Food Wars
Eating disorders: they have less to do with fitting into a smaller jean size than with gaining a sense of control...

Story by Julie Trescott ’08
Illustration by Stephanie Dalton Cowan

Emma ’10 started dieting in the seventh grade. Each morning, she woke up before her parents and later told them that she had already eaten breakfast. At school, she shared snacks with her friends and ate half of a sandwich for lunch. Dinnertime was always a power struggle, as Emma ate only a small portion of what her mom had cooked. Within a year, she had lost 15 pounds—but that wasn’t enough.

“The number was the obsession, because I didn’t know how to assess myself other than that. I didn’t see my worth beyond the number or beyond the grade,” Emma says. “I let these
things define who I was.”

Emma’s battle with food continued throughout high school. When her parents noticed her dramatic weight loss and the grayish tint of her skin, they set up appointments for her
with a psychologist and a nutritionist, who put her on a regimented meal plan. Emma remembers negotiating with the nutritionist, bartering for a diet with as few calories as possible. Then came the ultimatum: she could only go away to college if she controlled her eating habits. Eager to attend Pomona, Emma made a conscious effort to maintain a well-balanced diet.

Emma is not alone. Estimates for college students with mild to severe eating disorders range from 5 to 10 percent nationwide, with nine times as many women as men affected. At
Pomona, according to the 2005 National College Health Assessment conducted by the American College Health Association, 2.2 percent of students said they had been anorexic within the last year and 2.7 percent reported battling bulimia. Because students self-reported, Carla Jackson, a health educator at The Claremont Colleges’ Health Education Outreach, speculates that the actual numbers might be higher. The three most common eating disorders are anorexia, characterized by a severely limited calorie intake; bulimia, a cycle of binging and purging; and binge eating, frequently consumption of large amounts of food. Jackson makes a distinction between these conditions and disordered eating, which she defines as showing some of the warning signs of an eating disorder. There is no single cause for eating disorders, but research indicates that they usually have less to do with fitting into a smaller jean size than with a sense of control. When a long-term relationship ended and she left to study overseas for a semester, Heather ’07 dropped from 130 pounds to 100 in just five months. “It’s as though every other element in my life was suddenly completely out of control and going on in such a way that I never could have foreseen it,” says Heather. “My entire life turned upside-down.”

Ashley ’08, who began purging in high school and battled bulimia through her first years at Pomona, expressed a similar sentiment. “It was something that I could do, that I could control in my life, that no one else could have any say in, because nobody else knew about it,” she says. Although the students interviewed for this article felt comfortable talking about their experiences, they requested anonymity because of concerns about how other students would react. “There is a real misperception about what it means to have an eating disorder, and that’s the reason why I don’t want to get that label,” Heather ’07 says. She adds that people tend to associate eating disorders with vanity. “For me, it wasn’t that at all. It was almost the opposite. It was just kind of an apathy thing, an indifference to nurturing myself in any way.”

The health consequences of eating disorders can be severe. Anorexia, for instance, can lead to heart disease, loss of bone density and muscle loss—even death. But the danger that finally got to Heather was the risk of damaging her reproductive organs. “I hadn’t cared enough about myself, but my maternal instinct kicked in,” she says. “I really do want to have kids. I want to be a good mom.”

While Pomona provides various support networks to integrate students into life on campus, the transition from high school to college is a time when students may be particularly
vulnerable to eating disorders. For many, it’s the first time they’ve been able to make their own decisions regarding eating and exercise. And though The Claremont Colleges have a laidback vibe, and it is not uncommon for students to roll out of bed and attend class in sweatpants—“People here aren’t as much focused on appearance, which is really nice,” says Elizabeth ’09, who has been fighting anorexia since high school—many Pomona students display characteristics that can make them susceptible. “They are competitive, want to please others, want to make others happy,” Elizabeth says. “They work hard and they’re perfectionists.”

To combat their eating disorders, these students have had to learn to recognize trigger signals and find other, healthier ways of coping. Heather says that it was important for her to be surrounded by people with positive self-images and a realistic idea of what a body should look like. “I didn’t believe in this stickskinny ideal ever, but knowing that there were other people out there who also didn’t, who liked people to just be natural in whatever shape they are naturally given, was a really strong recovery point for me,” she says. As a varsity athlete, Elizabeth realizes that she needs to nourish her body in order to perform to the best of her ability. Emma, too, found that joining a sports team helped her along the road to recovery. “Exercise alone without restricting my eating totally changed my body,” she says. “It
made me feel more confident, more muscular, more toned.”

But just as a person who has battled alcoholism is considered a recovering alcoholic, rather than a recovered alcoholic, most people with eating disorders must spend a lifetime struggling to avoid falling back into old habits. “Learning how to live with it is the key, and I think at this point in time, I have done that,” Emma says. “Tomorrow is another day, but today I have it under control.”

The names of the students in this story have been changed to honor their requests for privacy.