Feb. 5--Bekah Sellers and Julie Samitt can tell you exactly what triggered their eating disorders.
"I wasn't even in the eighth grade yet," Sellers recalls. She was just beginning to be concerned about her weight when she read an article on the dangers of anorexia and bulimia in a popular teen magazine.
"It planted the idea in my mind," she said. "Isn't that scary? Instead of being sad and horrified, I thought it was a solution to my problem."
Samitt's struggle with bulimia began soon after a move to Germany with her military family that required her to sell her horse. "I started to gain weight, not knowing what to do with myself," she said.
On a trip to Paris, she remembers her mother telling her, "You're too pretty to be heavy," and deciding she should go on a diet.
Then, a friend on her soccer team told her, "'If you want to lose weight, this is the way to do it.' I was pretty much hooked."
Last year the two women's paths crossed at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Though neither has a problem with alcohol, they had turned to its 12-step program for support in their recovery from bulimia. There are similarities in overcoming the two types of addictive behavior, they said.
"It's a daily commitment to recovery," Sellers said.
In August, they organized a local 12-step group through Eating Disorders Anonymous, a national fellowship patterned after AA.
"We started off with two people," Sellers said of their group, and now their weekly meetings sometimes draw as many as 12 to 15.
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About 10 million females and 1 million males in the United States face a life-and-death battle with anorexia or bulimia, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. Anorexia has the highest premature fatality rate of any mental illness, including depression.
Waif-like models and starving celebrities draw attention to the problem -- but not necessarily in a negative way.
Rather, the images can reinforce the "social pressure to be so thin," says Dr. Suzanne Mazzeo, a Virginia Commonwealth University associate professor of psychology who researches the interaction of genetic and environmental factors on eating behaviors.
While genetic factors generally remain constant, Mazzeo says the social component can change over time. Especially over the last five years, she's noticed the renewed emphasis on "the very, very thin" -- celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie -- ensnaring not just vulnerable teens but younger girls and older women in their 50s.
"It used to be that people were allowed to age gracefully," she noted. Now, the acceptability of plastic surgery has put pressure on women of all ages and exacerbates problems with "body hatred," according to Mazzeo.
Such social issues will be the focus of a discussion sponsored by Commonwealth Parenting on Feb. 16 at the University of Richmond. Courtney E. Martin, author of "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters," will give her personal perspective on disordered eating and self-hatred.
The title of her book is a reference to Martin's contention that the problem goes way beyond body image. Her generation of young women grew up in a culture of affirmation that has left them feeling pressured to be both pretty and perfect, she says.
"We are the daughters of feminists who said 'You can be anything' and we heard 'You have to be everything,'" she writes.
"We must get A's. We must make money. We must save the world. We must be thin. We must be unflappable. We must be beautiful. We are the anorectics, the bulimics, the overexercisers, the overeaters. We must be perfect. We must make it look effortless."
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Martin's book is subtitled "The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body." When the subject came up at a recent meeting of Eating Disorders Anonymous, those words resonated.
"That just rings so true for all of us," Samitt said.
She also can relate to the connection between perfectionism and body image.
"When things can't be perfect, when the rest of your life is out of control, the one thing you can strive to make perfect -- or think you can make perfect -- is your body," she said.
Sellers and Samitt, who have struggled with both anorexia and bulimia, emphasized they were not speaking as representatives of EDA and that its policy is to keep identities anonymous.
Samitt was about 15 when her struggles with bulimia began; she has battled eating disorders for nearly 20 years now. When she was 19, she reached out for help and her mother took her to a nutritionist, who looked her over and said, "I don't see a problem."
"I was just lucky I didn't die," she said.
Samitt, who works as a crisis advocate in the field of domestic violence, said there are many misunderstandings about eating disorders. "It's not just body weight that can be lethal," she said. Electrolyte imbalances and ruptures of the esophagus can also threaten lives.
Part of the misunderstanding comes from people's reluctance to talk about eating disorders and to seek help. "It's a shameful, shameful disease," she said.
Sellers, a 27-year-old graduate student in nursing at Virginia Commonwealth University, said she kept her ordeal hidden until she reached college and found "many of my friends had eating disorders."
She often thinks back to that article in the teen magazine and wonders how her life might have been different if she hadn't read it.
"I really, really hate that magazine and what it's done to my life," she said.
Contact Karin Kapsidelis at (804) 649-6119 or kkapsidelis@timesdispatch.com.
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