Isabelle Caro, close-up from Nolita billboard ad, September, 2007
UPDATE #2
(Jan 20, 2011)
Isabelle's mother has committed suicide:
UPDATE #1:
Sadly, on November 17, 2010, Isabelle passed away.
More details can be found in my post here:
Click link:
"A skeleton. I see a skeleton. But one on the road to recovery." (Isabelle Caro)
Oliviero Toscani's Nolita billboard ad featuring Isabelle Caro
"I thought this could be a chance to use my suffering to get a message across, and finally put an image on what thinness represents and the danger it leads to -- which is death...to make people react, for young girls who see this to think: 'Oh, so that's what lies behind the beautiful clothes, the hair, the image that we are shown of fashion.'"
Isabelle, 2007
"[My mother] said, 'Do you know how heavy this is?' " "I weighed 10 pounds more, and I kept thinking 'I'm heavier than that heavy gas cylinder so I am a burden on my mother.' And that's when I thought about wanting to lose weight, to stop my growth. I dropped to about 58 pounds. My meal was reduced to two squares of chocolate and five cornflakes. That's all I ate all day."
Isabelle, 2007
"I know that it will take time, but I would rather go slowly and surely rather than gain weight rapidly and then fall back into losing it again," she said. "I have to get used to how I look with more weight."
Isabelle, 2007
"I have suffered enormously from the way people look at me. When I first moved to Marseille, nobody spoke to me, people stared at me. I stopped going out of my house. In cafes and bars they refuse to serve me. And that's why I refused to talk about it for such a long time. I was so afraid of people judging me. People just think you just stop eating but that is not what anorexia is. You don't just decide from one day to the next to stop eating. It's very hard. It's real suffering, and it goes deep."
Isabelle, 2007
"I really want to have a child. And I hope my body will allow me to. My doctor says it's possible. I'm still not having periods -- my body is too weak -- but he says it is possible. Then for a relationship. I don't know yet. I'm with somebody now. I don't want to say very much because it's a bit complicated. At the moment it's more an affair of the heart than a physical relationship because, simply, I'm still very thin and it's still very difficult to enjoy normal physical relations with such a tiny body and a man who is a normal size. I'm still nervous about having sex."
Isabelle, 2007
"When I see myself now, I say, 'what a horror. I'm trying to get out of it, and I want young women to know that is possible."
Isabelle, 2007
"I’ve hidden myself and covered myself for too long. Now I want to show myself fearlessly, even though I know my body arouses repugnance. I want to recover because I love life and the riches of the universe. I want to show young people how dangerous this illness is."
Isabelle, 2007 (Note lanugo on her arms)
"Thinness leads to death and it is anything but beautiful." (Isabelle Caro)
Isabelle, 2007
"I had a very complicated childhood, very difficult, very painful. My mother's big phobia was that I would grow. She spent her time measuring my height. She wouldn't let me go outside because she'd heard that fresh air makes children grow, and that's why I was kept at home. It was completely traumatic."
Isabelle, 2008
"You feel as if you master everything, that you are in total control, and then little by little you fall into this hellish spiral, a spiral of death."
Isabelle, 2008
"At one point I went right down to just less than four stone but now I'm almost five. I know I'll keep fighting it because I love life and I believe in that more than anything."
Isabelle, 2008
"I would fall into comas and when I woke up I'd be delirious, not even remembering who I was."
Isabelle, 2008
"You feel as if you master everything, that you are in total control, and then little by little you fall into this hellish spiral, a spiral of death."
Isabelle on the scale, 2007
"That Christmas [when Isabelle was 13 years old] I asked for some scales. I saw I'd dropped a few pounds so I started eating less and less. My parents were so worried I spent hours weighing myself that mum broke my scales."
Isabelle, 2007
"I'd panic if I even put on a few grams. I rejected everything I wanted and everything that made me happy for some ideal of a pure life. It was an absolute hell - that's what this disease does to you."
Isabelle, 2007
"I had a very close relationship with my mother, which led me down the path of anorexia. She wanted me to be her little girl for ever. So as I started puberty I hated the idea that my body was going to change. I wanted to have the body of a child for ever, to make my mother happy."
Isabelle Caro, 2007
"To break the monotony of my younger days I pretended to have a stomach ache... I ended up in hospital and the doctor weighed me and my mother shot me a disapproving glance when he said how many kilos I was. I understood that for her I weighed too much. So from that day, slowly, slowly, I stopped eating."
Isabelle Caro, 2007
"I'd have painful cramps every morning and I would crawl to the fridge to eat something just so I had enough strength to get in the shower. And then my body was so tender and so ravaged by needles from the transfusions that every drop of water hurt."
Isabelle Caro from Toscani's Nolita shoot, September, 2007
"[My psychologist] said the only way I could get through it was to see them just on Mother's Day or Father's Day at first. She noticed that my mother always argued with me about food. But my parents weren't happy... and the doctor only helped me for six months."
Isabelle Caro, 2007
"Every day I fight the demons of anorexia... I'm eating more calories every day and it's really hard, but I know I'll make it."
Stills of Isabelle Caro from the Toscani Nolita ad shoot
"I still eat almost nothing, but I've stopped vomiting. I have started to distinguish tastes of things. I have tried ice-cream - it's delicious."
Isabelle Caro, January, 2009
"Now I want to show myself without fear, even though I know that my body is repugnant. The suffering I have experienced only makes sense if it can be of help to others who have fallen in to the trap from which I am trying to escape."
Isabelle Caro at book signing (her autobiography), January, 2009
Links:
Isabelle Caro's blog:
(English translation of main blog page here):
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Laura, 7 years old
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