But just think about it...If karen Carpenter and Moma Cass had shared just that one chicken sandwich, both of them would still be alive today.

Is there any research about which social, economic and cultural group this behavior is manifested in? North Korea doesn’t count!

Well, I did a web search on anorexia, seems to me it is an STD (Socially Transmitted Disease). One of the very things I was worried about while my daughters were growing up. One of my daughters was especially susceptible. Many times we were asked to have her pursue a modeling career. My spouse and daughter were excited about that. Most of the time I would allow my children to pursue as many experiences as possible to broaden their perspective. This opportunity was an absolute resounding NO! We didn’t even know anorexia was back then, but I did know that the environment was toxic. Drug abuse, psychological abuse, marketing abuse, failed relationships, corporate competition, individual rivalries and short term career longevity, it is not good for maturing young people. Too many people fall victim to the persona marketers use to sell product and actually end up diminishing their life experience.

I'd be willing to bet a lot of people encouraged her to seek help but much like alcoholics, all the encouragement in the world doesn't do a lick of good until the person with the disease makes the decision to seek it on their own. Very sad indeed.

She likely wanted help and sought help numerous times, but the treatments and counseling apparently were not enough for her to overcome this complex psychiatric and sociological disease.

Even people who get help are often overwhelmed by the unbearable anxiety and fear they experience when they gain weight, even when facing possible death otherwise. People who have been down that path will understand what I'm describing.

The human brain can be described one way as having High and Low identities, a kind of split personality if you like. The High brain being the more recently evolved cerebral functions. The Low brain being the "ancient lizard brain-stem".

Our High brain despite it's self opinion of being in control, is really just for advanced planing and taking action to get what the Low brain wants. And the communication pathways are mostly one way, we can't tell our Low brain what to think about or not think about.

So you have this woman, who's High brain fully recognizes and acts upon her disease as long as those actions do not conflict with what her Low brain wants. That is, going to photo shoots, going to therapy, talking and listening with friends. None of it though, has a neural pathway to affect the Low brain.

When it came to actual disease behavior, the Low brain tormented the high brain with stress chemicals and pain messages into getting it's way. Some drugs can block some pathways the Low brain uses to coerce the High brain, but not all of them are well understood, or even known.

Essentially, despite our cultural and philosophical aversion to its implication, this woman had little free will, if any, in regard to manifestations of her disease. And it is the same for several other categories of diseases involving psycho-somatic dysfunctions.

My hope is that with modern FMRI machines and emerging deep brain remote stimulus technologies, we may soon be able to identify and eliminate very specific connections between the low and high brain to bring relief to millions of people suffering from these afflictions. If only she could have held on another 5-10 years.

WTF?

High low brain. Huh? LoL....you so crazy.

ttmadison-you are very right. First of all this isn't the best written news story of her. I know a lot of ppl that knew her and she did try many times to receive treatment but it was mostly temporary. She would go in, gain weight only to get out and lose(some of this is insurance based too). I've dealt with many addictions, issues myself and this is the costliest to get treatment for and one of the toughest to deal with as well. Other countries too lack as many treatment centers that US has.

Actually SaneScience is totally correct.

The number of neuro pathways going from the "low brain", (as he/she calls it), to the "high brain" is almost entirely a one-way street from "low" to "high".

It helps us to understand why people can rationally recognize the dire consequences of certain behaviors yet find it so difficult to make different choices. People can't rewire their brains overnight. There is significant relearning that requires going through tremendous discomfort.

It is most definitely not a simple either/or scenario.

Grow up lady, People are dying all around you! She most likely did not want the help!!

yo dave....kinda cold ain't ya? I think it's the opposite.....people are so damn selfish & it's all about me, me, me. maybe no one reached out. it's sad but true. the average person is selfish and/or always thinking it's their own fault, blah, blah, blah.......

Give it a rest. Not my week to watch her.

nice, dave. way to be utterly presumptuous, calous, and narrow-minded. people die so who cares? you've determined based on nothing that she deserved to die? here's a word to look up: s-o-c-i-o-p-a-t-h.

It's not a physical disease, it's a mental disorder that eventually shows harsh physical symptoms. A large part of it does have to do with culture, but half the time the end result isn't in contribution to the current paper thin definition of beauty. It only starts in that at times. Anorexia has the highest death rate of any mental disorder, do you really think that many people would put themselves through the excruciating process of slowly dying from malnutrition just to obtain that? At a certain point most people with eating disorders realize what they're doing to there bodies and how sick they actually look and are, it ends up becoming a crutch for these woman(And men, even) that has little to do with trying to fit into a mold and more to do with compulsion and complex psychological issues. And as for your last question, I haven't really checked 'which came first', but humans have had beauty standards since we've existed. Just look back at the art. Look around the world. It's true that in America the generalized ideal for a woman is to be thin, but this is because we're currently at a point where food is no longer difficult to obtain but rather an abundance and weight’s factored in as a serious issue. Look back to the days of the Depression, at the models back then -- clearly they were meatier, but no less attractive. And in countries round the world where food is an issue, a lot of people find the ideal woman to be as such, woman need a certain amount of body fat in order to breed. Anorexia however has had reported cases since before all this, and before heroin-chic was the new ’sexy’. Granted, the number of reported cases and the study of eating disorders has increased since that stereotype has come in to play, but my point is it’s not always about trying to fit in.

I could say so much more on this, but I didn’t come to this article to rant. I simply came to show remorse over miss Caro’s death, as I’ve been following her case for awhile and I find it extremely disheartening that she didn’t succeed in her battle with the disorder.

So rest in peace, miss Isabelle Caro.

It is a disease in the same way that obesity is a disease or alcoholism is a disease.

You're right, you're no doctor.

The modeling agencies probably told her she was to fat, so she starved herself so she could continue modeling.

I get so sick of seeing models that are 5'10" and weigh 100 lbs. If they're a size 2 they are to fat.

I'm 5 ft and barely 100 lbs and I'm NOT fat!

Then we got shows like Toddlers and Tiara's and these toddlers are being molded into little glamor queens. What are they going to be like when they grow up?

This sh!t needs to stop! Our young girls look at the models in the magazines and think that that is the way they should look.....thin is in. CRAZY!!!

I agree. Women who are just a tad pudgy have bigger tits.

I has a lady tell me she entered her daughter in beauty contests so she could develope self confidence. To me, that teaches a girl to depend on her looks. When my daughter was in middle school, she was always picked on by other kids and I enrolled her in martial arts. Her karate class gave a demonstration at her school and when it was her turn, she broke a couple of boards with her hand. All the kids were there and saw that. Needless to say, things were a lot better after that. The best thing you can do, is try to teach them not to depend on their looks alone.

i agree with you.

she could no more be instructed to eat than you could be taught how to have simple human compassion and the ability to filter which thoughts you decide to express to the world.

Yes, and thus contribute to the obesity epidemic. I agree with tompca.

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

- Abraham Lincoln

Right on . . . The Beev. Men love curves!

@ The Beev: The fashion designers do "get it". It's about the fashions that they are selling. They have no interest in having the models catch anyone's eye. They want the fashions to jump off the page and look fabulous. Fabric drapes better on a stick figure, so that's why they choose "Twiggy". The people who don't "get it" are the women who read anything more into the ads than the ads are meant to sell clothes (or some other product).

Other than that, I completely agree. Healthy people always look the best.

Lee is absolutely right. It's all about the clothes and how they hang on the model, not the bones that are wearing them.

In the first place, who the hell do these fashion guys think they are? and why do people think they have to follow them? Runway models look and act like bones with attitude. I don't know who is more stupid, the models or the women who emulate them. At least models get paid a huge sum, regular women can't get anything but disapointment trying to look like them.

Right on sister!

I got a better idea: In the words of the late great Marie Antoinette...

"Let them eat cake!"

sorry about your mom. what the hell is with your old man though? he sounds a bit toxic..... no offense intended. you seem to have learned from it and your empathy shows. and you're right about the pre-teen years. it's amazing just how much of our mind is shaped during that time.

tks for sharing k--so many ppl just don't understand this issue at all; I like ppl to talk but if you can't at least be open to try to understand, i'd rather them keep their mouth shut. Least the way it is in my life. Been dealing with anorexia & bulimia for 17 yrs now with complications-some serious/life-threatening. I never know what's going to happen. You do the best you can with what you got and keep fighting no matter what.

All disordered eating is an attempt at control. If the only thing you can control is what you put in your mouth then every bit of control you can muster goes into that.

Attend any meeting of Overeaters Anonymous and you'll hear almost everyone there say that they were sexually abused as children. If you're fat, the dirty old men won't look at you, and make rude comments, and feel you up, and force you to have sex. If you're extremely thin, the dirty old men won't look at you, and make rude comments, and feel you up, and force you to have sex.

Very little of anorexia is trying to be thin enough to make it on to a magazine cover. It's more trying to take your body back to before puberty, which most of us just aren't trained to deal with these days. Or wanting to not be noticed, to disappear.

my question is are you born with a eating disorder or do you choose to have it?

My sympathies regarding your mother, Kivrin. Another whole set of sympathies for you regarding your clueless dad, I hope he will soon realize the devastating impact his carelessly tossed-off words can have and that his "opinions" on your or anyone else's weight are unwanted, unwarranted, and unnecessary. I also agree with you that eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are FAR more than vanity or "fitting the beauty mold" and far more than just mental disorders. Eating disorders do often start as a control thing - if someone feels as if they have no control over certain aspects of their life or over what happens to them past, present or future, they become obsessed with what they can control, and food intake is probably the easiest to come to mind. Sexual, mental, any childhood abuse seems to be a huge component in this vicious cycle, it's all just layer upon layer of sad, sad, sad. Even those that can come to terms with the eating disorder still have to come to terms with the abuse that triggered it. It just shouldn't happen.

As a "recovering" anorexic, I agree that the disease is very complex. Mine was not triggered by wanting to be thin at all but by remembering abuse as has been mentioned above. The wanting to be thin was a secondary gain. I did get the "You are too fat," messages when I was younger, however, even though I was never the least bit overweight-according to my mom, medical records, and pictures. Maybe this is just my story, but not eating becomes a compulsion, a numbing behavior to help you cope (kind of like alcohol numbs you). It gets to where eating triggers panic, as does weight gain of any kind or any feeling of tightness in your clothes. You start to panic if you haven't LOST weight or if anyone says something like, "You look good," or "You look healthy." ("Good" and "Healthy" mean "fat" at that point.) I was so sick I used to be proud when people were worried about me and afraid about my health. Your thinking is SO messed up! I don't think you can think straight unless you get some nutrition, and then you have to stay healthy long enough to hear someone as they try to work with you to unravel all your sick, twisted thinking. You have to be willing to change your thinking completely, and not everyone is willing or even able to do that-while you do that, you experience intense anxiety and panic like you are going to die. It's really hard. If your insurance runs out before you get healthy enough or straightened out enough, you go right back. One thing that makes it hard is all the well-meaning people who maybe don't know you are anorexic who tell you you look great and ask how you managed to lose all that weight! Of course that just feeds into it. What saved me ultimately was that I had an intense, compelling reason to get well-my daughter. She found out and learned about eating disorders at school-she came crying, saying, "You could die!" That lit a rocket under me, and with God's help (yes, God) it's been straight ahead ever since.

So all of you who get off on saying mean things, it wouldn't kill you to learn a little. We've all got something. You, too.

Diana are you simply splittiing hairs by saying a mental illness is not a disease or do you deny that there is such a thing as menal illness at all?

I agree Diana...if this had been a picture of a plus-size woman, there would be nothing but hateful comments like "put the fork down". Dieing from starvation is no different than dieing from the side affects of obesity. Its a mental thing, not a disease. Either put the fork down or pick the fork up......choices on both sides.

I find that picture to be gross, not sad.....

D Russ...its not splitting hairs..people who eat too much or too little are not mentally ill...they have made a choice. Sometimes the choice is not easily reversible.

Lord, I hate trolls

diana........you're pathetic. I can't believe you're a female let alone a human being. were you at McDonalds when they were handing out compassion? it sounds like you supersized that side order of ignorance.

You are wrong. A valid comparison would not be a plus-size person but a 600 lb person who obviously has a mental health issue. If you can't see the difference between a plus size woman and a person dying from starvation then......

no, in our society, I don't see the difference..except that folks have compassion for someone who won't eat to say alive but none for someone who eats too much. On this board, people are absolutely cruel on overweight issues, but show "bones" and its sap-central. I don't buy it.......

Diana, I agree, there was nothing wrong with her that a ham sandwich and/or a swift kick in the ass wouldn't cure.

Disagree-I have just as much compassion for a person who is controlled by overeating...underneath it all it is rarely about the food,but the ability to have control over something...and the sad thing is that while the anorexic or morbidly obese person thinks they are in control they are being killed by the very thing that makes them feel whole or safe...that is why it is important to realize that this is a mental health issue that has physical effects....what makes it so difficult to break the "habit' is that,unlike alcohol or drugs, you need food to survive...the very thing that is the main focus of this illness

I also think compulsive overeating is a disease, and I have compassion for people who have it. There were many people diagnosed with it in treatment with me when I had anorexia. If you haven't been there, you really don't know what you are talking about.

Diana, my anorexia began when I spontaneously remembered abuse and felt so sick about it I couldn't eat as much-I also involuntarily vomited a lot (I was so disgusted with my body because of the abuse I was physically ill)-so after several months I had lost several pounds. At that point I was having panic attacks because of the abuse. I panicked at the thought of gaining the weight back and somehow felt like I needed to lose more. At that point I was not near critical body weight, where my brain would start to shut down from lack of nutrition. Tell me how this was just a series of bad decisions and stupidity.

I have probably wasted all that deep gut-level personal disclosure on you, and that ticks me off. But maybe someone will see that anorexia is not just someone being willful and just needing a kick in the pants so they will eat a cheeseburger for God's sake! Or someone turning up their nose at a milkshake to lose pounds for the prom! People are dying of this!

wow really? honestly Diana it is barely covered by insurance so that isn't even a valid argument. the fact is it is not a choice which is what is so infuriating about you and pro-ana people. you can chose to not eat and call it annorexia or you can chose to over eat however eating disorders are not choices. They are driggered by emotions and issues in your life not just because you feel like trying to lose weight. The fact is you can make a person who is annorexic eat however you haven't cured them, you can make someone who has decided not to eat themselves eat and they are cured. you can make someone who has binge eating stop eating but you havent cured them but someone who over eats because they decided to can stop and be fine. the fact it is a mental disorder that will not be cured without therapy same as depression. It is sad that people are so close minded still about this that they would even say this about someone who fought their entire lives. no one decides to do this to themselves because if they did they would stop. this isnt fun it isnt something I would wish on my worst enemy it consumes you and you are never free of this disease. people are dying of this and you are so ignorant to this fact it is sickening.

- seen too much I know exactly where you are coming from I am sorry for all that you have gone through and I share in your pain. I wish you well and wish you the best.

Humm... maybe some of the fault lies with misogynistic gay male fashion designers. If a man does not like women, in fact finds the female body disgusting, it seems that they would want to strip the feminine appearance from their models. Not that I am bashing gays, but maybe the mental illness starts with the designer and they inflict that abuse on the models.

I know a lot of men and not a single one looks at an anorexic model and says "OH yeah, she is hot!" Start putting those twisted designers out of business and maybe the demand for starved models will disappear.

Well then women need to stop buying dresses from queers.

Hmmmm...Well, I remember (back in the 1990'sespecially) Playboy frequently featured the stick skinny girls with the huge implants. They frequently do today as well, although I have noticed through the years they vary the body types. I wouldn't give straight men a free pass on the "we don't cause women any body image issues", maybe not all guys are so shallow, but I have met many who are. I've also heard men say horribly disparaging things about their wives bodies while in the presence of other men, so I can see where girls could still get some hang-ups on the weight issue from guys.

I used to work in the administrative branch of the auto industry in Detroit. I was typically the only woman in the board meetings, and I always played it cool and unaffected (we needed the business and I needed the job). Privately though, I was appalled at some of the things that were said with regards to women.

I would not suggest that men have no role to play in body image issues. I just get upset that straight men are usually blamed for every issue that affects women. Women are not just victims - they are powerful actors in their own lives and cultures too.

It is not "society". That is a cop-out. Be specific. Who is looking at these stick models? Who is buying what they display? Who holds them up in esteemed postions in society? The answer, sad to say, is almost entirely other women. Last time I looked, women only make up half of "society".

Apparently you aren't familiar with the media or the fashion industry, also made up of men....Educate yourself, Hon.

The fashion industry is made up of straight men? Gee I'm sure both of them would agree with you.....

It is funny how many feminists somehow chose not see the relationship between gay men and the industries feminists often vilified. I think this was because the feminist movement for the last couple decades was as much about gay rights (a noble cause) as for women's rights specifically. It would not have been PC in their movement to point out the relationship between gay men and misogynistic industries, media, or other organizations (like the church) during that phase of feminism's history. It is a valid topic of research and discussion now however, Hon.

I would just like to add that I am for promoting a healthy lifestyle in both women AND men. I don't care who is the root of the problem - gay men, straight men, lesbians, straight women, bisexuals. It doesn't matter. Fact is, MANY people are suffering. No woman or man should feel the need to starve themselves to be accepted.

it's broad, stupid

marcieme. Most people are sheep, they are easily read.

so, she'll at least be eatin' angel food cake?

is being skinny being "perfect"???

No, but being skinny with double-D tits is.

Scott Denbina ~~ How old are you? Does your mom know you're playing on the computer? The reason I ask is that ALL of your posts are quite immature, and it seems you are a VERY ill informed person. Not only immature and ignorant, but extremely dis-respectful, disregarding the sensitivity of this subject, and the sad consequences of such a disease. I don't usually respond to such garbage posts as yours, but today, I felt compelled. I hope you get your head screwed on straight. You are sorely in need of an attitude adjustment.

Lorene: Bite me.