A personal look at eating disorders

The answer to the question, when is someone with an eating disorder "ready" for treatment? is just as elusive for those suffering from the disorder from as it is for any observer.

When asked this, sophomore Mandy (not her real name) throws her head back and chuckles. "You're clearly asking the wrong person," Mandy said. Having lived with a combination of anorexia and bulimia for nearly four years, she is not unfamiliar with therapy.

"I've been in and out of therapy ever since my high school dean found out and told my parents," she said. "I even tried talking to someone here [at Tufts], but it never worked."

There are many reasons for why people actively choose to continue their disordered eating. Often, a person with an eating disorder is cognizant of the consequences of their actions. "Just like a druggie knows what they're doing is harming their bodies -- they just think that the rewards are worth the cost," Mandy said. "I know what I'm doing... I just think that the price I pay is worth keeping the weight off."

"Besides, the little nagging voice in the back of my mind saying 'tomorrow, worry about the consequences tomorrow' doesn't help either," she added.

Guilt and fear are further reasons for why people with eating disorders are reluctant to see help says Mandy. "I felt really, really horrible for my parents," she said. "It's hard enough on them for them to know that their daughter does something as unnatural as throwing up what she eats. Now they have to pay over a hundred bucks per therapy session?"

Mandy decided that she would "figure things out" on her own time instead of attending the costly therapy sessions. "...at least, I won't be going back [to therapy] till I'm ready to commit myself to making changes," she said. "At least then, the money's being put to good use."

Living en masse at college may actually give people like Mandy more privacy than expected. "It's easy to make up excuses about late lunches or eating with someone else or even having too much work to do -- it's all believable so no one can really question where you were at dinner time," Mandy said.

Living in a dorm also serves to take the scrutiny and attention off any one person. For example, the same single bathrooms in dorms that give students the privacy to throw up when they're drunk also give people with bulimic tendencies to purge in complete secrecy as often as they want, no questions asked.

In reality, between getting lost in the crowd during meal times and hiding amongst all the fitness gurus at the gym, it's just as easy to under eat and over exercise as it is to overeat and be a lazy bum -- it just takes a lot more self-control and planning.

But this lifestyle is just the 'now' lifestyle. What happens when tomorrow finally comes and consequences must finally be faced?

"I try not to think about that," Mandy admits. "Hopefully, a light will switch on in my head and I'll have a sudden desire to recover before anything serious happens. Perhaps I'm being fatalistic, but I wonder what it would take to set me back on the right track."