We live in Restriction Nation, where Lisa developed her own brand of “I don’t eat.” The seeds were planted in middle school, stayed underground through about half of high school, then grew into something awful.
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Roots of Anorexia Lisa’s Early Days and a Bit of History
On a warm evening in June 1999, we parents are planted in plastic folding chairs on the blacktop, our backs to the setting sun. Out on the grass, Lisa’s fellow middle school graduates squint, the sun in their faces. Maybe this slight discomfort will be the final trial of three turbulent years. The ceremony, unlike the years, is short and sweet, unlike other graduations the parents have attended. Preschool and elementary school promotion ceremonies can be way too much ado, to the point that it scares the graduates out of participating. And once you’ve had to sit though a high school or college marathon recital of unfamiliar names, you know to bring something to read. But Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School captures just the right tone: Congratulations, let’s move on. Rambunctious kids have practiced the procession from auditorium to soccer field at least three times. Trussed in their serious clothes, with families and teachers assembled, they somehow get the gravity of the occasion.
Palo Alto, population just under 65,000, comes up third in the country in Forbes magazine’s survey of small towns with the highest percentage of residents holding advanced degrees. At any graduation ceremony in town, at least half of the audience members are doctors, lawyers, researchers, and professors, possibly some Nobel Prize winners.
Lisa’s ceremony started with students standing to say, “Welcome to our graduation!” in the several dozen languages spoken at home, from Arabic to Gujarati to Tagalog. Pacific Islander kids wore extraordinary fresh flower leis around their necks. Four students read brief essays about the meaning of middle school, a couple of teachers and administrators got up and sat down, having kept their comments brief, and we went to find our kids on the blacktop. Phew! File the hazardous early adolescent years as Done.
Later that month Lisa was going to Camp Tawonga, a liberal Jewish camp near Yosemite National Park and the one place, she always said, where she felt like she could be her real self. She and Jake had been going there since elementary school. At camp it was possible to feel both special and accepted, to express their creativity and be part of a group, to be somebody else the next year and still feel valued—a combination of needs that for Lisa would later find expression in anorexia. Home, especially when it’s the same place since birth, isn’t set up like that. Many kids rightly find Palo Alto complacent and materialistic. To parents and real estate agents, comfortable towns like ours, with good public schools and curbside recycling, are the Promised Land. Teens call it “Shallow Alto.” Attention and praise are lavished on students for reasons that have nothing to do with the content of their character. Adolescents lacking superior talent, beauty, grades, or test scores are left to resolve their identity conflicts at their own risk, or so it often feels. Think you might want to play the piano or soccer? Be the best, the next Lang Lang or Ronaldinho, or why bother. If you aren’t fortifying your résumé, you’ll be left in the dust. Maybe homeless. Run the race, touch the bases, jump the hurdles, get into the right college, and then, much later, pause to think about who you really are and what you want in life.
Lisa was approaching high school, gateway to college, with trepidation and hope. Since fifth grade, she had continued to gain weight and beat herself up about it, but she’d gotten through. Toward the end of middle school, academics had gotten easier. She was getting her work done and finding creative outlets in art and theater classes, and she had a leading role in the musical Damn Yankees. We hadn’t run into any emergency roadblocks. No excessive partying, drug abuse, or cutting, we were pretty certain. Ned and I even crossed eating disorders off the list of Catastrophic Expectations, thinking they would’ve shown up by now. Lisa was eager to try new things in high school, like choir and water polo.
lisa: As I entered high school, my weight was still slightly above average but had started to even out on its own. The baby fat was going away. In addition, I became three times as active as I had ever been, developing a new interest in the highly vigorous sport of water polo and joining the freshman junior varsity team. With the lengthy practices that challenged my athletic abilities and toned my body, I lost weight fairly quickly. Although I had grown up playing sports year-round, none could compare to the challenge of water polo. I followed each season’s sport with a new one: water polo in the fall, soccer in the winter, swim team in the spring.
In middle school, I didn’t have the ability to control portions. Two fish tacos, a couple of molasses chips, and then I just kept eating until I knew I’d had too much. I felt terrible, but I’d do it again the next day. Starting high school was scary—the rumor was that seniors got on the roof and threw things at freshmen—but also a fresh start. You could be somebody new.
My sophomore year, the women’s water polo team hired two new coaches who decided to make strict cuts. I showed up for try-outs and went through two grueling weeks of all-day practices but did not make the team. At first I cried in disappointment, more from the effort I had put forth than any love of playing water polo. Then I signed up for AYSO league soccer. (The American Youth Soccer Organization focuses on positive coaching, not trophies and scholarships, and everyone gets to play.) I ended up playing soccer through the winter and returned to swimming in the spring.
Playing sports, I kept losing weight and toning my body. Suddenly I wasn’t the safety-net friend that made everyone feel good about their own weight (they used to look skinny next to me), as I had been in middle school.
sheila: Middle school is supposed to ease a difficult passage—for anxious near-teenagers. But once they leave the campus shared with five-year-olds and enter the one with kids necking at the Halloween dance, the halls are ruled by teenagers, and they’re sexier than ever.
By now kids have had years of experience with the Internet, video games, music, magazines, and movies selling sex, and their parents’ attempts to turn back the tide. In an extensive study conducted in 2007, the American Psychological Association concluded that a sexualized society gives girls no good choices: “Teen girls are encouraged to look sexy, yet they know little about what it means to be sexual, to have sexual desires, and to make rational and responsible decisions about pleasure and risk within intimate relationships that acknowledge their own desires.” Younger and younger girls are sex objects. Among the injurious consequences are body dissatisfaction and eating disorders.
Highly sexualized lyrics have only gotten grittier since the eighties, when Tipper Gore started complaining, the psychologists found. In magazines, nearly everything girls and women are encouraged to do in the line of self-improvement is geared toward gaining the attention of men. Saddest to me, forty years into feminism, were the new takes on attractiveness, such as revealing clothing designed for four- to eight-year-old girls and thongs in “tween” stores aimed at seven- to twelve-year-olds.
Greater exposure to thin-ideal media correlates with higher levels of dieting, exercising, and eating disorders. Here’s a horrifying statistic: From 2002 to 2003, the number of girls eighteen years old and younger who got breast implants nearly tripled, from 3,872 to 11,326. The current ideal, in case you’ve missed it, is to be skinny with big breasts.
Girls feel pressure to look this way, but then teachers report that girls’ “hypersexuality” strikes them as incompatible with academic achievement. So if you’re smart and want to be popular, you want to look sexy, leading teachers to think you can’t possibly have an intelligent thought in your head. What a setup.
lisa: My parents never shielded me from the reality of sex and sensuality, no beating around the bush stories of the birds and the bees or some other silly analogy other parents use, like, “The man parks his car in the woman’s garage.” During the news about Magic Johnson’s HIV, I heard the word sex over and over on the car radio. I was seve
n and asked, “Mom, what’s sex?” and, surprisingly, she answered bluntly in plain detail, “Well, sex is usually when a man sticks his penis in a woman’s vagina.”
“Oh . . .” I still wasn’t quite sure what that meant or why people did that, but okay. I had seen some pretty explicit movies. Most of my friends were restricted to PG-13 or less, but I had watched R-rated movies, though my parents would warn that I might not like it, or have nightmares or sometimes Dad would somewhat panic and shout, “Close your eyes, Lisa!” Yet, something about sexual expression fascinated me, on TV and within my own body. Because my parents didn’t draw a shield around the subject, I was able to develop my own opinion on sex and sexual expression, and I knew what was too mature for me.
In middle school, I learned terms such as blow job, feeling up and feeling down, eating out, and 69 although I had to have a friend explain how 69 stood for a sexual act.
I grew large breasts way before my time, at least before breasts were desirable to boys. And that was the problem; they were all still young boys, barely blossoming as I kicked off the puberty streak for girls.
In high school, I seemed to fade behind the other girls who had caught up with puberty, who had developed breasts and curves that the boys who were finally becoming “guys/men” began to desire. It wasn’t until midway through my junior year that I felt at all sexually desirable, when I met my first boyfriend. By that time, the idea of waiting until I was in love for sex seemed unnecessary, and I had grown far too impatient through all the years of self-loathing and body hatred and being passed over by guy after guy. When I had someone to make out with and fool around in bed with I didn’t want to wait. My parents had never pressed me to wait or made sex seem like it had to be something hugely important and dramatic. But sex brought on added pressure. With my boyfriend, after the first time, it became expected and I kept denying him, not fore-play, just sex, until he claimed we had moved too fast and dumped me. I started to feel as if sex meant little to most people.
As I got older it became a source of validation when everything else in my life seemed so chaotic. A touch from a guy or a look of desire my way made me feel wanted, and I gave in to what he wanted, but then was always left alone, with no phone calls, no word from him again. Then a new guy came along and this happened over and over. How stupid could I be? Or maybe I was just very lonesome and desperate for attention, even if only for a fleeting moment.
My mind got lost during sex, forgetting why I had gotten myself into that situation again. Somehow, I could never say no and the reality is that I feared if I did, they would physically hurt me. In sex ed and self-defense classes girls are taught to say no when they feel pressured, to resist sexual harassment and unwanted sexual requests. But when I wanted to say no I said nothing. My throat closed up, my mind went numb, and then it was too late.
In high school, I started smoking marijuana on weekends. We’d get high and eat, eat, eat. Everyone in Palo Alto went to this one donut shop, where you’d order one donut and get another for free. And one friend’s parents were stoners, keeping all kinds of stoner food at their house. Bingeing was fun. I only smoked on weekends, and I kept exercising, so it didn’t add weight, but when I got serious about restricting, the overeating had to stop. Therefore, I quit smoking pot. The allure of food grabbed me so strong that I had to throw my arms out in front of me and just say no to pot and thus no to overeating.
For years, I had no idea what hunger felt like, nor could I really recognize being full. I just felt the same all the time and ate, and ate, because food would never let me down. It was always there for me.
As a baby and young child I loved eating more than Dad, Mom, and Jake did, for sure. They may have loved food, but they understood their hunger and fullness cues, and when to stop.
I fit in perfectly with my family’s vast and adventurous appetites, especially on restaurant review nights. But I grew so much bigger than my peers at the very point when it was crucial to fit in, or at least be able to pretend to fit in. I’m not sure what I weighed, but it didn’t matter because I felt fat. When you’re fat, you can’t fake it. I had to choose between bonding with my family and fitting in with my peers, and as I was bad at both; all I felt was shame. And then I ate more.
I decided it was time for me to mold myself into what I saw as the ideal teenage female. I had to limit family meals and control my caloric intake, which meant that eating out could be dangerous. If I didn’t know the ingredients and quantities put into each meal, I felt safer avoiding the restaurant altogether. As I became stricter and more motivated in my journey to my ideal body, time with my family significantly diminished.
No one thing happened to get me into anorexia. I got interested in the vegetarian diet and menu options, but not all at once. I exercised a few times at the gym. I started to feel a sense of control over my body, which increased when I cut down on carbohydrates. One of the trainers suggested, “No carbs after six.” I added that to my growing list of restrictions.
For dinner I usually had a salad with chicken or tofu, light balsamic vinaigrette dressing, carrots, tomatoes, and some crumbled goat cheese. If my friends had pizza I either forced myself into allowing one slice, or I might scrape the vegetables and some cheese from the top and just eat that. I cut out fried foods, and limited sweets to twice a week. Then none at all. When all this started, I was eating three meals a day and an after-workout snack. Soon what little I was eating would only make up one meal. As my caloric intake decreased drastically, so did the number of statements about my body. People scrutinized me with some worry, dropping a few comments like, “Oh my god, Lisa, you have gotten so skinny!” But their observations and comments only furthered my desire to lose weight. If the public actually saw me as skinny then I felt I had to keep up that image. I sat alone during lunch at school, fearful of others’ comments toward my limited food choices and fearful they might make me eat more.
I started checking out the pro-anorexia websites (dubbed “proana” online). Many of them had enticing introductions like, “Enter if you dare.” I was so lonely. Here were pictures and stories of other girls who understood! That was the “thinspiration” section, and then they’d have diet and exercise tips, like this: Standing is better than sitting, walking is better than standing, running is better than walking, sprinting is better than running. It was stuff you could just incorporate into your day.
I made a point of turning down Mom’s invitations to join them when dining out. I wondered if I hurt her feelings, or Dad’s. When I did agree to go with Dad to the Afghan restaurant I used to love, I spent more time focused on the calories and quantity of my meal than enjoying the chance to be out with just Dad.
My fixation on achieving the ideal body overpowered my ability to remain an active member of my family.
sheila: In high school, Lisa started swearing off certain foods, then most of the restaurants I needed to review. She never was fat, but she felt that way, so it made no difference. Even if they had something for vegetarians, and a lot of my readers were vegetarians so I looked for those items, Lisa didn’t want to come with us anyway. She was revolted by the smell of steak, frying oil, whatever else was off her list on any given day. The tightening self-control was squeezing out any sense of natural balance, that you could just experience food, not as an enemy or ally but just as plain food. We didn’t expect a sixteen-year-old to make dining with us her top choice of activities. Still, when an all-vegan café opened in Palo Alto, I insisted that she had no excuse. The Bay Leaf Café was only three miles away and had a menu full of items she could eat.
As was often happening in Silicon Valley, techies with money had opened the Bay Leaf Café—bay for Bay Area, leaf for green environment. Two software engineers had stocked their little restaurant’s cheerful blond wood shelves with books like Eating to Save the Earth and The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen, and the menu was coded with full circles, half-circles, and three-quarter circles to indicate one hundred, fifty, or seventy-five percent or
ganic for each item. I ordered a grilled portobello mushroom sandwich and an entrée involving brown rice, braised tofu, mushrooms, spinach, red onions, spring onions, and tomatoes in a sesame wine sauce. We missed the Mighty Carrot Roll, which turned out to be one of Bay Leaf’s most popular items, but tasted the creamy carrot soup and the unfortunate soy cheesecake, frosted with strawberry jam.
Lisa took a few sullen bites of each dish and was ready to leave. I wasn’t. I needed to get a better feel for this restaurant. She snapped at me for trying to make her eat too much, then got up and left me sitting there, like a jilted lover.
Later we learned that teenagers hide eating disorders behind a vegetarian diet. They may initially become vegetarians out of concerns about global warming and cruelty to animals, or disgust with what their parents eat and keep in the house. Maybe the family doesn’t eat fried food or red meat; teenagers will find something else to repudiate. They need to find their wings, and the kitchen is a convenient place to practice fluttering. Rejecting Mom and Dad’s food puts the growing space between you on the table every day. Plenty of young vegetarians stay on the healthy side, but for teens, there are important, self-defining side benefits of exercising discipline and losing weight, feeling good about the former and getting praised for the latter. What’s not to like about shunning meat, a win-win in terms of asserting yourself and saving the planet? Except for some unsettling odds: Vegetarian teens are twice as likely as their peers to diet frequently, four times as likely to diet intensively, and eight times as likely to abuse laxatives. These are all symptoms of eating disorders.
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