The Cause

This film is very personal to me as it comes from my younger sister suffering with anorexia. I found out about her disorder after discovering her 'Thinspiration' diary which was full of images of skeletal models to aspire to, hints and tips on how to starve yourself and how to hide it from your family and friends, but worst of all letters from a women named Ana telling my sister what a hideous fat cow she is, how she will never amount to anything and how starving herself to perfection is the only way she will ever be truly happy. After approaching my sister about the diary, she showed me a whole world I never knew existed – the anorexic world. Everything from the diary came from a range of online websites, blogs and forums, a huge percentage of them promoting anorexia as a lifestyle choice not a disease, and 'Ana' (the personification of anorexia) being the leader.

As well as my sister, a good friend of mine has suffered with anorexia to the extreme and has been kind enough to open up to me about her experiences. Seeing a loved one suffer is hard, and through my film I want to speak out to anyone who can relate, and let them know that they aren't alone.

Eating disorders are conditions in which there is a serious disturbance in the way a person deals with food, weight, and body image. Most of the time eating disorders develop because of emotional or psychological problems rather than wanting to be skinny. It becomes a way of dealing with emotions. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness and can lead to a whole range of medical problems including hair loss, low heart rate, loss of periods, tooth erosion and osteoporosis.

With this film I am trying to open people's eyes to the brutal reality of how serious and crippling this disease is. We want to try and give the viewer an insight into what it can be like inside the mind of someone suffering with an eating disorder. The loneliness, confusion and pain that these people suffer with, most often in silence. We often hear about the facts, statistics and horrible stories relating to the subject, but the side of anorexia we are addressing is the inner psychological conflict and the secrecy – the side that sufferers often find too difficult to tell.