A dream that never lived

Remember the teenage model who died last November of starvation? The Daily Mail has an indepth report of her story that illustrates “how destructive our current perception of female beauty can be.” This is a very hard piece to read, but an important one for anyone who may still believe there are few downsides to this focus on obesity and pursuit of thinness.

Dying for fashion: How one young girl's dream turned into a nightmare

... “The other girls were podgy and had bottoms," she said later. “She won because she was slim and elegant." It doesn't seem an earth-shattering achievement. But for 13-year-old Ana Carolina Reston Marcan it was one step nearer to her dream... But it was on 14 November last year that she finally crossed over from being a successful catwalk model to appearing on the cover of every magazine and newspaper in Brazil, and making headlines around the globe. Not for her modelling, but for her agonising death, attributed to “complications arising from anorexia”...

“She arrived in China," explains a booker, “and the guys looked at her and said, 'You're fat.' “She took this very personally."... Her confidence was being destroyed....(After her death she was found to have survived on a diet of apples and tomatoes.)...

“This encourages a pattern of beauty that is absolutely unreal." These pressures, he continues, lead many such women to build up what he calls “an arsenal of anorexia": special diets, prescription and illegal drugs, starving themselves....Anorexia is obviously not exclusive to the fashion industry, nor to Brazil. According to the Norwich-based Eating Disorders Association, between one and two per cent of young women worldwide suffer from the eating disorder. Most, like Reston, are 15 to 25 years old, and it kills somewhere between 13 and 20 percent of its victims....

“Everyone told her she was ill,” says her mother, “but like all these girls, she denied that it was a problem." Then, suddenly, it was too late.... Two days later she was moved to the Hospital Municipal dos Servidores Publicos, and admitted almost immediately to the intensive care unit, where she spent her last 21 days. Her demise was agonising: a plastic tube was inserted down her throat, so she was unable to tell anyone how she felt, although the tears in her eyes must have made that clear. She weighed six stone.

Patches of her hair had fallen out. Her death certificate cites her time of death as 7:10am and lists the cause as “multiple organ failure, septicaemia, urinary infection”...