Wasting away, Katie died weighing only 58 pounds. And she was sixteen. That just doesn’t seem possible to me when I look at my seven-year-old daughter who weighs in at about 55 pounds. Anorexia is a medical enigma. Although there is little concrete evidence of what actually causes anorexia, most experts agree that there are several contributing risk factors. We believe that awareness of these risk factors can reduce the odds that they will be triggered so we are hopeful that this information will save lives. If you’re a parent or a teacher, you need to read on…

Word has it around town that Katie had been told by a high school teacher that “she needed to go on a diet.” So she did. Certainly this one comment didn’t cause this young lady to spin out of control with dieting but it might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Did you know that 75% of women believe they are fat even though only 25% are actually considered medically overweight? Did you know that 75% of 4th Grade girls report that they are on a diet? Did you know that dieting can be an eating disorder as serious as binge eating? Given the impact of body image on women’s consciousness, it is not surprising that eating disorder is becoming a critical problem in our age of affluence.

It is estimated that Bulimia affects between one and two per cent of women aged 15 to 40. Anorexia is estimated to affect between one and five teenage women in every 100,000, and the age at which most cases develop is 16 to 17. Most of the victims are females. Take a look at this confession from a young woman who is working on her recovery from an eating disorder. The excerpt comes from the book “It’s Not About Food”, written by Carol Emery Normandi M.S. MF.C.C. and Laurelee Roark M.A.CCHT, founders of Beyond Hunger Inc.