Micaela, whose surname is Bozzolasco, smiles at the kids in the audience and apologizes for her emotion: “I’m not used to speaking in front of so many people.” The university classroom (it’s the Catholic University in Rome, it’s early May) is packed and everyone is hanging on her lips, because the story she tells about herself is one that gets into her bones.
And it begins with the bones, the term that Micaela always uses to explain what happened to her, when she was little more than a child, when her never-ending story of anorexia began. Just as happens to one in three teenagers who, according to the latest chilling statistics, begin to suffer from so-called “eating disorders” before the age of 14: «I felt alone, I felt the cold in my bones. I felt that no one could see me for who I was and I was the first.”
This forty-year-old from Genoa who looks like a little girl and never stops smiling has been ill with anorexia for half her life. But she doesn’t want to talk about her illness, the “minimum weight” she reached, the hospitals, the terror in the eyes of mom and dad who didn’t understand what was happening to her, and why she decided not to eat until she died. “The numbers are not the point, not the measurements.”
The point is Micaela, with her recovery: «It took a long time to understand that I had to ask for help. It helped not to stop in front of some doctors who talked to me about my “disorder” as if it were a whim of mine, something I could control, that I chose – she explains. There was a need for proper care, which I eventually found. There was a need for a look at myself, for relationships that I slowly managed to sew and mend, when I took off the sunglasses with which I saw everything black and I reconnected my head with my body.”
It is not a horror story that impresses the audience of young people, visibly moved, not the descent into the underworld of food deprivation, weight loss, loneliness. Micaela’s eyes light up when she talks about the first morning when, leaving the house, she saw the temperature on the pharmacy cross: “Because when I walked, before, I did it with my head down, ashamed of who I was.” Life has started again and when she wakes up she can’t stand it: «I’ve wasted too much time, I’ve wasted too many days. I am filled with the desire to live.”
It is the driving force that pushed her not to stop at her recovery, but to work hard so that anorexia and bulimia are recognized as diseases, so that families no longer feel alone. And that’s what put her on the path of Stefano Tavilla, a father who couldn’t save her daughter, con which he founded the Fiocchetto Lilla, the association that in Italy is on the front line on the front of this emergency whose World Day is celebrated on 2 June.
Another photo of Micaela with Stefano Tavilla and another member of Fiocchetto Lilla – .
Very, very little good news. And not just because in Italy in 2000 there were 300 thousand sick people and today they are well over 3 million (a large part of which are teenagers, as was said a little while ago, and more and more males) and because last year the victims of food were 3,780, the number that those of the Fiocchetto Lilla wear sewn on their t-shirts. «Among eating disorders there are increasingly less well-known pathologies such as orthorexia (i.e. the obsessive search for a healthy diet), vigoroxia (excessive attention to physical fitness), diabulimia (patients with diabetes type 1, who omit insulin to lose weight) or binge eating disorder (Binge eating disorder), characterized by large binges without methods of compensation, which is followed by weight gain and, often, the onset of pathologies such as obesity” explains Laura Dalla Ragione, psychiatrist, director of the Umbrian network (Usl1) against brain disorders eating behavior, professor at the Biomedical Campus of Rome and director of the “SOS Eating Disorders” toll-free number 800180969 established in Todi by the Presidency of the Council and the Higher Institute of Health. For Dalla Ragione, those who work in the field of eating disorders have found themselves in recent years having to fight against a very powerful factor in the spread of the disorder: social media.
«Today the channels through which boys and girls can draw on information regarding dangerous methods for losing weight have multiplied disproportionately – notes the expert -. And not only that: apps for calorie counting or energy expenditure are available to everyone, and even the simple use of social media has an influence on self-esteem and contributes to changing the body image of those who use it, leading to an increase of depressive symptoms, the internalization of ideals of thinness, body monitoring practices”.
In short, the (immense) time spent online and the development of food-related diseases appear strongly correlated in younger people. The day being celebrated today is an opportunity to strike a blow, a few months after the controversy with the government over the cut, then reversed, of funds to the already very lacking assistance network in our territory: if in fact the establishment of multidisciplinary clinics constituted an important step forward in the path of patient care, «the latter are still present in a too uneven way on the Italian territory – continues Dalla Ragione -. Of the 136 facilities registered in 2023 by the ISS, the greatest number of centers (69) are located in the Northern regions, 26 are located in the Center, 41 are distributed between the South and the Islands. The Ministry of Health has decided to refinance the National Fund with 10 million euros for 2025, but we are still waiting to see the so-called “eating disorders” included in the Essential Levels of Assistance (Lea) in order to ensure assistance to patients in a structural way.” And hope that stories like Micaela’s do not remain isolated cases or strokes of luck.
