At the age of ten, Maaraah, a young middle-class girl from Guadalajara made a decision to redesign herself.

Her parents were divorcing, she was being teased about her plumpness and compared unfavourably to her brothers and sisters. Maaraah felt out of control. So she decided to do something that would put her back in control at least of her own body.

She decided to starve herself.

She had never heard of anorexia. She had no idea that she was doing something that millions of young girls and women around the world were doing. She only knew that it became a compulsion she could not refuse. She starved, she took laxatives and diet pills. When she felt she had to eat for watching eyes, she ate, then threw it up – sometimes as much as seven times a day.

Pro-ana sites
It was the internet that showed her that her strange compulsion was not unique. She discovered the pro-ana and pro-mia sites. Pro-ana is the phenomenon of anorexics claiming that they are making a lifestyle choice, not suffering from a psychological disorder. Pro-mia refers to bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder characterised by recurrent binge eating, followed by compensatory behaviors.

Maaraah herself started a blog that attracted thousands of fans. In certain circles, she even achieved a kind of fame in Mexico.

She went down to 40 kilos. And still her family did not seem to notice. The girls at school flocked to her, telling her she was their role model. But as she got thinner, they stopped coming, silenced by her pallor and obvious state of unhealthy. But the boys didn’t. “You look like a model,” she heard from them, “you’re not like the other girls here who are fat and disgusting.”

Looking fat
“I would touch my body and feel the ribs and know I was thin, but when I looked in the mirror, I looked fat,” she says in a voice too old for a 15-year-old.

Indeed she even did some modelling. And the photo editors had to touch up her photos, make her face and thighs fuller. “When I see those pictures now, I look sick,” she says sadly. Why didn’t her family notice? “They didn’t want to notice.”

Maaraah was finally diagnosed with anorexia and builimia at the age of 14. She’s so out of condition that she can’t walk three blocks without her throat closing up. She has damaged her teeth from all the vomiting, and two of them are loose. Her hair and skin have suffered. Her body, which should be in its prime, is still suffering. But she’s now in recovery and on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet.

And what does she see now when she looks in a mirror?  “I don’t have mirrors in my house – it is forbidden.”

Maarah's story is featured in The State We're In, RNW's programme featuring first-person stories from around the world about human rights, human wrongs and how we treat each other.