Eating disorders are more common than you think

Members of the STA community share their struggles with body image and eating disorders.

January 8, 2015

by Katherine Green and Christina Elias

 

DoSomething.org‘s website defines body image as “the way that someone perceives their body and assumes that others perceive them. This image is often affected by family, friends, social pressure and the media.” According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, anywhere as many as 24 million of the United States’ over 300 million people suffer from eating disorders.

Eating disorders and the media

“My disorder was bulimia, so I would binge eat at times and then I would feel so bad about myself that I would just go and throw up.”

Last winter when junior Hannah* found papers leading to her parents’ divorce, she had already been experiencing difficulty in her friendships, school was stressful and the sport she played was getting crazy. On top of this, her family and others were telling Hannah different things about her weight and size.

It was someone within her family that told Hannah she was wearing clothes inappropriate for her body size. If she actually wanted to fit in with the friends not talking to her, she needed to be like them. She needed to be skinnier.

“That kind of news made me think about [my weight] a lot, and it made me feel sick so at first,” Hannah said. “I was like, ‘Well, he’s right. I need to fix this. Maybe if I do, I’ll become friends with them again.’ So that’s what started [my sickness], and then it was just self-consciousness. At one point, even the smell of food kind of made me sick, but I would get so hungry that I would eat so much in one sitting and I would just throw it up.”for web

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, over one-half of teenage girls and nearly one-third of teenage boys use unhealthy weight control behaviors, including skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting and taking laxatives.

Various organizations have recently been working to promote positive body image. According to its website, campaigns such as The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty work to create a “wider definition of beauty” and make beauty “a source of confidence, not anxiety.” Dove has widened its campaign from not only finding real beauty but helping raise young girls’ and women’s self-esteem. Despite this recent rise in positive body image promotion, as many as 24 million people in the United States still suffer from an eating disorder, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.

“I definitely feel like I get [pressure] from almost every outlet,” Hannah said. “Obviously on the family side, and then with friends talking about the right clothes to wear, what you should look like when you go out, and with media and with this whole new Kim Kardashian thing, ‘Break the Internet.’”

Although Hannah overcame her battle with bulimia, anonymous student Casey* is currently battling anorexia.

“My advice to anyone with any sort of mental illness would be to one, talk about it,” Casey said. “As much as you want to, you can’t get over it yourself. It’s just like any other disease. Keeping it in only makes things worse because eventually you will blow up. That stuff is too heavy to handle on your own. [And] two, as a friend of someone with an eating disorder, be supportive but don’t force them to eat. Trust me, we want nothing more than to have a normal life and to love our bodies. Again, we didn’t choose this disease. Three, you are stronger than you know. You may think that it’s over and you’ll never win, but you can. Your eating disorder isn’t who you are.”

It doesn’t just affect them

Science teacher Terry Conner began to suspect something was wrong with her daughter during her sophomore year in college when Kaitlyn would appear thinner and thinner every time she came home. Her mom chalked it up to a case of a college athlete working out too hard. But soon, Kaitlyn’s parents began to notice other changes.

“The other change I’d started to notice in her was her personality,” Conner recollects. “Of my three kids, she was always the bubbly baby; she was so outgoing and she was homecoming queen at the school and she was the life of the party . . . Then her personality starting changing in terms of, whenever she used to call me before this, when she’d talk to me, everything was like, ‘Hey Mom!’–and she calls me Marmie–‘Hey Marmie! How’s it going?’ Now when she’d call me from college, it got to the point where when I heard her ringtone on my phone I started dreading answering the phone because it was always some crisis–she’d had a car accident, she was in a panic because a teacher had said something to her about her being in class or something; it was just crisis after crisis after crisis after crisis. And the bubbly kid was just gone.”

Conner and her husband debated pulling her out of school to get her the help she needed, but Kaitlyn was “dead-set against that.” She and her husband discussed it at length and set up a meeting between Conner, her daughter, her daughter’s fiance and Kaitlyn’s doctor. Conner says she admitted her concerns about how thin Kaitlyn was getting. By then, Kaitlyn was having digestive problems.

“So the first step was to do the kinds of things they have you do: she had to have a colonoscopy, and of course this freaked her out insanely,” Conner remembered. “She was like, ‘Nothing’s wrong with me, nothing’s wrong with me.’ So I said, ‘We’ve got to find out what’s wrong with you and why you’re having these stomach problems.’”

The colonoscopy didn’t yield any answers. They turned to the help of a gastroenterologist, who speculated that she might have a gluten sensitivity that was the source of her digestive pains, so Kaitlyn put gluten out of her diet. Then the the gastroenterologist decided that maybe the pains were stemming from a milk sensitivity, so she put milk out of her diet.

“She doesn’t have a gluten sensitivity,” Conner admitted. “She’s not allergic to gluten or milk, but she said it upset her stomach. But what that’s doing is excluding whole classes of foods. Anything with gluten she won’t eat.”

By excluding milk and gluten, Kaitlyn was able to set aside entire food groups that she had a reason to avoid

“Although we had said, ‘You need to go, you need to get help,’ she was dead-set against going in-patient,” Conner said. “I think she just didn’t ever want to admit to herself that she had a problem . . . But it finally got so bad, she was so sick . . . she finally got to the point where she realized, ‘I do have a problem, and I need help.’ . . . She finally called me and, again it was a Saturday morning, the ringtone was hers and I answered the phone and she’s crying, she’s hysterical and she says, ‘Mom, I finally realize I need help, can you please find out some information on where I can go?’”

Conner and her husband began looking into area programs that would take Kaitlyn. Finally, they found a place that would take her for in-patient treatment–Research Medical Center, but their program has since closed.

“It was . . . for her, I can’t think of a better word than hell,” Conner describes. “It was horrible. In terms of, not what they did, but she was in such a state of deprivation . . . She’s my height, she’s 5’3”, and she got down to 73 pounds. She was just a walking skeleton. She looked horrible and her brain wasn’t functioning right, she wasn’t eating enough to even function her brain, so she was just horribly emotional and hysterical.”

“At Research Medical Center, when you go to an in-patient treatment, they’re going to feed you,” Conner explained. “And so she had to eat foods and at first it was like, ‘No! I can’t eat anything with gluten, I can’t eat anything with milk,’ so she’s excluding all these foods and [the staff was] like, “Okay, let’s get some medical evidence on what you really are allergic to.’ She said she’s allergic to it all. They did allergy testing and she wasn’t allergic to [milk] so they made her drink it, like Ensure, which has milk in it. And the phone calls . . . She’d call me hysterical and say, ‘They’re forcing me to eat things I’m allergic to,’ and yada yada yada. It was awful. The first week–it was just, I can’t explain how horrible it was for all of us.”

At Research, the medical staff began to slowly reintroduce Kaitlyn’s digestive system to food. Conner said that the first week of Kaitlyn’s in-patient treatment, there was a twenty-four hour nurse that stayed in the room with her to make sure she didn’t harm herself or slow down the treatments by purging–the same reason that staff locked the doors to the bathrooms for a certain time after eating. After spending 40 days in inpatient treatment, at 21 years old, Kaitlyn was finally showing enough signs of improvement to be released.

Cases like Kaitlyn’s show the life and death dangers of eating disorders. Some may attribute them to negative body image, but science teacher Mary Montag disagrees.

“It’s not about the food,” Montag explains. “It’s about control. It’s about something that most often affects very accomplished people. More men than it used to be. Older people than it used to be. It used to be a young, late teens, like high school and college. You see younger children with it and you see older people with it. Because it’s a control. So something in their life is so out of control that this . . . this is something I can control. I can control how much I eat, when I eat, what I eat.”

Montag, who suffered from an eating disorder in her high school and college years, explains that there is more to the psychology behind eating disorders than people assume.

“It really does take over and because it’s about [the idea that] this is the thing I can control,” Montag said. “There’s something deeper that this person is not finding . . . There’s a bigger issue, but an accomplished person isn’t going to tell you, “I need you, I need help.’ But this is a person that is so accomplished maybe in many areas, that they aren’t able to say, ‘I need help. I need help here.’ That a person oftentimes with anorexia or an eating disorder is someone who does not know how to reach out.”

According to Montag, the best way to help someone with an eating disorder is through support.

“I think much of that comes from, ‘I just want to help you and fix it,’” Montag said. “And it isn’t always ‘fix it,’ it’s a person learning–and once they really do learn–to control it and live with it and understand it and reach out and share. The you really can let your finger up a little bit. Then that control bug of, something feels out of control, this I can control–that eases . . . You learn tools and coping skills, and that just comes with time and education. And kindness. And love. And patience. And listening. And letting someone talk without trying to fix them.”

Conner and her family continue to support Kaitlyn in the years after her treatment and recovery.

“While my daughter was hospitalized . . . each family [or]support group had the opportunity to write an encouraging message on a poster placed on each patient’s room door.  The recurring message on each poster was, “You are worth the fight!”  Throughout her hospitalization and even today, I remind both Kaitlyn and myself that she is worth the fight against the negative feelings and images that tempt her to relapse.  I think it is a great message for all of us. With prayer, patience and supportive help plus education, an eating disorder does not have to define or consume a person.”

*Name has been changed to protect source’s anonymity.

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