Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self, an autobiography by Lori Gottlieb, tells the story of an average eleven-year-old girl trying to slowly overcome her problem with anorexia. When Lori Gottlieb was growing up in California in the seventies, looks and status were very important and anorexia nervosa was virtually unknown. If it were not for several negative influences in her life, Lori may never have become anorexic.
Lori felt tremendous pressure to be thin and beautiful from her friends and boys from school, from her mother, and from society in general. Until her friends started making a fuss over what they looked like and what was considered "sexy", Lori never had an issue with her looks. After hearing a comment from a boy about another girl at a party, Lori said to herself, "I guess it's pretty obvious that no one could ever like a girl who has thunder thighs" (Gottlieb 44).
Dopamine and serotonin pathways.
Two images of an anorexic female patient published...
A summary of the strategy Zucker et al. (2007) use...This party helped contribute to her obsession with weight because she so desperately wanted to fit in with this group of classmates. Lori's mother also contributed greatly to her skewed outlook by failing to set a good example for her daughter. Lori's mother would never eat a full meal, always dumping her food onto someone else's plate, proud of how little she ate. A mother is supposed to be her daughter's role model, and Lori began to just nibble off her plate, slowing eating less and less. The main negative influence in Lori's life, though, had to come from society in general. Society created an atmosphere where it seemed only thin, beautiful people were happy, making people like Lori feel inferior. If society were not this way, then Lori would not have felt that becoming thin enough was the only way that she could ever...