U.K. mother welcomes eating disorder over weight problem
How do you make sure your daughter doesn't end up overweight? Saddle her with an early eating disorder. Or at least that's the logic Aly Gilardoni is living by as she limits her 8-year-old daughter Corleigh's food intake to just 700 calories a day. For the record, that's a little more than half of what the American Heart Association recommends for a growing girl. The kicker? Gilardoni herself is incredibly embarrassed by her own 238 pounds, thinks it severely altered her chances of being happy in the world, and spends her nights alone, gorging on junk food in bed.
"I don't want a fat child," Gilardoni told the Daily Mail. "I'm obsessed with how she looks. I want her to be pretty and popular and she wouldn't be if she was bigger."
And that's really the nugget here, isn't it? The semi-relatable moment that reveals itself to be completely monstrous? Because while every parent has had that fantasy of giving their kids the one thing they didn't have, the idea of that thing being an eating disorder is, well, just freaking horrible. And yet, according to Gilardoni, that is not the worst thing in the world.
"With an eating disorder you can get through it with therapy. But when you're fat, you're fat for life," she said.
Wow, Mom. Way to make Kate Moss's "nothing tastes as good as skinny looks" quote of last year sound positively enlightened.
If there's an upside to this story, it's that somehow, other than being 5 pounds underweight, Corleigh Gilardoni has managed to stay healthy so far. But doctors are wary of what the future will bring.
"Her immune system will suffer, her growth may be affected, puberty will be delayed and there will be a risk of osteoporosis as well as mineral and vitamin deficiency," says Dr. Christian Jessen, a regular on Britain's Channel 4 series, Embarrassing Bodies. "More worryingly, from a psychological point of view, this could trigger severe anorexia that could ultimately kill her."
