June 21, 2002 | 9:41 AM

I have lost a LOT of weight. I still have a LOT more weight to lose.

I have to lose another fifty lbs. at least to get down to my goal weight. And my goal weight is not skinny. I want to be a size 10-12. I want to be able to go running and not feel horrible in a bathing suit.

I am trying not to get crazy over it. It�s hard, though. I get in a groove and I don�t want to eat. Yesterday I had two eggs for breakfast, nothing for lunch and nothing for dinner. Bad, I know. And I know what it does to your metabolism. I know it�s stupid. I was in the outpatient eating disorders clinic for a long time. I just get... obsessive. And I want to push myself to see how far I can go. The endorphins. The light-headedness. The illusory sense of control. As much as I despise the whole pro-ana concept and fight very hard to not succumb, I do understand it�s appeal.

I go to extremes of eating. Once I ate three large pizzas all by myself in a day. Then I threw them up and ate another pizza. I know�gross.

I have also not eaten for three days at a time.

Once I went to the mall with my Mom during one of my starvation diets and I ordered a diet coke. I took one sip and realized it was regular coke and I freaked out. I literally flipped. I was maybe fourteen or fifteen and the time. All I could think about for the rest of the day was that I had a sip of regular coke. I went on a five mile run and only ate three teaspoons of cream of wheat a day for the next week.

This is a sickness. It is not positive. It doesn�t display strength or discipline to be able to submit to such gross preoccupation and fascistic tyranny over your own body. It pains me so much to hear people on diaryland talk about anorexia as though it�s a positive lifestyle choice. Pro-ana people are like religious nuts. They hold steadfastly to a doctrine and defend it at any cost. The dogma is self-sacrifice, martyrdom, and the illusory goal of �perfection�. They remind me of that saint who subsisted only on bugs and cut herself all the time to prove her allegiance to God.

Don�t get me wrong. Anorexia and bulimia are diseases. And it is so painful to suffer from them. But they are also learned behaviors. Can you remember the cults of teenage girls in high school comparing how many tic tacs they�d eaten that day? Cutting up their english muffin haves into itty bitty pieces and chewing each piece a hundred times? Taking trips to the gym together and seeing who could stairmaster the longest? It�s not like cancer or schizophrenia where you have no or hardly any control over getting better. People who have eating disorders can learn to change their behavior. One of the primary ways of doing that is to change your world view and quit being such a narcissist and victim. Being anorexic absolutely precludes those two stances. I have an enormous amount of empathy for the pro-ana girls because I am so much like them. I thank my lucky stars that I can take a step outside of it all and look at the whole fucking thing with some level of objectivity.

I made myself eat a bagel this morning. And I have been telling myself all day that just because I ate a bagel doesn�t mean I�m going to go crazy and devour tw0o gallons of ice cream. I have a choice. I don�t have to be a slave to gluttony nor do I have to be at the mercy of starvation.

But eating that bagel makes me not want to eat for the next three days.

why oh why does food have to be so fucking complicated?