I don’t mean to be lurid, but I had a pang of deep empathy when I read, in the Times of London this morning that:

A “severely emaciated” Michael Jackson weighed just over 8 stone (51kg) [112 pounds] according to leaked results from an official autopsy.

And elsewhere, that…

…the 5ft 10in star — once famed for his on-stage athleticism… had been eating just one meagre meal a day. Pathologists found his stomach empty…

Though John Lennon died by different means, it is generally accepted (though not widely known) that he too was also prone to anorexia. Just one of many sources notes:

John had time to obsess with his health and weight. He considered sugar to be the world’s poison and banish it from the house. Also he managed to control his habit of ingesting food indiscriminately. Once a husky man, prone towards obesity, he became nearly an anorexic. John at 5 feet 10 inches, weighed only 140 pounds. Unfortunately John could not kick his chain smoking, nor the 20 cups a day espresso drinking habits.

Anorexia in women, particularly the young and affluent, is a well-known and sadly widespread phenomenon. In dying from it, Karen Carpenter defined the extreme, but among women I know, it’s easy to tick off half a dozen who probably suffer from what is ultimately a psychological malady — a misplaced means of coping with circumstances over which one feels little or no control.

There is a woman around town here — very affluent — whom everyone refers to as “anorexic walking woman”. One sees her power-walking everywhere, miles and miles and miles in any weather, usually bundled up in a coat, her hollow eyes matched by stick-legs. Another woman I know — nice, smart, also well-off… she used to take two or three 90-minute Bikram (hot) yoga classes per day. You could see it in her eyes also, though you didn’t need to in a leotard. She confessed to me, once we got to know one another, that she struggled with it, though that admission didn’t deter her from the obsessive exercise.

Driving Springy and a friend home from an athletic practice several weeks ago, the topic somehow came up (her coaches make it a routine, every season, of warning parents to watch out for telltale signs). I asked the two of them: “If you had to guess, how many girls at the high school have eating disorders?” My own guess, which I didn’t share with them, was about a third. After an uncharacteristically long moment of reflection, they each responded, independently and almost simultaneously: “about 35-40%”.

The condition in men often surprises people. How do I know? I used to suffer from it. Sometimes it comes up in conversation (usually as we parents talks talk about what’s facing our girls nowadays). When I ‘weigh-in’ with authoritative personal insights, the reaction is almost universal: What? You? I didn’t know guys ‘got’ it.

We do.

In high school, I had already achieved my adult height of 6-foot one and yet, for a little over two years I weighed-in at between 140 and 142 pounds — not anywhere near Jacksonian, but ‘ahead’ of John Lennon. (Anorexics think in comparative, competitive terms — their/our ‘achievement’ making them/us feel superior to the rest of the world.)

I can recall feeling great pleasure when I got down to 139 one day at the end of a week that included over 70 miles of hard running. And I can recall feeling shameful and out of control when the scale tipped up to 143 or 144. (I kept obsessive records of all of this.) I’m about 35 pounds heavier nowadays, a weight which allows me to run marathons without any trouble. Most people still think I’m pretty slim. I look at pictures of myself from those days and cringe. Sure, I was boyish. That accounts for a few pounds. But not thirty-five. Not even close.

My diet during those years consisted of one piece of dry toast and half a glass of orange juice for breakfast, a cup of skim milk and a single orange for lunch (no snacks at all, ever — my self-imposed rule). I would allow myself one serving at dinner — no butter allowed if there were rolls or other bread on offer. No dessert either, of course — I felt extra-superior turning down that indulgence.

I was cold all the time. Upon coming home from school, I would crawl into bed for an hour to stem the hunger pangs while I waited for dinner. (It also helped me avoid the temptation of my mom offering me pre-dinner snacks.) My parents never knew.

It’s not that they were clueless or un-loving. Far from it. It’s just that I was working hard to ensure they didn’t know. Making others believe you are eating enough is an art form, the dark, intricate, self-imposed secrets of which could fill several volumes, with chapter headings such as “Portion Control for Dummies”, “Pushing Food Around the Plate 101″, “Maintaining Discipline When it Seems Painful”, “How to Deflect Concern Before it Surfaces” and “Responses Guaranteed to Shut Off Future Scrutiny”.

But man, did it feel good. I can put myself back in that world and remember it vividly. It ‘worked’ according to its own rules. At a time when I felt I could control almost nothing (or so it seemed), there was one thing I could. Anorexia was my private refuge… a discipline which made me (in my own mind) better than everyone else.

And there’s the irony. Or at least one. As the great C.S. Lewis has noted (e.g., in ‘The Great Divorce’), hell is a natural extension of a process of turning inward. It begins here on earth.

Anorexia, at least as I experienced it, is not all that far from what I understand to be the suicidal mindset: a strange combination of pride (feelings of superiority and self-obsession) combined with rage, loneliness, despair and the belief that one is unable to change one’s situation. (It also excludes an external savior and is therefore essentially atheistic).

Ultimately my condition subsided with time, plus the freedom and independence that came with a car and with going away to college. It came back one summer back at home. Then it just drifted back into the past. Without ever identifying what was going on or getting treatment, I just grew out of it.

Sadly, as many have observed, Michael never had much of a childhood and thus he never really grew up or out of anything. With the world beating him down and isolating him (when you’re rich, how do you know who your real friends are?), anorexia would have been an easy, obvious refuge that he could justify (albeit thinly) on the grounds of getting ‘in shape’ for his upcoming tour.

Absent the music bit, it’s the same justification I used in high school: that it would make me fast for track and cross country. Looking back I realize I could have run faster if I hadn’t been running on fumes, digesting my own muscle tissue just to stay alive.

Which is all to say that, once I heard of this superficial symptom (anorexia), I found it much easier to empathize with what must have been a deep, deep anguish in Michael — a man whom I too thought was ‘weird’.

Yet now I think I ‘get’ him. A little. It’s a strange kind of hell from which I pray he has now been released. May God rest his tortured soul.