Inspiration to Fight Eating Disorders - NYTimes.com

For years, young people ? often girls and young women ? have frequented Web sites promoting anorexia and bulimia as a source of inspiration and tips on staying thin, even as online companies have worked to ban such content. Now, groups and Web sites focused on recovery from eating disorders are fighting back.

?We need to be looking at these communities and see what we can learn from them, and what we can provide as a positive alternative,? said Claire Mysko, manager of Proud2Bme.org, a Web site and online community focused on healthy recovery that is financed by the nonprofit National Eating Disorders Association. ?That?s what we?re trying to do here.?

This Saturday, the group is taking its message to the University of South Florida in Tampa for its free annual Proud2Bme Summit. Attendees will be encouraged to engage in activities like taking a stand on Twitter against ?body snarking,? a bullying tactic that draws attention to a person?s body or weight gain, and hear from speakers including Julia Bluhm, a 14-year-old who collected more than 86,000 signatures to petition Seventeen magazine to print one unaltered photo spread a month.

?Our goal here is to make it a space where people can connect,? Ms. Mysko said.

The site began in 2011 after the success of its Dutch counterpart, Proud2Bme.nl, whose co-founder Scarlet Hemkes struggled with anorexia and bulimia as a teenager and young adult and was horrified to find countless sites where girls competed to lose weight or shared tips on how to lie to parents about weight loss. Inspired by France?s move in 2008 to ban such sites ? commonly called pro-ana (for pro-anorexia) sites ? Ms. Hemkes collected 10,000 signatures with the hopes of inspiring similar Dutch legislation. When that didn?t work, she created a community on Hyves, a Facebook-like social network for girls with eating disorders, before founding Proud2Bme with a psychologist, Eric van Furth, in 2009.

Many pro-ana sites cater to young people with eating disorders by featuring blogs, forums, calorie counters, videos, tips, poetry and pictures. ?A lot of it is very image based: It?s people posting pictures of very thin bodies that have quotes glorifying thinness,? said Ms. Mysko, who aims to make the American site equally appealing for its 7,000 daily visitors by also including ?fashion and everyday stuff.?

Web companies periodically try to stamp out the proliferation of pro-ana Web sites. In 2001, Yahoo! and other Web portals banned sites promoting eating disorders. And this year, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram banned ?thinspo,? a term associated with finding inspiration for thinness. ?We?re committed to supporting freedom of speech, but we wanted to provide some limits,? said Katherine Barna, a Tumblr spokeswoman. ?We drew the line on any blogs that actively promote self-harm.?

Still, pro-ana sites continue to multiply with the ever-increasing number of online platforms.

?We need to find a way to make the healthy information more attractive to these girls,? said Daphna Yeshua-Katz, a doctoral student in the Indiana University department of telecommunications. For a recent study, she and Nicole Martins, an assistant professor at the university, talked to 33 pro-ana bloggers, women ages 15 to 33 who were willing to be interviewed. The study, published in August in the journal Health Communication, showed that participants were motivated to blog as a way to cope with a stigmatized illness and a means of self-expression and social support.

Ms. Mysko of Proud2Bme.org says that her group is aiming to turn that social support into something positive. ?Those who might be attracted to thinspiration content will find a space where they can feel accepted and feel like they are able to talk to others who get it,? she said. ?It?s an environment that?s promoting recovery.?

Source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/turning-to-the-web-to-fight-anorexia/

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