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"  I watched the doctor&amp;#039;s hands as he wrote out the diet. They were large hands with thick, truncated fingers. He wore a gold wedding band that appeared to be permanently embedded in the flesh creeping up around it. These were the hands of a man who liked to eat.  I focused on his hands to distract myself from the anger tightening its grip on my chest. I was convinced that if I looked at his face I might snatch his expensive pen from his meaty paws and throw it across the room. This was the fourth time in two months I had come to my doctor\u2014let&amp;#039;s call him Dr. F.\u2014complaining of a radical upheaval in the rhythms of my digestion, a shift soon accompanied by swift, inexplicable weight loss. Both had occurred shortly after I&amp;#039;d returned from a trip to Belize. He had performed a few tests and found nothing. And so he was writing out for me a meat-heavy, cream-rich, high-lipid diet on his letterhead. It read:   Breakfast: Scrambled eggs, bacon Lunch: Red meat (hamburger, steak), potatoes, cheese Dinner: Steak, potatoes Snack: Milk shakes (w/ full-fat ice cream)  &amp;quot;For the milk shakes,&amp;quot; he said as he tore the &amp;quot;prescription&amp;quot; from his pad and pushed it across the desk with a self-satisfied flourish, &amp;quot;be sure to use H\u00E4agen Dazs ice cream. We have to fatten you up.&amp;quot;  I studied this preposterously caloric, sclerosis-inducing regimen\u2014milk shakes? Was this the 1950s?\u2014and then tried, one more time, to explain the situation to him. The problem was not that I was depriving myself. The problem was that I was eating the same way I always had, and I was still losing weight.  &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve gotten way too thin, &amp;quot; he said, not listening to me. &amp;quot;Clearly you&amp;#039;re not eating enough.&amp;quot;  For him, it was mathematical, elementary: Calories consumed equaled pounds gained. By this logic, if I was dropping weight, it had to be because I was starving myself. In a way, I could understand his biased assumption. Here I was, a young woman in her early twenties, a former dancer, an assistant at a fashion magazine, my hips and collarbone shockingly\u2014and, yes, fashionably\u2014protuberant. The context clues pointed overwhelmingly one way: I must be anorexic.  I tried again. I described for him, with the most graphic images I could conjure, the coup under way in my intestines. I told him about the relentless nausea and bloating, the humiliatingly frequent trips to the office restroom. I explained that, for obvious reasons, this was affecting my work life, my social life\u2014everything. He patted my hand and gave me an indulgent smile. &amp;quot;Just give the diet a try.&amp;quot;  In the most superficial sense, my doctor was correct: I needed to put on some weight. Since my return from Belize some two months earlier, I had shed the fleshly equivalent of a small child. At 5&amp;#039;6&amp;quot; and a shade over 120 pounds, I had always hovered on the thin side of normal, but after my rapid post-Belize diminishment, the needle on the scale barely reached the 100 mark. My soft, slightly rounded physique had become all sharp angles and flat planes: prominent clavicles; concave abdomen; visible, countable ribs.  I have to admit that, in the beginning at least, as the weight began to fall away, I enjoyed my metamorphosis. All those epithets we&amp;#039;ve coined to describe annoying areas of recalcitrant flesh\u2014bat wings, back fat, love handles, muffin tops\u2014no longer applied to me. I remember standing beneath the harsh fluorescent lights in the dressing room at Saks and thinking, Give me tight! Give me diaphanous! Give me sleeveless! For the first time since I was a teenager, I could take a photograph in which I did not appear to have Nixon-like jowls. I began to look more frequently in mirrors. So thoroughly had I internalized our culture&amp;#039;s idolization of the very thin that I was secretly pleased by a weight loss I knew had to have sinister roots.  But my perverse romance with thinness, fleeting as it was, ran deeper than a delight in my new-found ability to wear slinky, body-skimming clothes, or the desire, often mentioned when a woman loses weight, to emulate undernourished actresses. I suddenly found myself able to glide around with an unencumbered ease I had not experienced since adolescence, and I liked it. I would call the sentiment nostalgia if it hadn&amp;#039;t felt so physiological, chemical. Studies have shown that in the minds of those predisposed to eating disorders, starvation often creates a sense of euphoria by altering the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. In my experience, notable weight loss in the absence of caloric deprivation engenders a similar feeling. Even as I worried I might truly be dying, I relished being exceedingly thin. How fabulous to be able to eat whatever I want and not gain a pound! How demented, under the circumstances, to have this thought at all.  All of this must sound vain, perhaps shallow, and in large part it was. But there was also an anthropological aspect to my curiosity. Watching my face and body shape-shift, and during such a short period of time, was a bit like watching a natural disaster play itself out. I knew the phenomenon was destructive and that the final outcome might well be ruinous, but I could not look away. And then, my recently acquired narcissism was also nourished by a bizarre sense of disassociation, what I&amp;#039;ll call a divided identity. When I looked at myself in the mirror, the self I saw did not align with the self I felt I was. Viewing my reflection initiated an eerie sort of time travel: I was transported at once backward and forward, to the ridiculous teenager I was long ago, the skinny ballet dancer who for two years ate only fat-free foods, and the wizened old woman, her cheeks sunken and forehead pronounced, who I might one day become. I grew to understand, in a profoundly tangible way, how inner identity arises from outward form. And I like to think that my literal navel-gazing was an attempt to get a fix on my drastic transformation. If I was paying an inordinate amount of attention to my new silhouette, this was nothing compared to the attention it was getting from others. Many men, I quickly learned, really do like frighteningly lean women, whatever they may claim to the contrary. As an average, medium-size young woman, I was unremarkable, innocuous. As a skinny slip of a thing, I was something of a sensation. In restaurants and at parties, men flirted with me extravagantly. A critic for a highbrow magazine slipped me his business card, whispering, as though we were actors in a noir film, &amp;quot;Call me...&amp;quot; and, after an almost comically pregnant pause, leaned in to add &amp;quot;...socially.&amp;quot; Another, a gossip columnist, presented me with a manila envelope straining to contain copies of his articles. (I guess he was in the habit of carrying them around with him.) It was not that I had never been hit on, but never had it happened\u2014nor has it since\u2014with such frequency or audacity. And I could only point to my sudden waifishness, my newly excavated cheekbones and sinewy upper arms, as the source of all the silly come-ons and smoldering glances. Had I dyed my brown hair platinum blond or augmented my breasts, I imagine the effect might have been similar\u2014an almost overnight alteration of the way I was experienced by the world.  But while blindingly blond hair and cartoonishly large breasts are fetishized symbols of an obvious, stereotypical sort of femininity, I was surprised to discover that near-emaciation also invites the proverbial male gaze. Do so many men really fancy women with the curves of a prepubescent boy? Apparently so. And why not? Men also live in a culture that, for reasons not entirely clear, prizes dollsize celebrities on the one hand and gazelle-like models on the other. Their ideals of beauty have also been formed by such images. (As a male friend once put it to me, semifacetiously, &amp;quot;A little anorexia is hot.&amp;quot;) And yet this seems like a simplistic explanation. It may well be that there is something primal in the male gravitation toward female frailty, an attraction the media has reinforced but did not create. A physically small woman connotes weakness, helplessness, the need for protection (however invalid these interpretations may be). Her body serves as a visible affirmation of the differences between the sexes. (Perhaps this partly explains the collective fascination with dolls and gazelles.) One literary type with an overblown streak of romanticism captured this notion for me when he said I reminded him of a heroine from a Joan Didion novel. As anyone who has read Didion knows, this is hard to construe as any sort of compliment, but I think I understand what he meant: all bones and big eyes. Insert macho rescue fantasy here.  If men took notice, women took it upon themselves to comment. There exists a species of woman that obsesses over other women&amp;#039;s weight loss. &amp;quot;Look how tiny you&amp;#039;ve gotten! Are you eating? What are you eating? You should eat more.&amp;quot; An associate editor, walking behind me down the hall at work, hollered, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re such a whippet!&amp;quot; And one afternoon, while I stood at the copy machine wearing a pair of black pinstripe pants that had long since grown baggy, the photo editor passed by and said aloud, as if to no one in particular\u2014as if I weren&amp;#039;t standing right there\u2014&amp;quot;Okay, now you&amp;#039;re really going too far! Being that thin is just gross.&amp;quot; People apparently feel it&amp;#039;s appropriate to comment on your weight if it falls toward the low end of the scale. It&amp;#039;s assumed that, as the saying goes, one can never be too thin; telling someone she&amp;#039;s too skinny is like telling her she&amp;#039;s too smart. But that&amp;#039;s not how it felt: It was like being constantly reminded of how sickly I looked. And of course, I hardly need to add that had I instead been gaining weight, not a soul would have dared ask about my dietary habits.  Perhaps I&amp;#039;m being too cynical. It&amp;#039;s true that some of the remarks were made out of genuine concern for my well-being. But an equal number were motivated by the tangle of complex feelings provoked by the sight of a skinny woman: jealousy, admiration for her (supposed) discipline and will-power, pity that she feels she must conform to an impossible cultural ideal, self-loathing, anxiety, fear. More than once, I was asked, in a single conspiratorial breath, Had I been eating enough...and how did I lose the weight? A slender woman is treated like some kind of human bulletin board, or perhaps a chat room is the era-appropriate metaphor: Her body becomes a locus for people to air their thoughts and anxieties about weight.  Granted, I worked at a fashion magazine\u2014we were in the business of perpetuating thinness, and on birthdays we ordered cakes that went untouched\u2014but in reality my coworkers were only marginally more concerned with matters of weight (theirs, mine, everyone else&amp;#039;s) than the women I knew outside the office, who lobbed their opinions at me too. And while it bothered me to field public editorializing about what seemed to me a private topic, it bothered me more that the comments, even the well-meaning ones, were almost entirely off the mark. The insinuation was always that I was eating too little or exercising too much, when, in truth, I was seriously unwell.  I grew paranoid. I fretted that my friends and colleagues thought I was willfully ravaging my body, and I tried to demonstrate otherwise every chance I got. At restaurants, I made sure to eat heartily regardless of whether I felt hungry. If sweets were offered during meetings\u2014those ever-present birthday cakes!\u2014I made a show of devouring some. Once, after I had grown gaunt enough to prompt a remark that I looked &amp;quot;like Anne Frank,&amp;quot; I bought a giant, gooey cinnamon roll, the sort consumed by travelers in Midwestern airports, and polished it off during an editorial meeting. (I&amp;#039;m sure I looked bulimic.) I was behaving like one of those emaciated starlets who gorges on McDonald&amp;#039;s for the benefit of the press while claiming a &amp;quot;fast metabolism&amp;quot; between mouthfuls. The irony of my behavior was not lost on me: In my attempts to make clear that I didn&amp;#039;t have an eating disorder, I was acting like someone who did.  Why not simply admit I was sick? That, too, seemed a delicate personal matter, and not one for interoffice parsing. In any case, I wouldn&amp;#039;t have known what to say; after numerous visits to my internist, I still had no idea what was wrong with me. When I typed &amp;quot;unexplained weight loss&amp;quot; into Google, the scary possibilities floated up: thyroid malfunction, pituitary tumor, lupus, cancer, HIV. If the world was going to believe I was ailing\u2014and who could blame them, as it was disturbingly evident that I was\u2014perhaps anorexia was the best of the many bad disorders to have. The other maladies so terrified me that I didn&amp;#039;t even want to think about them. And so you might say that in my unwillingness to speak of my mystery illness, I perpetuated my coworkers&amp;#039; misguided assumptions.  Meanwhile, my body pressed on with its death march toward cadaverousness. I stopped getting my period. At some point, I started to avoid mirrors as aggressively as I had once sought them out. My face looked so drawn that whenever I caught a glimpse of it, Bob Dylan&amp;#039;s lyric &amp;quot;the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face&amp;quot; came to mind. Indeed, I felt ghostlike, invisible. If I pulled my hair back, my ears looked enormous. I thought I resembled a hobbit, or some kind of wood nymph or elf.  Every couple of weeks, as I became increasingly ill, I&amp;#039;d visit Dr. F. (I was 23 years old, and it had not yet dawned on me that doctors might be fallible.) And here is where the knee-jerk cultural prejudice I&amp;#039;d been facing\u2014that a skeletal young woman equals a practicing anorexic\u2014ceased to be merely annoying and became troublesome, even dangerous. When his initial exploratory measures failed to arrive at an answer, he neither ordered more tests nor sent me to a specialist\u2014and this even as I continued to drop several pounds a week. Instead, he decided I had an eating disorder, and, if I was interpreting his forbearing tone correctly, that I was a hypochondriac as well. I was causing my problems. I might even be imagining things. I needed to eat.  I can almost understand his failure to listen to me. Anorexics can be a crafty, duplicitous bunch, and I&amp;#039;m sure he assumed I was lying. Plus, eating disorders can wreak havoc on one&amp;#039;s system, creating a host of physical symptoms not unlike my complaints (nausea, abdominal pain, fatigue). But why not entertain another possibility? Why discount weight loss as one of the surest signs of illness? Why not even consider that deranged digestion, rather than being the self-induced consequence of some aberrant dietary practice, might itself be a serious problem, a signal flare sent out by a body gone astray? And what if I had been anorexic? The irony, of course, is that although he may have diagnosed my disorder\u2014without ever dignifying it by speaking its name\u2014I still would not have received proper treatment. Some Victorian-era rest cure consisting of fatty foods (the sort of therapy Virginia Woolf was forced to submit to) is hardly the answer for a twentysomething woman fearful of gaining weight. Nor is telling the patient to &amp;quot;Just eat, just get over it&amp;quot; as though the disease were a question of a quick change of mind and not a quirk of disordered brain chemistry.  Eventually, six months after I first became ill, I left Dr. F. and found myself a specialist. Many months after that, I received a diagnosis. I&amp;#039;d acquired a parasite, an amoeba\u2014Entamoeba histolytica, to be precise\u2014in Belize. Since I&amp;#039;d had it for so long, multiple courses of drugs over several years (megadoses of Flagyl, Humatin, and combinations of the two) were required to treat it. When I think back on the experience, I can&amp;#039;t help but mentally shake an angry fist at Dr. F. for refusing to see beyond his prejudice. Parasites are notoriously difficult to diagnose, and multiple tests are often required to pinpoint one, but had he taken my clamoring more seriously, I doubt so many months would have passed before the problem was uncovered.  When I received the diagnosis, I finally enlightened my boss and several of my coworkers about my condition. In truth, I had no choice in the matter; the Flagyl left me so dizzy and disoriented for several hours after each dose (a very high 750 milligrams several times a day) that I had to use vacation days to take it. &amp;quot;A parasite!&amp;quot; an editor friend exclaimed when I told her, &amp;quot;So that&amp;#039;s it! We were wondering what was wrong.&amp;quot; And with her comment, my nagging suspicion that my weight loss had been gossiped about over after-work drinks and midday cigarette breaks was validated. A few colleagues, upon hearing the story, asked, only half-jokingly, where they could get a parasite of their own. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/advice/a9444/the-year-my-body-shrank-261302/>