ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, we saw that the interviewees used the same term – ‘carrying on’ – to talk about a period that, in their view, extended from the original diet to when they were hospitalized. We also saw that analysing this period distinguished two separate phases that sometimes overlapped to some extent. During the second phase of the anorexic career, discussed in the previous chapter, the definition of the situation changed progressively. ‘Carrying on’ was increasingly defined as a way of ‘not stopping’ despite the requests and demands of external actors:1
At the beginning, my mum said to me ‘Right, well, that’s very good, if you’ve lost a bit of weight, if you’re better like that, good for you, but now you have to stop’ and then bit by bit she started saying ‘Right, now, you really have to stop’ and, [pauses] I didn’t stop and that’s when it started, they started to worry.
