Secrets. We all have them. Some eat you alive.

What if yours literally did?

Anorexia. Bulimia. Words rarely spoken around campus. But in a time where extremely skinny models grace catalogs and diet secrets clutter front covers, it needs to be discussed.

Last year, in 1,500 students seen at the Syracuse University’s Counseling Center, about 7 percent of the clients were seen for an eating disorder, said Cory Wallack, director at the Counseling Center.

This week marks National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. The theme is ‘Everybody knows somebody.’

Maybe it’s your best friend. Roommate. Family member.

Or maybe it’s you.

Three brave individuals spoke up about being a support system or recovering from an eating disorder.

These are their stories.

—

In eighth grade, Colleen Baker developed a habit of consuming only Diet Coke for three days in a row. Then after starving for three days, she binged and purged — six times a day. Within months, she dropped 30 pounds.

Baker was always the ‘chubby girl.’ Although she always felt big, she wasn’t pressured by her parents or peers to change her size.

Change crept into her life when she obtained contacts and her braces came off. Suddenly, Baker realized the weight could come off, too.

‘I just wanted to be able to feel small for once in my life,’ Baker said. ‘I would always be tall, but if there was no fat on my body, maybe boys could lift me and make me feel little.’

What started as a mere improvement project transformed into a seven-year struggle with bulimia, along with some episodes of anorexia. Now Baker, a junior psychology and television, radio and film dual major, can proudly say she has been clean for eight months.

To offer support on campus, Baker founded Students Helping to Acquire, Promote and Enhance Self-esteem in September, a club that promotes healthy body images and openly discusses eating disorders.

Tim Carter, her boyfriend of four years, admires how she has used her struggles as a motivation to help others and as her own cathartic release. She’s come a long way from when they first met as juniors in high school.

‘Where I saw a pretty, bubbly and intelligent blonde, she saw nothing of the sort, and that really alarmed me,’ he said.

The jig was up in high school when her dad found remnants of a purging session in the toilet. Her parents got her a counselor, whom she talked to until college. When she stepped on campus, it seemed like everyone’s lips were sealed about eating disorders. She only heard murmurs of a then-nonexistent support group.

She wanted to spark the conversation, reach girls who felt pressured to look a certain way. Baker recalls growing up and seeing images of celebrities she wanted to look like.

She remembers buying Paris Hilton’s ‘Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose’ in eighth grade. She flipped through the pages, amazed at how skinny Hilton was and how eating anything you wanted was ‘chic.’ She followed that advice. But the food didn’t stay down.

‘So many images of beautiful skinny women in magazines and on TV swarmed around me, and I assured myself that I could be that if I just lost some more,’ she said. ‘Little did I know, I looked like a skeleton already.’

She began to find peace within herself at college. Last June, she decided enough was enough and ate healthy foods to lessen potential remorse. Now, she eats what she wants without any guilt.

‘You don’t need to be perfect all the time,’ she said. ‘Those pictures aren’t reality.’

—

Harriet Brown noticed her 14-year-old daughter develop a sudden fascination with gourmet cooking. She frequently read cookbooks and prepared the recipes. Brown gradually realized she would eat none of it.

Her daughter was diagnosed with anorexia with an anosognosic mindset, not recognizing that her actions were problematic.

Brown sought guidance. She searched for books that would give her advice in helping her daughter. What she found disappointed her.

‘There are a lot of eating disorder memoirs, but not really help for families who want to get involved,’ said Brown, an SU magazine journalism professor. ‘I wanted other parents to know that they weren’t alone in this.’

Brown wrote ‘Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia,’ published in 2010. It described her oldest daughter’s nonconventional family-based treatment.

Family-based treatment allows the individual to live at home, but it requires parents to eat every meal with their child and find creative ways to get them to eat. The treatment’s philosophy is to stop searching for the root of the eating disorder and instead focus on restoring physical health and weight.

Brown’s daughter had to consume 5,000 calories a day. She didn’t lose any more weight, but she failed to gain weight. Each day became a battle against the high-calorie food she was afraid of.

To extinguish her daughter’s fears, Brown wrote ‘One Spoonful at a Time’ for The New York Times Magazine in November 2006. It’s an article that took awhile to get her daughter’s permission to publish.

Then in high school, her daughter saw her friends having body issues. Witnessing that made her change her mind. Brown recalled her daughter saying one day: ‘You know, it might help if other people knew about this other way of dealing with it.’

Five hundred pages. That’s how many pages Brown scribbled in her journal on her daughter’s recovery. Fifty pages. That’s how many pages of the book she wrote in two months. After four more weeks at an artist colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., ‘Brave Girl Eating’ was born. Brown chose the title to combat the stereotype that people with eating disorders were spoiled rich girls just acting out.

‘What you have to go through in recovery takes bravery and courage,’ she said.

Brown maintained her daughter’s anonymity, calling her ‘Kitty,’ a childhood nickname. No pictures were slipped in the pages. ‘Good Morning America’ wanted her to come on the show on one condition — show pictures of her daughter at her sickest. She declined.

Her daughter recovered after 18 months. Brown still gets two or three emails a day about the book with overwhelming positive remarks from parents and people who are suffering, saying, ‘You get it.’ She believes full recovery is possible, and families should support their child and defeat that negative inner voice no matter what.

Brown said: ‘You have to have someone louder than that voice saying, ‘No, that’s lies.”

—

Rachel Beckman hid her secret beneath a perfect façade. High GPA. Vice president of a sorority. Assistant feature editor for The Daily Orange, where her new boyfriend worked.

In about a month, that was over. A junior at the time, Beckman left campus in 2002 to treat what she had snuck under everyone’s nose: an eating disorder.

The uncovered secret, hidden since her senior year of high school, made her parents place her for treatment at the Kartini Clinic for Disordered Eating in her hometown of Portland, Ore. — treatment she wrote about in a weekly column for The D.O. Her boyfriend and sports editor at the time, Eli Saslow, saw this as an opportunity to reach out to others.

‘I’m about to begin a fight against bulimia, an illness that has nearly destroyed my life,’ Beckman, a 2004 alumna, wrote in October 2002. Destruction to her 5-foot-6-inch, 127-pound frame wasn’t obvious. Having the traits of both an anorexic and bulimic meant she didn’t look startlingly thin, a warning sign.

She wrote in an October column that her perfectionism, obsession with fashion magazines, a year in a sorority house and other underlying factors contributed to her situation.

During her year in treatment, about 150 emails from readers, teachers and students suffering from eating disorders flooded her inbox. Beckman sympathized, but she didn’t necessarily have answers for them; she was still trying to recover.

Beckman replied to everyone. One email in particular made a lasting impression. It was from a girl living in the Brewster/Boland/Brockway Complex who spent every night in the study carrel binging and purging into a trash can.

‘I didn’t expect myself to fix her or solve her problems, but I am still kind of haunted by that because I was in the same position, except it was in the first-floor bathroom at my sorority house,’ she said.

Her life was filled with therapy, medication and psychologists. She followed a food plan, maintained a food journal and ate three meals under parental supervision. She wrote that she felt partly comforted with this because her eating habits could go completely unchecked on campus. On the other hand, she felt stifled by the restriction.

She was ashamed to admit how her eating disorder and depression were intertwined.

‘They feed off each other like twin demons plotting my demise,’ she wrote in a November 2002 column. ‘… So my goal now is to fight to get my life back.’

She fought and returned to campus a year later with tools to continue her recovery — monthly weigh-ins with an SU Health Services nurse, therapy with a psychologist every two weeks and a food plan.

She reunited with Saslow, who wrote long daily emails while she was gone.

‘We really kind of fell in love during all of these crazy times, and it was totally unexpected,’ she said. The pair married in 2008.

Beckman will always have a different outlook on food. She can’t skip meals, and if she gains a few pounds, she may get anxious. But those are tiny parts of a full life.

Ten years later, Beckman is a freelance writer for The Washington Post. She has Saslow and a new addition to the family — seven-month-old daughter, Sienna. Beckman is healthy and happy.

There is no façade. Not anymore.

cbidwill@syr.edu

Published on February 29, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Contact Colleen: cbidwill@syr.edu