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Plus-size model Crystal Renn's book Hungry looks at her experience with anorexia and coming to terms with her body's natural size.
Instead of fixating on myself for a week, I thought I’d fixate on a book I’ve recently completed, Hungry: A Young Model’s Story of Appetite, Ambition and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves.
It tells the life story 23-year-old plus-size model Crystal Renn. Renn got her start as a teen when a scout spotted her at charm school, told her to lose nine inches from her waist, and said she could be a super model.
So Renn was determined, obsessively watching what she ate and exercising ceaselessly; trying to get her 5′8 body down to 110 lbs.
Here she talks about the realization she’s met her goal after losing 42 per cent of her body weight:
“One night in the late spring of 2002, I stood naked in front of my full-length mirror, my feet together. I didn’t see that my inner wrists looked like pale blue birds’ wings you could crush with a breath. I didn’t see my concave chest. All I saw was the gap between my upper thighs. Finally, the gap. I felt the blood rush to my face. I was ecstatic.”
She was 16 years old.
The story follows her move to New York City where she lived in an apartment with other models, all trying to stay thin. She continued her downward spiral growing into a bony, hollow shell of who she had been.
Her typical daily diet was a breakfast consisting of steamed vegetables, fat free dressing and a stick of sugar-free gum; lunch consisted of a head of lettuce or steamed veggies, a protein shake, sugar-free Snapple, apple and a stick of gum; dinner was the same as breakfast; and snacks were sugar-free gum and two diet Cokes.
Those with eating disorders often have a distorted image of their own body and can’t see what the rest of the world sees. Bones jutting out. Hollow cheeks. Empty eyes.
Renn said she wanted to have a “lethal razor sharpness” people who she bumped into on the street would feel. At the same time, she was ignoring all the signs her body was turning on her: heart palpitations, hair falling out, skin turning grey, ringing in the ears, aching joints and more.
At the bottom of her lonely descent into her eating disorder she was spreading workouts between two gyms (so no one suspected her of being an exercise addict) working out eight hours a day on weekends and three hours a day during the week.
But she was gaining weight, and she couldn’t explain it. Looking back, Renn suspects it was just due to nature and normal changes in her body. But the modelling agency which represented her kept demanding she lose weight. “I hit 130 pounds. For a model I might as well have been 430.”
She said she walked around in a fog, “The stereotype of models is that we’re brain-dead, but some of us are just starving.”
I found this book really eye-opening. Not only does Renn open her heart and tell her deepest darkest secrets, but she also supports a lot of her statements with scientific evidence.
She suggests that genes are the deciding factor in what weight our body wants and needs to be at: “Adopted kids grow up to be the same approximate size as their biological parents, not their adoptive parents.”
Crystal Renn was used for a breast cancer awareness campaign because her figure is representative of women. (Photo www.2medusa.com)
She also mentions a study done by researcher Ethan Sims at the University of Vermont. Sims tried to make thin mice fat through force feeding. They gained weight but their metabolism also sped up and gained much less than the amount of food they were eating. As soon as he stopped the force feeding, they lost the weight. He also did the test on humans with similar results.
I won’t give away the whole story, but somehow Renn manages to pull herself out of the well of despair and starvation and become a popular plus-size model.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has struggled with their weight, or has someone in their life struggling with weight issues. For me, it’s an inspiration to not give up, but also to not be too hard on myself because I can’t get my body to respond the way I want it to with diet and exercise.
Next week I start my running club and get my fitness re-assessed. Wonder how fit I am today, compared to where I was three months ago.
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2 Responses to “Fit Club Week 12: Model’s hunger for success leads to eating disorder”
Tags: anorexia, crystal renn, fitness assessment, hungry, plus-size
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I just wanted to bring to your attention, dear readers, that my column has been re-Tweeted (on Twitter) by someone supporting pro-ana behaviour. If you don’t know what “pro-ana” means, it’s pro-anorexic. These people “help” other anorexics by offering advice and suggestions to help them further their disease.
Because this is a “happy ending” story with Crystal Renn becoming a healthy weight, I’m assuming pro-ana visitors are looking at the photos on my post that show Renn as an extremely emaciated and bony teen. These visitors will use the photos as inspiration of what they, too, could become if they continue to starve themselves and waste away.
That is the reason I’ve decided to remove that set of photos from post. I was hoping to shock readers by showing them just how unhealthily thin the writer was. But having it being viewed by pro-anas is exactly the opposite of what I was trying to achieve.
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My clinical experience with weight loss dieting
and eating issues is that most dieters adopt an insane approach to achieving their goals. Insane, in that Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different result.” How many of you have given in to the next magazine article or book or friends’ advise about the “new—really works this time” diet? Isn’t it about time a truly different way of
looking at your diet and weight situation be explored? Check out the book-Not Your Mother’s Diet.
I am pleased that Crystal found her true body image and she is so beautiful. Yet we are all different and we as women are beautiful in our differences. The core issue is to learn to love yourself as you are.
Please continue discussion on the forum: link