When Ivy Silver got a call from her friend Jane telling her something wasn’t right with Ivy’s sixteen-year-old daughter Rachel, the Wyncote, Pennsylvania mom was frightened. “One of Rachel’s friends had approached Jane, an eating disorder specialist,” says Ivy, age fifty-two, who owns an insurance brokerage and employee benefits consulting firm with her husband, Steven Leshner. “Her friends had noticed Rachel’s eating habits were different. She wasn’t eating any meals with them and was fixated on losing weight, talking about how little she was eating and how she would try to limit her calories to less than five hundred per day.”
Ivy and Steven were surprised they hadn’t noticed Rachel’s unusual behavior. At five-feet-five inches, she had always been a “small” girl, but her weight was within normal limits, and she ate dinner with the family every night. Still, at a time when she should have been becoming more curvaceous, she wasn’t.
Ivy, who had struggled with bulimia in the past, understood the gravity of the situation. Scared for their daughter’s life, she and Steven sprang into action. In the end, they would spend two and a half years helping Rachel recover from anorexia and bulimia. They enrolled her in therapy, took her to a nutritionist, and scheduled weigh-ins at their family doctor’s office, which revealed that their daughter had lost 15 percent of her prediagnosis weight. Rachel underwent intensive treatment on an outpatient basis and then began in-patient treatment at a psychiatric hospital. Both caused her to miss a significant portion of her senior year. “The grim reality of seeing boys with feeding tubes and women still sick in their fifties really inspired her to work through this,” Ivy says. “She learned that this is not a glamorous disease.”
An Illness that Starts Young
It’s estimated that up to twenty-four million people suffer from eating disorders, including at least 10 percent of late-adolescent girls and adult women. While the disease is also known to affect boys, parents need to keep a particular eye on their girls, especially if they are athletes or people pleasers. Early traces of the illness can be seen around age seven, when kids often start referring to themselves as “fat.” Today, 95 percent of people with eating disorders are between the ages of twelve and twenty-five.
What causes eating disorders? Sharon Fried Buchalter, PhD, a clinical psychologist with advanced training in child and adolescent psychology, points to a variety of factors, ranging from psychological (low self-esteem) to genetic (depression, chemical imbalances) to social (super-thin celebrities on magazine covers).
What parents say matters, too. “Talking about feeling fat, your own dieting, or your kids’ weight can have a negative impact on how children look at themselves,” says Jane Shure, PhD, a Philadelphia-based psychotherapist who has specialized in treating eating disorders for more than twenty years.
The consequences of an eating disorder can range from very serious (low blood pressure, rotted teeth, stunted growth, loss of menstruation, liver damage, osteoporosis, ulcers) to fatal (heart attacks). In fact, eating disorders are the deadliest of all mental illnesses, according to the Renfrew Center, an eating disorder education and advocacy group with several treatment facilities. The mortality rate for anorexia is twelve times higher than that of all other causes of death in females fifteen to twenty-four years old.
Warning Signs
What begins as seemingly normal behavior (a child says she ate at a friend’s house or exercises more frequently), can quickly become a serious problem. Alarm bells should go off when children:
