Word: anorexia
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...Harvard student, but she is typical of the many women at Harvard who have bulimia, says Ellen Porter Honnet, assistant dean of the college for co-education. Annette is a real student. And people, men and women, like them are a growing population at Harvard. Bulimia and anorexia have not struck Cambridge in epidemic proportions, but the eating disorders on campus can't be ignored either...
...Anorexia has been recognized since the Middle Ages, while bulimia, Jenny's problem, has only been recognized for a decade. Anorexics have an intense preoccupation with dieting and lose at least 25 percent of their original body weight but still see themselves as fat. Bulimics are more difficult to diagnose because they binge and then purge, not greatly affecting body weight. The most difficult type of eating disorder to diagnose is the irregular eating habit. Large numbers of students pursue very unhealthy eating patterns, going on crash diets, eating unbalanced meals, binging on sweets...
...Anorexia and bulimia are not diseases. If labeled as such people think they can take pills or something to get rid of it. I call it a 'coping strategy gone awry.' It's a combination of the psychological and the physical," says Honnet, who is also an assistant psychologist at University Health Services dealing with eating disorders...
...Bulimia is much more common than anorexia, but it is very difficult to get reliable statistics," according to Dr. Margaret S. McKenna '70, a psychiatrist at UHS. In medical literature, many surveys of college age women have yielded a wide range of results: from 2 to 25 percent of the female college age population have eating disorders McKenna says...
...that bulimia has increased, but it is not nearly as prevalent as has been widely believed. At the same time, there are many individuals who have bulimic-like syndromes that don't fit all the stringent requirements of the operational definition," Ware says. "The same would be true for anorexia," she added...