Mobile App Makes a Girl Anorexic in Just 5 Months

Being a completely healthy person, a 14-year-old girl turned into a patient who needs artificial feeding over the period of just 5 months. The teenager became the victim of anorexia after getting interested in the mobile application counting calories.

14-year-old Englishwoman Beth O’Brien almost starved to death as she became obsessed with using a special mobile application to count calories. Not so long ago, she was a completely healthy girl, who had a normal body weight. However, after the last New Year, Beth decided to lose a few kilograms.

The girl started to record the number of consumed calories with the help of a special mobile application. Every day, Beth tried to reduce this figure, struggling with herself. Then, the girl developed all the classic signs of anorexia, and 5 months later she was hospitalized and underwent artificial feeding through a tube, inserted in her nose.

However, soon Beth was discharged from hospital because of the lack of available beds in the hospital. Only after her mother’s desperate appeals, the girl was hospitalized in a medical center located 150 kilometers away from her family home in the city of Bristol.

Now, Beth’s mom, 37-year-old Fran O’Brien, wants to warn other teens and their parents about the dangers of using such mobile applications for counting calories – by informing them about her daughter’s mischief. The woman did not specifically indicate her daughter’s current weight because she was afraid that other victims of anorexia would try to match it.

According to the girl’s mother, it is awful when parents feel completely helpless. One may have a child who is seriously ill, and the only remedy is food. But as the parents put this medicine in front of their daughter, she won’t accept it. Beth has completely abandoned eating. And it is not because she did not want to – she could not eat! In her mind, there were some voices that forbade her to eat food, the mother says.