthy pleasures of food. Less spiritual, less in the air.

Less floating.

You get a bulimic rush from food.

Too much pleasure in it.

You won’t be anorexic, however little you eat. The disorders are related but distinct. You’ll be a bulimic who’s self-starving.

Every day you get closer to the perfect, classic, and stereotyped relation of the bulimic to food.

Your body sweats more when it’s so fat. It isn’t very appealing. You look more like a pregnant cow than someone blending into the air.

Do you enjoy carrying all that shifting weight around?

Oh, stop wasting time!

Your breasts are bloated to their fullest size, and it’s not a good look.

The fat in your body’s a valid source of energy. You might feel better on it than on your confusing and badly-spaced intake of food. Your fat will supply your body’s energy needs. Food’s a back-up, a medicine, you take it carefully and according to prescription, and you don’t self-prescribe. You know it’s like a drug.

You read Susie Orbach and maybe you realise you don’t actually want to be thin. You know in reality you need to be thin, for all those social and emotional and health and psychological reasons. But when you’ve become thin and been that way for years and managed to shrink and disappear, you can make a comeback.

You don’t have to, of course. At the moment you need to lose fat because you are blobby and disgusting and you can’t feel the angularity of your bones when you sit. You haven’t felt the cold since winter. You feel awful. Right now, you can cure all that by dropping fat. Step out of it like a sealskin. Isolate yourself from food. Wait a while. Will you feel fabulous?

Alternative sources of energy include: qi, prana, light, air, solar energy…

In Ayurveda, on the other hand, fasting is done for physical purification. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, it is expected that the faster will lose weight, but that’s okay, because mortification of the flesh and all that have a place in religion.

Which makes them the perfect cover for not eating — religious freedom extends further than the freedom to choose your own mental disorders.

The only socially unacceptable form is fasting without a spiritual anchorpoint. The focus is the self, and, even without the culture crying ‘too egotistic!’, it’s hard to withstand that sort of dedication when you’re starving. Fine to abuse your body for a God, not okay for yourself, and definitely not for a boyfriend.

Like breatharians, fasters in Qi Gong can partially survive on qi.

Luckily for anorexics, until you’ve learned how to do this, you starve.

Food is bad for you.

Yes it is, the way you use it.

So shut up, and get on with your life.