[Hildy]

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Before she was the severely brain-damaged patient at the center of a legal dispute over whether she should live or die, Terri Schiavo was a young woman who desperately wanted to be thin.

At 26, she was strikingly beautiful with delicate features. But she had spent her childhood and high school years as a chubby and shy girl, standing just 5-foot-3 and weighing 200 pounds at her heaviest.

When she finally lost 65 pounds in her late teens, men started to pay attention -- including the man who would become her husband, Michael Schiavo, who was tall and handsome.

But keeping the weight off was a struggle for Terri Schiavo, and years later -- after her heart stopped briefly, cutting off oxygen to the brain -- a malpractice case brought against a doctor on her behalf would reveal she had been trying to survive on liquids and was making herself throw up after meals. The Schiavos' lawyer said her 1990 collapse was caused by a potassium imbalance brought on by an eating disorder.

It is a cruel twist lost on no one close to the case: A woman who is said to have struggled with an eating disorder is now in the middle of a court battle over whether her feeding tube should be removed so that she can starve to death.

[the Deejay]

I'm tellin' ya, all this girls & women that are Bulimic, just to keep their weight down, are playing a dangerous game.

Also, the Anorexia girls. It all takes its toll sooner or later and in one way or another.

[llama hunter]

wow that is a sad irony

[veronica]

Do you have a link to that AP article?