“The number doesn't matter. If I got down to 070.00, I'd want to be 065.00. If I weighed 010.00, I wouldn't be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.” -Laurie Halse Anderson 85 pounds. That`s the lowest weight anorexic teen Lia Overbrook reached before she realized how negatively her mental state was affecting her body. The story Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson is told by Lia Overbrook in the first person point of view. It is a story about Lia`s struggle with anorexia and how negatively it affects her mind every day. Add the fact that her best friend just died from a similar eating disorder to the one that she has, and you soon realize how mentally unstable Lia really is. At some points, she isn't sure if she wants to live anymore. During other points, Lia is sure that she wants to die. But, in the end, she realizes that dying isn't the solution and that she really does want to live. The author wants all of us, as readers, to realize that eating disorders affect more than just the body and that mental thoughts go a long ways and can cause a lot of hurt to people. Before I read this book, I believed that many of the stereotypes about anorexia were true. But after reading, I realized how many of them aren`t the full truth or are even completely wrong. Because of how eating disorders are portrayed by the media, particularly in movies and TV shows, many people believe that when anorexic people look in the mirror, they see a fat person with a bunch of stomach rolls. While I may not have fully believed this, I was negatively impacted by this common belief. The narrator explained multiple times throughout the story how she knew that she was skinny and she knew that she could see her ribs, and she knew that all of this was bad. But, she just couldn`t stop. She knew that too. Lia was able to realize as her weight got lower and lower that no number would ever be low enough for her. “105, 100, 95, 90, …” no matter how low her weight got, her goal weight was always lower. By reading this book, I was able to realize how wrong stereotypes often really are about eating disorders and how much goes through their minds on a daily basis. Anorexia, and other eating disorders are not easy to get over. It takes a realization from the person with this disease for recovery to even become an option. Even after that, getting ‘better’ doesn't just happen. It takes lots of hard work and determination, as Lia and her family quickly learned. But, just because you work hard towards recovery, sometimes your mental state still tries to reject the idea and hard work that it would require. Lia couldn't just say she wanted to recover, she had to mean it and work hard towards it every day. By Madelynn C.
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AuthorSTenth grade students at Decorah High School share how they're reading outside of their own experiences and how it has changed them. Categories
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November 2022
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