Wednesday, March 30th, 2005

Your straphanger's eyes go from a grim newspaper report about Terri Schiavo and the feeding tube to a subway ad for TrimSpa diet pills featuring an ebulliently slim Anna Nicole Smith.

"Be envied," reads the slogan.

The ad has pictures of Smith before and after she began taking the TrimSpa pills that enabled her to lose 65 pounds. You had read that Schiavo used another diet, NutriSystem, to shed 60 pounds toward the end of high school.

You look at the before picture of Smith, which is presented as an image of how a young woman would never want to look. You think this must be a little bit like Schiavo must have looked during high school, when she carried 200 pounds on a 5-foot-3 frame.

Like any teenage American girl, Schiavo would have been bombarded with images from magazines and TV and movies of how a young woman should want to look, which is to say slender, preferably with a big bust.

The boys also take cues from these images, and Schiavo neared the end of high school without a date. She had no prom to remember and she had yet to experience her first kiss.

But then, presto! Schiavo went on the NutriSystem diet and dropped nearly a third of her weight. She suddenly had a boyfriend and she got her first kiss and she was as excited as if he were David Cassidy or one of those other TV heartthrobs whose posters she put up in her room.

Her excitement over him could only have made the boyfriend feel like a kind of star, which was not likely something Michael Schiavo ever expected to feel. Michael Schiavo would later say he was surprised by how hard he fell for her right from the start.

The two married and moved to Florida, where the climate leads people to dress as they do in after pictures. Terri Schiavo had all the requisites to make hers a happily ever after, but part of her must have feared that this was only because of NutriSystem.

And, as every crash dieter learns, the real challenge is keeping the weight off. A person can adhere to one of those diets for only so long before the spirit as well as the body falters.

At social gatherings, Terry Schiavo began piling her food plate high, as if rebelling against having to deny herself to be desirable. She would then go in the bathroom and purge lest after become before.

In between binges, she attempted her own miracle diet. Her medical records would note, "She apparently has been trying to keep her weight down with dieting by herself, drinking liquids most of the time during the day and drinking about 10-15 glasses of iced tea."

Then, she would rebel and binge and purge herself again, so often that her stomach lining was damaged. The enamel on the back of her teeth was eroded by gastric acids.

Her bulimia nervosa became so severe that the purging deprived her heart of potassium. An executioner's lethal injection does the opposite, flooding the body with potassium, but the effect is the same. A cellular reaction known as the sodium potassium pump is disrupted and the heart can no longer beat.

The paramedics got Terri Schiavo's heart thumping again, but not before she suffered irreversible brain damage. The video of her in a persistent vegetative state can be seen as a kind of an after-after picture.

Michael Schiavo prevailed in the courts to have the feeding tube removed from the young woman who destroyed her health trying to remain thin. Legions of folks who say they hold all life sacred clamored to have the tube reinserted. The U.S. Congress and even the President became involved.

But almost nobody was voicing outrage over the social pressures that landed Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state in 1990. Tens of thousands of other young women are presently bulimic and more than Terri Schiavo will perish.

Meanwhile, we have those happy after, if not necessarily happily ever after, pictures of Anna Nicole Smith in the subway. She was saying just the other day, "I wasn't unhappy at all until just everybody started ridiculing me so bad. I just got to the point that it was just like, 'My God, you know. Just shut up, everybody. What is the big deal.' And then I just looked in the mirror. I'm like, 'I'm fat.'"

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com/