Student, 19, developed anorexia after 'toxic' ex told her he was into thigh gap

A student developed anorexia after her controlling boyfriend told her he was attracted to thighs gaps. Geneva Ottavianvo, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, slipped into an unhealthy obsession with being skinny as she tried to please her ‘toxic’ ex-boyfriend.

Admin assistant, Geneva, now aged 22, said her boyfriend’s attraction to her being dangerously thin led her to skip meals and deliberately starve herself. During the ‘controlling’ relationship, Geneva said she took drastic steps to be skinny, lost 40 pounds in just six months and was eventually diagnosed with anorexia by a doctor in December 2016.

Geneva, who has since ended the relationship and now weighs a healthy 144lbs, said: ‘The relationship I was in at the time was mentally abusive and generally very unhealthy. I ended up not feeding myself properly.

‘I wanted to be skinny because a lot of people think that’s the ideal body type for a young woman.

‘My boyfriend at the time was obsessed with me having a thigh gap and that played on my mind a lot. He always used to say ‘wow you have a thigh gap, that’s really attractive.

‘It wasn’t until afterwards that I realized it was not normal to be like that. But I thought if that’s how he wants me to look then I should try because it makes him happy.

‘I had stopped eating properly and looked like a skeleton, but I completely ignored it for a long time.’

Geneva grew up in New York but moved to Philadelphia to study as a teenager and recalls how in her mid to late teens, her weight was at a healthy 140 pounds.

It wasn’t until she entered into a relationship with someone she met through college, at the age of 18 in early 2016, that she developed an unhealthy obsession with eating as little as possible.

Fuelled by her new boyfriend’s desire for her to have gap between her thighs, Geneva said she starting drastically cutting back on her portion sizes, stopped eating snacks and often avoided eating three full meals a day.

In recent times a thigh gap has formed a trend among some teenager girls and young women who see it as a sign of physical fitness and the beauty ideal. However experts have warned the extreme look is impossible for almost all women to obtain while living a healthy lifestyle, and have urged them to ignore the trend.

‘I would cook him something to eat but I’d not eat when he did, I’d have something much smaller’, said Geneva.

‘I snacked a lot of the time and sometimes didn’t have all the meals I should have. Because I used to snack it might have seemed like I was eating enough to other people, but I knew I wasn’t.

‘My family did start to notice but whenever they mentioned it I just got really defensive about it.’

Around a year into the relationship, in December 2016, Geneva visited her doctor for an annual medical which she says served as a wake-up call about her eating disorder. Geneva said her doctor told her she was too skinny and needed to change her ways for the sake of her health.

She was formally diagnosed with anorexia, as well as depression and anxiety.

But despite being told to eat more because she was unhealthily thin, Geneva was still dating her boyfriend and admits to failing to change her ways. It wasn’t until the relationship came to an end, in July 2017, that Geneva finally started to gain weight.

She said: ‘I didn’t put weight on until the relationship had ended even though I know I should have changed.

‘After the doctors I was in denial and I slipped into bad habits pretty much straight away.

‘But when the relationship ended I remember going shopping with my mom and we bought lots of really nice food, that was the first step to recovery for me. I started eating as much as I could to gain weight.

‘I stopped caring about what other people thought and stopped letting other people dictate what I eat.’

Between July 2017 and April 2018 Geneva had gained around 40 pounds on the road to recovery and said she began enjoying eating healthy amounts of food again.

But during this time she was not working out and said driven by a desire to get fitter and stronger, decided to join her local gym.

Now Geneva, who currently weighs 144 pounds, is a fitness fanatic who works out five times a week and carefully managed her daily food intake to ensure she’s eating a healthy and balanced diet.

Having previously ignored conversations about food, Geneva now shares fitness tips, nutrition support and inspiration to hundreds of followers on Instagram about food and fitness.

Geneva said: ‘My body shape and composition has completely toned and I am more toned now.

‘I find it scary to look back at how skinny I was. The photos do not remind me of good times in my life.

‘The skinniest version of me is not the best version of me and that is something for everyone to learn from.’