The disease begins to control her. She once bought a birthday cake inscribed with a fictitious name so no one would know she planned to eat the entire cake herself. She broke her knee from lack of calcium and continued to run 75 miles a week when she could barely walk. Despite these things, Ms. Potash's eating disorder was her secret for 10 years. Sometimes it seems like America has a collective eating disorder.
Dinner is disjointed and rushed.
And we don't have any real reason to move. Combine these facts with a lot of misinformation and wrong thinking about nutrition, and you come up with an entire society prone to eating problems. Dr. Ross noted that from their earliest consciousness, girls are bombarded with media images of women who are unrealistically thin. From as early as age five, girls seem vulnerable to thinking they should restrict their food intake, setting themselves up potentially for a lifetime of rollercoasting weights and a cycle of deprivation, inevitable breakthrough eating, guilt and attempts to diet or purge. Recent research indicates there may be genetic and hormonal as well as psychological factors involved.