“I was overweight and made fun of for most of my life. Relentlessly,” said the Fairfield County teen. “But then I became extremely obsessive.”

He dropped more than 100 pounds in six months. He began to eliminate many foods from his diet, eating almost no fat. At his lowest point, he ate about 700 calories a day and exercised at least three hours.

He felt that he couldn’t stop.

Whitehead was 16 when a doctor diagnosed anorexia. At one point, the 5-foot 9-inch teen had shrunk to 120 pounds.

He now is 18 and a senior at Amanda-Clearcreek High School. He has been through two inpatient-care programs and continues to get care at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. His weight is up to about 180 pounds, and he’s on medication that helps ease the obsessive-compulsive disorder that helped fuel his illness.

Whitehead is troubled by advertising that depicts young men who are impossibly thin and yet still have muscles. Images such as that contribute to the disorder by encouraging people to attain an impossible physique, to seek “perfection,” he said.

And he’s adamant that people, including doctors, should be better at recognizing eating disorders in boys and men. Initially, he said, doctors “were like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re a guy, you can’t have an eating disorder.’

“I think that society really needs to know that this is not just a female problem.”

A population-based study published in 2007 found that men and boys were one-third as likely as women to have anorexia or bulimia and more than half as likely to have a binge-eating disorder.

“I think it’s still viewed as a predominantly female disorder, and I think that’s going to be a hard thing to change,” said Dr. Terry Bravender, chief of adolescent medicine at Children’s.

There are many obstacles, including doctors who don’t recognize it and patients and families who resist getting help, he said. “I’ve seen boys and young men embarrassed to come in because they think they have a girls’ disorder. And I think a lot of times boys have to be really impaired to be identified as having an eating disorder.”

In male patients, problems typically arise a little differently, he said. They often start to eat healthier and exercise more in hopes of building muscle. Then other mental illnesses – including obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and anxiety – lead to development of the disease.

Anorexia and bulimia can lead to osteoporosis, heart problems and, in the most extreme cases, death.

Read the full article at The Columbus Dispatch.

Vic had a deadly disease. And he says the world was a scary place when he was diagnosed with anorexia five years ago.

“I was very resistant to that. I was like how can this be possible, this doesn’t happen to guys,” he said.

But it does. And the National Eating Disorders Association or NEDA says it’s getting worse. A recent study shows that over a 7 year period, there was an 18% increase in hospitalizations for eating disorders.

“Among that increase, 37% of those hospitalized were men,” said Lynn Grefe, President and CEO of NEDA.

The big question is why and how come we aren’t hearing about it?

The pressure to be tough kept Vic quiet for a while.

Grefe says that one of the things fueling that 37% increase, is men who don’t know where go for help.

“Eating disorders are biologically based illnesses,” said Grefe. “People have a variety of characteristics that all come together like a perfect storm.”

“I started to look for other men in my situation and I couldn’t find any. Then I was like wow I must be broken,” said Vic.

But now he is hoping to help other men break their silence too. Sharing his insight with us at NEDA in New York City.

“There is a lot of pressure on guys to act a certain way, look a certain way,” said Vic. “I could never fit that mold.”

“I was heavy growing up, I had a lot of peer bullying, I was bullied for a great period of my life. That contributed to really negative feelings about my body,” said Vic. “I turned to food to comfort myself. It was a vicious cycle, I’d go to the food, eat a lot feel comfort, then it made me heavier and I hated it and hated myself for it.”

His eating disorder began when he started starving his emotions instead.

“I wanted the number to go lower, lower, lower,” he said “I was doing a fade diet, I didn’t research anything.”

He became obsessed with cutting calories while burning as many as he could.

“I pushed through it no matter how hard it was, how badly it hurt,” said Vic.

Everything came to a head when he decided to hospitalize himself.

“They were there to wake me up at 6 am to check my pulse and my blood pressure and make sure I wasn’t passing away,” said Vic.

There, he met other men with eating disorders too. That helped, as he made a commitment to get better.

“I’ve never taken a step backward since leaving the hospital. It’s either taking a step forward or staying where I am,” said Vic.

Siena head trainer Daniel Taylor works to combat eating disorders by educating his athletes about health, not weight or size.

He says the obsession isn’t always about getting smaller. Sometimes it’s all about getting big.

“They see themselves as being smaller when they really are getting bigger and bigger. The problem becomes that they work out too much, they work out too, hard which can cause health problem,” said Taylor.

It’s called body dysmorphia or adonis syndrome. And because it seems like the guy thing to do, NEDA and Taylor say it’s going ignored for too long.

“We’re talking about guys working out so it probably isn’t held the same way in society and it should be,” he said.

Experts say it’s an issue thats only being accelerated by images in the media and advertising that portrays skinny and muscular as the desired body type.

“Young guys they are reading these magazine telling them to do this, this and this and it’s either not real or it’s unattainable,” said Taylor.

Read the full article at Fox23 News.

Unlike other girls, she discovered that she possessed a powerful weight-loss gimmick, a secret reward for being diagnosed at age 10 with her detested disease, type 1 diabetes.

“When I was 14, I realized that by not taking my insulin, I could eat anything I wanted and lose weight,” recalls Akers, now 21, of Seattle. “For an overweight kid, that’s like a dream come true. I lost 55 pounds that summer. I thought I was a genius. I thought no one else knew about this.”

Akers spent the next six years in and out of hospitals, recovering from the life-threatening complications of skipping her insulin shots, before confronting the fact that she had an eating disorder. In 2008, she underwent intensive therapy, then set up an online nonprofit group to help women like her.

She is part of a recent wave of attention, activism, and research focused on type 1 diabetics who restrict their insulin for weight control.

The ranks of these complex patients are growing, according to eating-disorders treatment programs such as the Renfrew Center of Philadelphia. Yet recognition and understanding of their pathological pursuit of thinness remain sketchy.

In fact, there was no formal name for the dual diagnosis until three years ago, when an international group recommended “Eating Disorders-Diabetes Mellitus Type 1.”

Patients and the media have embraced a catchier label: diabulimia.

“Clinicians have qualms about using that term because it’s a media” invention, said Ann Goebel-Fabbri, a clinical psychologist and eating-disorders specialist at the Joslin Diabetes Center, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. “But it has given voice to a lot of women who are struggling with this, and now realize they aren’t alone.”

Type 1 diabetics, typically diagnosed in childhood or adolescence, can’t make insulin, the hormone that cells need to convert sugar from carbohydrate foods into energy.

Without insulin, the body effectively goes into a state of speeded-up starvation, dumping unused sugar into the urine and breaking down muscle, fat, and liver cells for fuel. This process produces acids called ketones, which build up in the blood, leading to a metabolic crisis called diabetic ketoacidosis.

An infection such as the flu or an injury can accidentally set ketoacidosis. But diabulimics try to skate on the edge of it, strategically omitting insulin to purge calories and suppress appetite – and enduring the resulting thirst, frequent urination, dehydration, weakness, fatigue, racing heart, nausea, and vomiting.

Cumulatively, bouts of ketoacidosis can permanently damage the kidneys, liver, stomach, arteries, and nerves – especially nerves in the feet and eyes.

Like the well-known eating disorders anorexia (self-starvation) and bulimia (bingeing and purging by vomiting or laxative abuse), diabulimia involves a cycle of low self-esteem, struggle for control, fear, depression, shame, secrecy, deception, and guilt.

Yet doctors and parents may not recognize the psychological complexity, assuming instead that the diabetic is being “noncompliant” – neglecting or defying onerous dietary, blood-sugar monitoring, and insulin regimens. In fact, after reports of weight loss induced by insulin restriction first appeared in medical journals in the 1980s, diabetes experts disagreed about the implications.

“There was a huge debate: Is this an eating disorder or not?” recalled Goebel-Fabbri at the Joslin Center.

Since then, she and other researchers have found that young women with type 1 diabetes are more than twice as likely to develop an eating disorder as their nondiabetic peers. One study found 10 percent of teenage diabetic girls had eating disorders, compared with 4 percent of same-age girls without diabetes. (Researchers have found no clear association between type 2 diabetes and eating disorders, probably because disturbed eating behaviors usually begin many years before the onset of type 2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity.)

Anecdotally, the number of diabulimics is growing.

The Renfrew Center’s residential treatment program on Spring Lane, for example, now admits a few dozen diabetics a year.

“When I started working at Renfrew seven years ago, we had maybe one diabetic a year. It was rare,” said Julie Dorfman, director of nutrition. “Now, we’ve created a special menu for them with the carbohydrates already counted.”

Medical director Susan Ice said diabetics were also a big factor behind an increase in the number of newly admitted Renfrew patients who had to be transferred to a hospital because they were critically ill.

“Twenty percent who come in for admission, we send to the ER right away or during the course of treatment,” she said. “Two years ago, just five percent” required such care.

Read the full article at Philly.com.

It was like crack, she said. Drugs and alcohol seemed messy but binging and purging offered that same high; the kind of high that would take away the self-hatred that constantly weighed her down.

For seven years, Armstrong’s bulimia was her deepest secret. And as a black woman, Armstrong said, carrying the stigma of an eating disorder was even worse.

“There is that shame of not being a strong black woman,” said Armstrong, a Los Angeles playwright and author of the book, “Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat.”

“People would ask me, ‘What, do you want to be white or something?’”

More than 10 million Americans suffer from some kind of eating disorder, and many of them are not white, young or female, according to the National Eating Disorders Association.

Dr. Wendy Oliver-Pyatt, executive director of the Oliver-Pyatt Centers in Florida, said that, at any given time, at least half of her patients are not what society typically thinks of someone having an eating disorder: people older then 40, mothers, men and minorities.

“Minorities, men and older people have an even more difficult time,” said Oliver-Pyatt, speaking on behalf of the National Eating Disorders Association. “It’s almost culturally accepted for a young white woman to have an eating disorder.”

“Many black women are coming from an environment where there is such little control,” Armstrong, 45, said. “Who has less control than poor minorities in this country? I’ve interviewed black women who have said, ‘All I have is my food. You’re not taking that away.’”

Correlation between Trauma and Eating Disorders

Armstrong was raped by her favorite uncle when she was 13. Already having lived in a fatherless household, Armstrong said, she didn’t feel worthy enough to come forward with the trauma.

Bulimic Woman Sought Help

“He was the one male I trusted,” Armstrong said. “My thoughts were, ‘If he didn’t think I was worthy, if he could rape me, then maybe I am not worth anything. Maybe I do lack value.’”

On the outside, Armstrong was driven and bright. She did well in school but the self-hatred owned her.

At 17, Armstrong discovered that food helped her cope with feelings of worthlessness.

“It’s like gambling,” she said. “You win a little something and you’re on this high. But, eventually, you need it more than it needs you. It turned on me.”

And for years, she continued to lose the gamble. But Armstrong said she would have rather been silent than go against the symbol of an archetypal strong black woman.

She was suicidal and seven years into the disease, she finally went in for treatment.

“If my whole life was going to be about throwing up and controlling food, I didn’t want to live anymore,” Armstrong said.

When she relapsed in her late 30s, she realized that she hadn’t dealt with the emotional heaviness of her eating disorder and her traumatic experience as a young girl.

But unlike in her younger years, after a few weeks into her relapse, she realized she needed someone to help her cope with the heaviness.

“When I recovered the second time, I had nothing to hide anymore,” said Armstrong, who now has a heart murmur because of the the bulimia. “I can safely say now that I’ll never throw up again. It doesn’t occur to me anymore. I have no desire. It used to be in the back of my mind but it just isn’t anymore.”

Eating Disorders in Older Women

Oliver-Pyatt said that many older female patients who come to her clinic actually did not fully recover from an eating disorder in their early years.

She said many of this subgroup of women had a bad experience while receiving treatment for their condition in their 20s and teens. And now, many of these women fly under the doctor’s radar for eating disorders.

Read the full article at ABC News.

Gen Komaki who led the ministry’s first full survey on the juvenile health problem said, “The number of potential sufferers could grow several-fold. The popular trend today that favors dieting could be endangering children.”

The survey found that 1.9 percent of girls and 0.2 percent of boys have eating disorders and are in need of therapy or advice from doctors who have expertise in both physical and mental health.

Students trying to lose weight often use laxatives, throw up food they have eaten, skip meals and work out excessively, according to the survey led by Komaki, senior researcher with the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry.

In contrast, 3.5 percent of girls and 1.3 percent of boys said they took to binge-eating eight times over four weeks or more often.

Female students with the disorder said they tend to stay up late at night or cannot enjoy eating with their families, that they are told by family members to get thinner or that nobody understands their feelings.

Read the full article at The Mainichi Daily News.

Because it’s considered a female issue there isn’t much acknowledgement of male bulimia, but Dave McKenzie of Rogersville, Tennessee and Bo Blaze of Hackensack decided to speak candidly about their struggles in order to let others know they are not alone.

McKenzie was a chubby kid who tried diets and nothing worked. He said, “My parents called me ‘garbage belly.’” During his sophomore year in high school, he thought he’d get girls if he was thinner so he started skipping meals. “One day it was like a light switch,” he said. “I’m not gonna eat. I developed the will power not to eat.”

The young McKenzie had it all figured out. His mom slept late, so he skipped breakfast. He started staying in school during lunch hour so he wouldn’t eat then either and his parents were none the wiser. He worked at a pizza parlor at night so he told his parents he’d eat there. But on the nights he didn’t work, his parents made him eat at the dinner table. He’d feed some of his meal to the dog and then go to the bathroom and make himself throw up.

By his college years he started binging too. His addictive habit of pigging out and throwing up happened as often as twice a day. McKenzie’s habit tapered off over the years, but as a middle-aged man he admits to still binging and purging once in a blue moon, usually during stressful times. He’s unsure if his habit caused him any serious health problems, but he does have problems with his throat. “I haven’t gone to the doctor,” he said, “I don’t have insurance.”

Bo Blaze started having problems in his late teens also. He said that nowadays people are more forgiving, but in the 1980s you had to look a certain way, everybody had to be fit. “A lot of people don’t realize men have the same social stigmas women do.”

Read the full article at Patch.com.

In the United States, according to the National Eating Disorders Association, between five and 10 million girls and women and one million boys and men struggle with eating disorders. And eating disorders have the unfortunate distinction of having the highest death rate of any mental illness — nearly 10 percent will die as a result of their eating disorder.

Of all eating disorders, Anorexia Nervosa is the most rare, affecting approximately 3 percent of all individuals struggling with eating disorders. The illness often has devastating effects on patients and their families. Many patients experience cardiac complications, hair loss, bone deterioration including osteoporosis, and loss of their periods.

Historically, Anorexia has been treated in inpatient and residential treatment facilities requiring patients to live away from their families for many weeks or months per treatment episode. Fifteen years ago, families were often vilified and blamed for causing their son or daughter’s illness. Treatment involved separating patients from their families because treatment providers believed that the parents had “failed” — that not only were the parents incapable of helping, but that they actually caused more harm.

For many families, this separation caused significant distress and disruption. And although treatment in inpatient or residential facilities is usually successful in restoring the patient’s weight, the rate of relapse once patients leave and return home is high often requiring multiple treatment episodes. Often, families were unprepared for how to continue to support their son or daughter once they were back in the “real world.”

The Changing Face of Treatment

Researchers have now found that for some patients suffering from anorexia the involvement of the families in the treatment process contributes to better outcomes (1), (2), (3). In addition, this treatment can often be done in an outpatient setting eliminating the need for patients to leave their families and live outside of the home.

Family Based Treatment, also known as the Maudsley Approach, is a specific type of treatment for anorexia for adolescents between ages 13 and 17 years. This approach utilizes the parents and family as active participants in the restoration of the patients’ weight and physical health (1). It also aims at preventing hospitalization of patients and assisting parents in restoring their child’s weight and returning him or her to normal adolescent development with no continuing eating disorder behaviors.

Outcome studies for Family Based Treatment have shown that for patients who have had anorexia for less than three years, approximately two thirds of adolescent patients are restored to a healthy weight. Impressively, five years later some 75 to 90 percent remain fully weight recovered (2). Research has also shown that most patients participating in a Family Based Treatment require on average no more than 20 treatment sessions over the course of six to 12 months (3).

What Families and Patients Can Expect

So often, patients and families have been told that “it’s not about the food.” In essence, there is still much truth to this statement. The simplest way to conceptualize an eating disorder is to think of it like a puzzle that has five pieces:

1. Genetics: Most individuals struggling with eating disorders have a family of anxiety and/or depression. In some studies, upwards of 70 percent of individuals with anorexia were identified as having an undiagnosed anxiety disorder dating from early childhood. The most common forms of anxiety were obsessive-compulsive disorder (or strong traits of OCD), social anxiety and social phobia.

2. Personality Traits: In the past five years, researchers in the field of eating disorders have begun to focus in on this underlying puzzle piece. Typical traits include people-pleasing, perfectionism, being highly driven, and harm or conflict avoidance. Often individuals and their families will note that their son or daughter had an extremely difficult time with change, conflict or making mistakes.

3. Trauma or Loss: This is often a misunderstood piece of the puzzle. Individuals with eating disorders usually have some degree of trauma or loss in their histories, but it can range from being picked on in school to severe emotional or sexual abuse. Not everyone experiences abuse, but because patients with eating disorders are often more sensitive and intuitive, the impact of these types of events resonates that much stronger for them.

Read the full article at the Huffington Post.

These shocking statistics are revealed in Lauren Stern’s new book “The Slender Trap: A Food and Body Workbook”. Stern’s book aims to help women and girls work through their issues with food and body image and lead them on the path to emotional wellbeing and features a series of writing and drawing exercises that guide readers through the therapeutic experience to help them assess how they feel about themselves and their bodies. The book also reveals that 9 percent of nine year olds have vomited to lose weight and 81 percent of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat.

These statistics underline recent reports that the incidence of eating disorders amongst the primary school age group is increasing.

A study published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2009 found that between July 2002 and June 2005, 101 five to 13-year-old children were newly diagnosed with an eating disorder. About two-thirds were affected by anorexia nervosa. The rest were experiencing “food avoidant emotional disorder” — a condition unique to children which involves extreme weight loss driven by high anxiety levels, rather than wanting to be thin.

Two-thirds of girls in year 1 believed that being thin would make them more popular. Even more believed weight gain would attract teasing.(i)

According to Dr. Murray Drummond of Flinders University in Australia, for boys these negative impressions are “associated with the drive for muscularity. Guys on the cover of male targeted health magazines are athletic and muscular, but devoid of hair — almost prepubescent, which has caused a problem in our changing cultural expectations.”

Material published on a psychology website confirms that by school-age, children often face prejudices based on their appearances. Children spend much of their early lives in schools, an environment that is highly social and competitive with notoriously rigid hierarchies often based on physical appearances. Studies have found that teachers are also drawn to the most attractive children, which can further compound a child’s poor body image. In a school-age child, a poor body image may result in social withdrawal and poor self-esteem.

And if primary school aged children develop a fixation on the way they look and a negative awareness about weight and size, these feelings can trigger self destructive thoughts and behaviours which can spiral into an eating disorder.

In my book Why Can’t I Look the Way I Want; Overcoming Eating Issues there is a chapter dedicated to triggers. For me personally, peer pressure and puberty led to feelings of inadequacy, and played a leading role in the onset of anorexia. Triggers can be situations, comments or events that bring up feelings of anxiety and worthlessness including family arguments related to eating (e.g. “you’re not leaving the table until you’ve eaten everything on your plate”), feelings of being misunderstood, rejection by peers (e.g. “go away we don’t want to play with you”), or feeling like a misfit. Negative emotions can lead to unhealthy thought processes and feelings of insecurity.

I recently delivered a keynote to a wonderful group of educators of primary school aged children at the Life Education annual conference. I feel strongly that we need to target the primary school age group and engage them constructively in order to educate about positive body image to aid in fostering a positive self-image.

From an early age children are susceptible to the messages they receive and negative messages are in danger of being absorbed into their belief system. If we can be proactive at the primary school level, we have every chance of reducing the incidence of disordered eating at an early age, as well as when children grow into teenagers.

Read the full article at the Huffington Post.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, exercise could be used as an intervention for — or even a way to prevent — eating disorders.

“When it comes to eating disorders, exercise has always been seen as a negative because people use it as a way to control their weight,” says Heather Hausenblas, an exercise psychologist at theUniversity of Florida. ” But for most people, exercise is a very positive thing.”

Hausenblas says results of her research show it’s not necessarily bad for people with disordered eating to engage in exercise. In fact, she says, “The effects on self-esteem, depression, mood and body image can reduce the risk of eating pathologies.”

Psychology of exercise

Researchers surveyed 539 normal-weight college students, most of whom were not at risk for eating disorders. They evaluated the students’ drive to be thin, along with their exercise habits and risk for exercise dependence and used statistical models to find potential relationships.

They found that, more than its physical benefits, the psychological effects of exercise could help prevent and treat eating disorders. The findings are reported in European Eating Disorders Review.

Read the full article at ConsumerAffairs.

Girls who have lots of TV-watching friends, a new study found, are at the highest risk of succumbing to anorexia, bulimia and other body image problems — whether or not they watch TV themselves.

The research took place in Fiji, where scientists have documented a massive cultural shift since broadcast TV arrived there in 1995. But secondhand TV watching is likely to have the same influence elsewhere, too, said psychologist Anne Becker, vice chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

“As a mom or dad trying to do right by your child, you may have a false sense of reassurance if you are limiting TV time in your home that you are protecting your child from these exposures,” Becker said. “Our study suggests you may not be.”

Becker’s research first took her to Fiji in the late 1980s. At the time, Fijians held a round and plump body ideal and women there were remarkably comfortable in their skin.

It seemed to Becker an ideal place for exploring questions about how cultural contexts affect eating behaviors and disorders. For her dissertation research, she spent a couple years living in a Fijian village that had no electricity and no paved roads.

Eventually, the slow march of modernization swept through Fiji, bringing tourism and electronic devices to many of the island nation’s remote villages. In 1995, the Fijian government finally approved the use of broadcast television, ushering in a flood of TV shows from the Western world.

“That seemed to be a watershed point, at least for teenage girls,” Becker said. “Until then, eating disorder symptoms were rare. Using all the data available, eating pathology was not present in Fiji prior to TV.”

After the arrival of broadcast TV, everything changed.

In 1995, Becker said, none of the girls said they had thrown up to lose weight. By 1998, more than 11 percent had tried purging.

A major reason for the shift, according to the girls themselves, was that they had become attached to actresses whose looks and lives were so strikingly different from their own. The Fijian girls also interpreted the shows not as fictional stories, but as real news outlets.

“Girls told us they thought these actresses were role models,” Becker said. “They were really struck by how thin these girls were on TV and how successful they were. They began to emulate them. They wanted to look like them, act like them, speak like them, and dress like them to enhance their own social opportunities.”

As clear as it was that TV had influenced girls in Fiji, Becker continued to wonder whether it was, in fact, specific images on a screen that actually caused a shift in eating behaviors. Or, as she speculated, maybe so much sitting around and talking about shows was having an impact, too.

To test the idea, Becker and colleagues collected data on more than 500 Fijian girls with a diversity of backgrounds. All of the girls spoke the same language, but some lived on developed coastlines, while others lived in remote mountainous areas. Access to TV varied among the group from one extreme to the other.

After performing a battery of psychosocial tests on the girls and conducting hundreds of interviews with them, the researchers found that the only factor that was consistently connected to eating disorder symptoms was how much TV a girl’s peer group watched. It made no difference, they reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry, whether a she watches TV herself.

Read the full article at Discovery News.

This is such a scary statistic, but why is this becoming an issue for kids so young?

Caroline Miller is someone who has overcome the mental illness of eating disorders.

She wrote an autobiography called “My Name is Caroline” in 1988 and at that time was one of the first books to discuss eating disorders and put a face on the disease.

When asked why she felt eating disorders are on the rise, she said, while there is more help available 22 years later, there are also more pressures than ever coming from shows like “America’s Next Top Model” to be skinny as a ticket to fame.

She added that there is a lot less activity kids do these days, with the Internet, video games and junk food, so therefore this young generation is the most obese ever.

Miller states, “The quick-fix society of gastric bypass and lunchtime peels has led to people to want everything as rapidly and easily as possible, and if they aren’t going to be athletic, then they want the quick fix way of anorexia or bulimia to lose weight.”

With kids having pressure from the entertainment world showing that thinness means fame, it can lead to mix signals and potential for an eating disorder.

Caroline said we need more role models from the entertainment world to come out and talk about the issue. She said there are so few public celebrities who have fought this battle and won. The bottom-line is there are not many role models we know of that have overcome an eating disorder. To add to that, there are also a record number of middle-aged women who have eating disorders and that can be a very bad role model for their daughters.

If you suspect your child may have an eating disorder, Miller says don’t ignore the signs and don’t pretend it is going away.

She adds that each eating disorder shows different warning signs. For example, someone who may suffer from bulimia may have lots of cavities, swollen glands, mood swings, make frequent trips to the bathroom, obsession with food and loss of interest in friends and hobbies. Versus someone who maybe suffering from anorexia, some warning signs may be not eating in public, loss of weight of 15 percent or more and continues to want to restrict food.

Read the full article at ABC 2 News.

Just now, searching for images from the movie, I found one — at a site called “Thinspo Me Baby” on Tumblr, along with the caption, “Get your thinspiration from the upcoming movie Black Swan!!!” Another search brought me to Superskinnyus.blogspot.com. And another to Mydailythinspo.blogspot.com. Looks like pro-ana websites all over are looking to the movie.

For their roles in the movie, both Natalie and Mila Kunis lost about 20 pounds each — a lot considering that they are both very petite to begin with. Mila famously spoke out on hating how she looked and felt while filming. “I went down to 95 pounds. I weigh 117 usually, like today. I looked like Gollum,” she says. “It took me five months to lose 20 pounds, but it took me just five days—days!—to gain it all back.”

Natalie, however, has said that director Darren Aronofsky — known for putting his actors and actresses through extreme measures — encouraged her to lose the weight. She said, “Darren claims he never said this, but he definitely was like, ‘How thin do you think you can get without being sick?’”

Darren’s memory of this is a little different. He claims, “At a certain point in the middle of the ballet stuff, I thought she was getting way too skinny and I started to make her eat. It started to get scary, and she was starting to look too thin.”

Who is to blame here? It almost doesn’t matter. But it certainly sounds like they were on a slippery slope while filming.

Read the full article at ABC News.

Anorexia nervosa
When you have anorexia nervosa (an-o-REK-see-uh nur-VOH-suh), you’re obsessed with food and being thin, sometimes to the point of deadly self-starvation.

Anorexia signs and symptoms may include:

• Refusing to eat and denying hunger
• An intense fear of gaining weight
• Negative or distorted self-image
• Excessively exercising
• Flat mood or lack of emotion
• Preoccupation with food
• Social withdrawal
• Thin appearance
• Dizziness or fainting
• Soft, downy hair present on the body (lanugo)
• Menstrual irregularities or loss of menstruation (amenorrhea)
• Constipation
• Abdominal pain
• Dry skin
• Frequently being cold
• Irregular heart rhythms
• Low blood pressure
• Dehydration

Read the full article at the MayoClinic.

That’s because the first signs of an eating disorder can manifest in the mouth. Sensitivity, tooth erosion, dry mouth, a high number of cavities, and enlarged salivary glands that cause swollen cheeks are signs that a patient may be suffering from an eating disorder.

“The repeated, self-induced vomiting that occurs with many of these patients introduces corrosive stomach acid into the mouth that eats away at the enamel on teeth,” says AGD spokesperson Claire Campbell, DMD, FAGD. “And brushing your teeth immediately after purging may amplify the damage, because you are actually brushing acid onto more tooth surfaces, increasing the erosive action.”

Another tip-off of an eating disorder is an abundance of cavities over a short period of time. “Patients who binge on high-caloric, high-carbohydrate foods and then purge those foods run the greatest risk of decay,” says Dr. Campbell. “The sugars in those foods cause increased acidity in the mouth, while the purging bathes the teeth in even more acid, an incredibly destructive double whammy.”

Read the full article at PR Newswire.

In fact, 82% of the survey respondents now agree that an ED is a physical or mental illness, 78% said they would know whether someone was suffering from an ED, and 95% said that they would seek help or encourage someone else if they had an ED.

“We have moved the thinking, and people are starting to have more empathy and concern and taking it more seriously. They’re seeing that these are actually very complicated illnesses,” she added.”I think the public is finally starting to get it,” Lynn Grefe, president and chief executive officer of NEDA, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, told Medscape Medical News.

However, the results also show that the overall level of knowledge has not increased, and the problem of EDs has not declined.

“There is still a lot of work to be done,” said Ms. Grefe. “The awareness campaign needs to shift to education about this disease. We really need to get into more depth of information about the illness because we’re still losing people.

“At least 25 million people in this country have some type of [ED], and those rates are not going down. And anorexia has the highest death rate of any mental illness,” she added.

The survey results were first announced by Ms. Grefe October 10 during her closing presentation at the NEDA annual meeting in New York City.

Read the full article at Medscape.com.