From early childhood, women receive messages from society and the media that push them to use food for psychological comfort. Too often, the end result is eating disorders that, as this story of Ashley illustrates, can severely disrupt their college experience:
Ashley's struggle with depression and anorexia began in high school. "Especially in my senior year, I was really a mess," she remembers. "I was crying all the time. People in school would ask me what was wrong, and I'd say it was just the stress of taking high-level courses and applying to top schools. But I knew that wasn't it. I even failed a few classes, which never happened before. My parents didn't notice, or if they did, I guess they just figured I was in a senior slump."
Of course, Ashley brought those problems with her to college. Although she knew that the tension of being in a new environment would probably aggravate both of these mental health conditions, Ashley couldn't wait to get out on her own. "My eating problems caused a lot of fighting with my parents," she remembers. "They tried to control everything I ate and tell me exactly how much I could exercise. My mom tried to understand what I was going through because she had had her own issues with eating, but my dad was very angry about the problem, and we had a lot of arguments. I wasn't homesick at all when I got to college. In fact, the first family weekend at college was a disaster for me because my parents came to visit, and I didn't want to show them anything about my new life. I was really worried that they would keep trying to control me. I don't know how much they actually did that or how much I just worried about it happening."
Freshman year passed in a haze for Ashley. "I couldn't concentrate or focus on anything. I couldn't get up in the morning. I just wanted to sleep all the time. I started skipping classes, and I didn't want to eat. Finally, when I was really feeling desperate, I went to see a therapist at the college's mental health center. She diagnosed depression and put me on Zoloft. I know that really helps some people, but it didn't help me feel much better."
But this was a turning point. Because Ashley used her credit card to pay for her prescription, she knew her parents would find out. So she called them and for the first time told them about her struggle with depression. Ashley remembers, "They didn't seem surprised, and they didn't ask any questions. Nothing changed."
At the end of her freshman year, Ashley began to lose more weight. "I can't say exactly what triggered it, but I guess I just needed something I could have control over. Then I came home for the summer and started fighting with my parents again. They told me I had to go to a doctor that my mother picked out. She had to talk to him first and be very involved in my treatment. This made me feel like the doctor's opinion of me was already decided based on what my mother had told him. My mother didn't lie about my problem, but she did exaggerate things. My parents said that I had to be weighed by the doctor every week, and if I didn't meet a certain weight, they ­ wouldn't pay my tuition for college in the fall. It was a horrible summer." Ashley kept her weight up and went back to school, but she says she hated that her parents had used her college education to make her do what they wanted.
In her sophomore year, things got worse. "I wasn't getting along with my roommates. They didn't like my compulsion with exercising and my eating habits. They would go out together without inviting me. They talked about me behind my back and acted so condescending when I was around. I was very unhappy, but I didn't tell anyone about it. To cope, I would leave the room every day at around 7:00 a.m. and not come back until one in the morning. I'd sleep for only about four hours a night and then get out of the room again. That way I didn't have to deal with my roommates, but it also made me feel very lonesome and depressed." These roommate issues, combined with the other anxieties of college life, made Ashley withdraw from the college community. She soon started to lose even more weight, and by the spring of her sophomore year, she hit a crisis point.
"I withdrew from college because I knew I was going to fail out," says Ashley with a little laugh. "My depression was worse, and I had no motivation to do anything. I couldn't focus, and I stopped doing my school work completely." Ashley's parents agreed with her decision as long as she supported herself. So she sublet an apartment, got two part-time jobs, and started to feel better. But soon Ashley got caught up in her eating rituals again and lost another ten pounds.
"I didn't like that my life was so controlled by these rules I set for myself," she admits. "But it was just so hard to get away from them. I'd set a certain amount of time that I had to exercise each day, and if I cut the time short, I'd feel so terrible. I'd set a rule that I couldn't eat snacks, and if I did, I'd be so angry at my own weakness and laziness. If I didn't limit my eating and increase my exercising, I just couldn't stand myself."
When Ashley went back to college for her junior year, she wasn't in good shape physically, but things were starting to look better. "I had a roommate that I liked, and I had a boyfriend. I was being more social and maintaining a healthy weight. But then I started to slide backward in the second semester around exam time. I felt like my boyfriend was taking up too much of my time and energy, and it was keeping me from focusing on my eating and exercising patterns. So we broke up. After that, I studied hard all the time, and I got stuck in a high-intensity mode that roped me back into my eating disorder behavior. I continued to lose more weight through the summer.
"During this time, I didn't see my parents very often, but when we did meet, the subject of food always came up. I'd get a lecture about how I was hurting my body, and then my father would yell at me. These conversations didn't affect me at all because I had heard the same thing a thousand times, and so nothing constructive came out of it."
Finally, in her senior year, things started to change for Ashley. "With the help of the therapist I was seeing, I was able to talk to my parents in a way that was more constructive. We worked on finding ways we could explain our feelings without shutting each other down. I told my dad how he could phrase his thoughts differently so I wouldn't react so strongly. I also got a glimpse of what they were so upset about when I had my picture taken for an ID card at the library. When I saw at myself in the picture, I thought I looked like one of those girls in documentaries about anorexia. It was the first time I hated what I saw. I also started to worry that I was getting physically weak. I was getting lightheaded, and I worried about passing out. Sometimes I'd get chest pains and worry about having a heart attack, which happens to anorectics sometimes."
The breaking point came when a primary care doctor on campus told Ashley that if she didn't weigh at least 106 pounds by Thanksgiving, she would have to leave school. "Being thin was important to me, but I didn't want my eating rituals to ruin my whole life. This ultimatum made the consequences of what I was doing much more immediate, and it took away some of my guilt about eating. I felt that I wasn't giving in or being lazy; I was choosing to stay in school.
"I had struggled with eating issues for eight years, and nothing changed for me until I decided that I wanted it to change. My father always thought that he could make me do things his way. He thought he knew how I should work on my recovery. My mother too was so involved in trying to 'help' me that it just added more pressure to my life. Once I made my own decision to change, that's when it happened."
After she handed in her senior thesis, Ashley says she finally felt relaxed and at ease. "I was ready to leave school and start my life. I think that was when I realized that I wanted to be more than just thin. Today, I get a strong sense of accomplishment from my job that has nothing to do with how thin I am. It's a great feeling."

It is too bad that Ashley could not have learned this lesson sooner. To keep eating disorders from ruining their college years, our daughters need to hear from us over and over again that their value as human beings has nothing to do with the size of their body.