Doctors, however, view her skeptically, questioning her methods and her success rate. She has no formal training in treating eating disorders yet says both that she knows what causes anorexia and bulimia and that she can cure anyone who gives her the chance. Anorexics and bulimics, she says, want to make everything right. When they realize they cannot, they turn their sense of worthlessness inward in an unconscious attempt at suicide. It's about death.
Victims starve themselves in order to disappear.
Claude-Pierre developed her theory while reclaiming her own two daughters from anorexia nearly 14 years ago. First, Kirsten, then 15, dropped to 80 pounds. Doctors told Claude-Pierre, a graduate student recently separated from her husband, that her oldest daughter was a hopeless case. Kirsten got better, but then Nicole, two years younger, began to starve herself. It took a year and a half but Nicole, too, got better.