Editor’s Note: This is part one of a two-part column about eating disorders. To read the rest, check the Features page on Wednesday.
I made a very large mistake in high school. It wasn’t that I cheated on a test and got caught or lost a best friend because of a small misunderstanding. My mistake could have been fatal. My mistake was that I kept my mouth shut.
On no particular night in June, I found someone close to me — let’s just say his name was Ben — bent over the toilet, his fingers down his throat as his body spasmed. It was a natural reaction to choking. Sure, I’d heard of eating disorders before, but nothing in depth, not enough to prepare me to keep such a powerful secret.
Ben looked up at me, vomit and blood on his arm, and minutes later begged me not to say a word to anyone. And I didn’t. I thought about it many times. I constantly found him hunched over the toilet vomiting blood and telling himself that his body was not good enough. Ben carried a little extra weight than most high schoolers, and he was, like many, a very insecure person. The teasing that his peers gave him — just having fun, they’d say — pushed him beyond the lines to being proactive about his body structure, but not in a good way.
What I never realized was that by carrying his secret of being both bulimic and anorexic — bulimarexic — and not telling anyone, he played with the dangerous line between an unhealthy way to try to maintain weight and lifelong, grave consequences, and I let him.
Two years into his disease, Ben broke off his front two teeth. His dentist couldn’t understand how they just broke off, so easily. But he and I knew why, the vomit eroded the back of his teeth until they became so weak that any little bump snapped them right off. He had to get fake teeth built, and he will need to have a denture fitted before he is thirty.
It was lucky that Ben wasn’t a woman like a friend I met in college. She was bulimic for years and jeopardized the chance of being able to conceive. It only takes a few months of being bulimic for a woman to destroy her ability to have a child, and one in five women will have an eating disorder in her lifetime.
Those are crippling statistics.
What most people don’t know is that each year, 480,000 people die from complications due to eating disorders and 24 million Americans suffer from an eating disorder, while even more suffer from a lesser form of disordered eating. It is the third chronic illness among teenagers across the world. And it’s not just a disorder that affects women — 20 percent of those with eating disorders are males.
During my struggle to convince Ben that his “not-a-problem” problem was affecting his social, emotion and physical well-being, I ran into another side of eating disorders — people who turn a blind eye to obvious problems.
A friend of mine — let’s just say her name is Jennifer — decided that dropping a few extra pounds would get her more dates. It seems sensible, but many times this is how the road to eating disorders starts.
Jennifer took her diet to an unhealthy level. She would eat one meal a day, usually lunch. A week or so into the diet, I noticed changes in her mood — her personality became tamer. She was withdrawing, already, from social activities. This is common of those with disordered eating and those with full-blown eating disorders.
So, the next time I saw her mother I decided I would tell her about what her daughter was doing to herself. I was appalled at the response I got from Jennifer’s mother.
“You have to do what you have to do to stay thin and attractive,” she said. “When I was in college, I ate only fruit to stay at a size two.”
You have to do what you have to do.
I repeated the sentences over and over to myself. Jennifer’s mom was the mother of five children and had at least 40 years on me, but I knew she was wrong.
I knew that this was the sort of sentiment Ben must have told himself before throwing up meals into the toilet. The sort of sentiment that drove him to eat fewer than 1,000 calories and run six miles a day.
