By the end of her short life, she looked like a skeleton covered in skin. She looked desperately sick. Emaciated. How, you may wonder as you look at her photos, could someone look at themselves in the mirror, see that, and think it was desirable? What’s more, how could other girls look at Isabelle’s photos and want to be like her? That’s the hardest part for me to understand. Isabelle, however, was so brave. Not only did she agree to pose for an ad campaign, appearing fully naked to show people the toll anorexia can take on your body, but she also made an appearance on Jessica Simpson’s VH-1 show, “The Price of Beauty,” shortly before she died. Click through to see the segment. I am glad that Caro at least made a valiant effort to bring awareness to her disease before she died. And while I can’t imagine getting to her level of “thin,” I definitely was on a path to destruction in my early twenties when I began dieting and got down to such a low weight that I started getting sick all the time. And I definitely remember thinking even then, when I was a size zero, that I still had flab on my belly and still had at least a few more pounds to lose. Looking back now at photos from that time, I looked awful! I looked sickly. And it took being hospitalized with flu to realize that I had dieted my immune system away- I had no reserves in my system to fight illness- and I didn’t like that feeling one bit. I’ll never be a size zero again and I’m pretty damn happy about it. It also strikes me now that my diet was set off by one person’s inadvertent comment about my weight. One comment was all it took. Sad isn’t it? And a little bit scary. Do you have memories of teetering on the brink of an eating disorder? What did it take to get you back on track? And what caused it?
