The road to recovery
Women share stories of their struggles and successes about overcoming eating disorders during national awareness week
By Paul Sisolak 02/25/2010
It took years before Karie Miller could come to grips with the fact that she was struggling with an eating disorder.
“I pretty much suffered all of my life with compulsive overeating, and went the route of getting gastric bypass surgery, thinking that would solve all my problems,” she said.
Though she did not realize it at the time, Miller was at a healthy weight through most of her teens and 20s and had even briefly delved into fashion modeling, but she still grappled with her own negative body image issues. Fad diets were common in her family — so was the pressure to prove one’s worth with her figure — yet food was always there in abundance. Through years of what she now says was “shameful eating” on her part, problems mounted further before culminating in her decision to volunteer for the surgical procedure five years ago.
It was a last-ditch attempt to shed 100 pounds. It was not, as she later discovered, the solution to staying thin forever.
“Through the surgery,” recounts the Thousand Oaks woman, “I became bulimic. I never learned to throw up before.
But after a surgery like that, I was throwing up all the time.”
What Miller, and millions of other women like her, did not realize at the time was that no amount of quick fixes could repair the damage done to a person’s body, and psyche, caused by an eating disorder. The terms are well-known, like anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating, but the extent of the danger they pose is not.
This week, therapists, counselors, the recovering and the recovered are all raising awareness of this fact through a series of events across Ventura County, bringing to light a better understanding of how eating disorders can be prevented and cured.
National Eating Disorders Awareness Week began on Feb. 21 and is spotlighted by an informational panel discussion and seminar at California State University, Channel Islands, in Camarillo, on Thursday, Feb. 25. The event, which begins at 7 p.m. in the university’s Broome Library on campus, will feature a free screening of the film “Beauty Mark: Body Image & the Race for Perfection,” followed by the panel of three eating disorder specialists.
Of them, Susan Richter, a certified marriage and family therapist, is viewed as one of the frontrunners in bringing eating disorder awareness to Ventura County. Richter started the New Beginnings Counseling Center in Camarillo 10 years ago, after she noticed a lack of resources for women in need of help. It was something Richter took to heart; for years, she, too, had also suffered from several eating disorders.
“I was put on a diet as a child, and that led to adolescent difficulty with compulsive overeating and yo-yo dieting,” Richter said. “I sort of oscillated between undereating and overeating.”
What Richter came to understand was that no matter the physical outcomes of disorders in the women she began treating — from the skeletal malnourishment of anorexia to the binging and purging indicative of bulimia or the obesity from overeating — each one had a psychological root that needed addressing. An eating disorder like anorexia, for example, is often fueled by a flawed mental perception of one’s body, prompting a man or a woman to eat less and less. When the body is starved, the nervous system is attacked, other organs are affected, neurological damage worsens the mental state, and the problem persists.
“There is this drive to feel better that is the underlying issue,” she said. “ ‘I’m trying to feel better, and if I’m thinner and thinner and thinner still, perhaps I’ll feel better.’ Then, as the brain is malnourished, it actually exacerbates the problem. It becomes a vicious cycle.”
Richter continued, “Because eating disorders are also psychological disorders, and nutrition is a major part of treatment, that way people can get nourishment to their brains, which allows them to take on the psychological work” of therapy.
Statistics point to young people as the primary victims of eating disorders. The National Eating Disorders Association indicates that in the United States, at least 10 million women are battling an eating disorder of some kind. Forty percent of newly identified cases of anorexia are in teen girls aged 15-19. While significantly smaller in number, there are still at least 1 million young men dealing with eating disorders at any given time.
Richter says the psychological and body image problems that go along with an eating disorder make it particularly hard for any girl or boy of that age group to grapple with, especially when there is peer pressure to contend with.
An unrealistic view of what is physically beautiful to the eye, prompted by the media, Hollywood and a proliferation of “pro-anorexia” (or “pro-ana”) Web sites, means that Ventura County and the greater Los Angeles area are notorious for cultivating eating disorders in otherwise healthy women.
“They’re really saying, ‘Here, do this. Starve.’ They’re promoting that destruction. That’s sad to me,” says Candy Bartole, an eating disorders specialist with La Ventana in Thousand Oaks.
Part of Bartole’s and Richter’s mission during the awareness week is to alert others that because eating disorders are often overlooked or written off, little money is put into researching them.
The NEDA estimates that more than $647 million is spent annually for Alzheimer’s Disease, which affects 4.5 million people. Research into schizophrenia, which afflicts 2.5 million people a year, totals $350 million annually. But for eating disorders, only $12 million in funding is allotted to solving a problem that affects the aforementioned 10 million women a year.
Richter, Bartole and dietitian Karen Decker, who will lead Thursday’s panel, are urging parents and their teenagers to attend. Part of the solution to stopping eating disorders before they start is for parents to pay attention to the warning signs. Are their daughters preoccupied with exercise? Obsessed with emaciated runway models?
“We’re just trying to educate the public about eating disorders, that recovery is possible, and for parents to be aware of the warning signs, and how to prevent their child from developing these problems,” says Richter.
As someone who emerged successful from an eating disorder Miller, now 42, is engaged to be married and has cultivated a close relationship with her 16-year-old stepdaughter. Miller says one of the key elements to working with an eating disorder, in the end, is embracing health, and developing a healthy relationship with food.
“I just tell her you have to understand you’re never going to look like everybody else and you need to feel beautiful inside, as well as look good on the outside,” Miller says. “And there’s never such a thing as bad food. All foods are OK. You just have to learn to eat them.”
For further reference on eating disorders, visit NationalEatingDisorders.org. For information on Thursday’s panel, or for information on eating disorder screenings, contact Susan Richter at New Beginnings, 987-3162, ext. 5.
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
Other Stories by Paul Sisolak
Related Articles
Comments
What a great story! I love stories with a positive message :)