I have been in the hospital for anorexia more times than I care to count. Dehydration is usually the starting issues.....it's when they take the blood cound & if it shows up to anemic.....then the hospital ends up keeping the person & either puts them on a central line with TPN nutrition or a feeding tube to get the body out of the anemic state.

The central line for me was a horrible experience & one time the surgeon actually knicked my lung with the needle that they put in the artery next to your heart so that the food goes directly into the blood.

I can honestly tell you from personal experience....it's better to eat at least small amounts to get back to eating more normally.....it's not something to mess around with. When I was in the hospital for anorexia right before my mother's funeral, the hospital's pdoc said he would put me on a 72 hour hold because I was a danger to myself since he believed that within a few days I would not be alive if I didn't agree immediately to the central line.....would have meant I couldn't go to my mother's funeral. Graciously, my GP did not react so extremely & looked the other way when I left the hospital Against Medical Advice....with the promise to come back to the hospital right after the funeral.

In reality....ED's are not something to mess around with....I think that within families, there is the mental attitude toward weight that tends to keep in going through the generations. Most of the time ED's are based from stressful situations in life or a trauma in one's background or in my case it was a current trauma I went through that last time.

I think there is just too much of the belief that genes are the cause of our problems & that it's not really our choice because of that.....NOT TRUE....it's always our choice to eat or not to eat.....& the desire to live really needs to be there also much stronger then the desire to loose weight.