You're a freshman, a neophyte in the real world. As Friday night rolls around, you and your friends sashay into a swanky downtown eatery, swarm a booth, peruse the menu and maybe even order some drinks if your fake is decent or the place doesn't card. And finally your entree arrives and you can plunge your fork into ... a heaping pile of lettuce, sans dressing, while everyone else is diving into immaculate pasta or chicken dishes. They moan with pleasure and plead for you to taste a bite, just try it. Or maybe you order that, too, but promptly shuffle to the bathroom when you're finished to throw it all up, the acid still burning your nostrils as you return to the table.
You're fat. Maybe that's the "Freshman Fifteen" beckoning, but college girls are keenly self-conscious of their weight and appearance. At Penn, the desire to be perfect is a compelling force, and girls will suffer to be thin. The critical part is understanding why some are willing to sacrifice their health, their relationships and to a certain extent their sanity, for a skewed sense of beautiful.
*
Looking at Rachel* now, one can hardly envision her ever struggling with her body. Presently a College junior, her dimensions are the same as three years prior -- 5'3" and 113 pounds. Imagining her much slimmer is a painful thought to entertain. Her eyes are a muted blue that sit above a snippet nose and pouty lips. She pulls taut her side swept bangs to join the rest of her hair, returned to its natural rusty brown from the blond she maintained in high school.
She found her competitive streak long before she arrived at Penn. Growing up in an upper-middle class suburb of New York City, Rachel's surroundings were much akin to hers now at Penn: people were consumed by status and appearance. She attended a ritzy public school, where Mean Girls and Election collide to uphold many cherished high school stereotypes. The school sits on a hushed road, where its outside landscape is grassy and welcoming, and its inside corridors cast a sterile yet soothing bluish hue. Rachel experienced her most hellish days as a teenager inside these hallways, harassed for four years by an image-conscious environment and entranced by a delusion that she was fat. Though her illness didn't culminate until her senior year of high school, the obsession with weight struck her and her girlfriends hard and fast early in their freshman year.
Rachel and her friends were increasingly preoccupied with weight. "My best friend [Laura*] developed such a serious problem freshman year. She was very religious and her parents would force her to eat Shabbat dinner and she would throw it up, and she'd throw her lunch away every day."
Yet as concerned as she was for her friend's safety, Rachel and her other friends found themselves secretly ambivalent. "She was getting really, really skinny. On the one hand we were like 'Stop doing this!' but on the other we were all jealous because she was that skinny." Laura was sick freshman year, and another of Rachel's close friends suffered a more severe bout of anorexia sophomore year.
Rachel's own time arrived after suffering a spell of depression the summer before senior year. "There was a day I woke up and I said 'I'm not going to eat anything today.' And it was fine."
*
When Rachel decided not to eat that September day, she landed herself on the cusp of a psychological revolution. "The first day in an anorexic's life that she doesn't eat, that she realizes it can be done, is the worst day ever. You say you can live without food."
She tumbled into a routine that sustained her from September 2002 through May or June of 2003. Breakfast was a cup of coffee--black, to cut calories. Lunch at school was unenforceable and thus skipped entirely, and dinner would be once every four days. On that fourth day she would eat with her family and immediately purge it with laxatives. "That was my schedule," she declares dismissively, almost as if her practice sounded commonplace.
Shortly thereafter, she discovered a new complement to her lifestyle. "One day I was driving this kid to school and he said he took diet pills in the morning and it gave him a jump start ... and I was like 'Oh, this is perfect.'" So the next day she bought diet pills. But the caffeine from the morning coffee coupled with that from the pills had Rachel noticeably jittery during the day, since she would skip the food that's ordinarily part of the deal. "At 11:30 I'd have two diet pills, for lunch basically. After school I had a job, and before I got there I'd take another two. By the time I got to my job I'd be shaking, but I had to contain myself."
Rachel's peers quickly noted her deterioration. "My face was gaunt, I had black circles under my eyes. My teachers noticed, they thought that I was probably doing drugs ... I would get looks, I would hear people talking about me." Interacting on a normal level became a struggle. "I almost got into car accidents because I was always dizzy. I was faint. If I took laxatives after dinner I would wake up at four in the morning and have to go to the bathroom for three hours. I'd have to sit on my toilet for two hours and finally get back to sleep, get up at six, shower and go to school making like nothing happened, like I wasn't up all night sitting on my toilet." But Rachel was so entrenched in her mindset that she persisted anyway. "The day you start eating is the day you start gaining weight," she says.
Dinnertime was always the hardest, though Rachel got by without incident. She would tell her parents she'd be eating with a friend, while telling that friend she was eating with her parents so nobody could suspect. To pass the time she'd drive around, head to a Barnes & Noble store and browse, just go anywhere but home. "Wherever it was, it had to be a lie. To be an anorexic is to lie. You have to lie about everything."
*
Rachel never had the intrusive, over-involved parents that many teens nowadays bemoan in concert. With both parents being doctors, their time in the office gave Rachel extraordinary freedom growing up. "My parents always treated me like an equal, which has had some amazing consequences. But because my parents always treated me like a friend and not a kid I always had an extra burden [of raising myself]. I never really felt that I could tell my mother anything. She could know nothing," she insists.
Rachel never revealed to her mother that she had a mental blueprint to shed unwanted pounds. From that September to May of 2003, Rachel lost 25 pounds on her already slim frame without her parents commenting, until she entered a shouting match with her mother one day late in the academic year. "I was screaming and yelling at her and she looked into my eyes and noticed that I wasn't the same person anymore. I think she thought I was on coke," she recalls. "I ran up to my room and she came up ... I was hysterically crying and I said, 'I'm not on drugs, I'm anorexic, I don't know if you've noticed.'" Rachel pauses for a moment. "And she just gave me a hug and said, 'It's because you're special.' I have no idea to this day what that means." Her father offered equally little compassion, where Rachel said to this day he is still in denial about her problem. "At that point I realized I was not going to get anything out of them.
"I was doing it to spite them, because I feel like my parents hurt me, in a way, and I have an anger toward them that I have not yet to this day fully resolved," she admits. "I was angry at them for fucking me up or making me crazy and this was my way of getting back at them. It was my way of saying, 'Be worried about me.' I was looking for attention, I was looking for a way for them to say, 'We need to take care of our daughter.' I was looking to be sick," she sighs.
*
The perfectionist, "type-A" personality trait that so many Penn students carry applies to looks as much as it does academic performance. The Daily Pennsylvanian ran an article last year with the screaming headline "Eating disorder rates quadruple at Penn," alleging that 4.3 percent of Penn students reported having an eating disorder, a four-fold increase from 2001, according to the national College Health Assessment. This figure stands above the national average of 4.1 percent of college students.
"Ever since I've been here, body image has been an issue," says Susan Villari, the Director of Penn's Office of Health Education. Villari has worked at Penn since 1987 and oversaw the inception of Guide, a body image awareness group, in 1991. "I've heard some of the students say that they didn't feel bad about their bodies, they weren't particularly conscious of their bodies, and then they came here and all of a sudden it was a constant conversation," she says.
Rachel's anorexia thrived on the idea of competition. Even while she was shrinking to perilously thin proportions, she never gave in to her urge to eat. "That would be giving in, that would be failing, that would be unnecessary. It was all about not needing food, removing this need. When I set my mind to do something, I do it." Even when she was finally skinnier than all her friends, she continued. "I had to," she said flatly, her eyes intent. "It was also about the fact that I was better at being sick than Laura had ever been."
*
Rachel's high school struggles spilled into her life at Penn, but she's hoping that she can disentangle herself from these problems once and for all. During the summer before freshman year she had her first binging episode and felt tired of depriving herself. "I was like 'this is retarded. I'm sick of living like this, I'm hungry, I feel like shit.' And then I binged for the rest of the summer and freshman year and put on 40 pounds." Of those 40 pounds, she needed close to 30. "It was the worst experience ever," she declares. "I went from someone wanting to be skinny to being ten pounds overweight. I went back to sweatpants only; I weighed more than I ever had in my life." At her biggest, Rachel wore a size six or eight.
"I was sick of denying, restricting. I was like 'Fuck this, I'm gonna let my body have whatever it wants.' I would have two dinners sometimes ... I was extremely depressed." Toward the end of freshman year, though, Rachel began eating more healthily and managed to lift her spirits. She went down to 125 pounds over the summer, a healthy weight for her, but found a new fixation. "I started smoking a lot of pot -- pot became my new anorexia." She holds up her hands to erect a timeline in the air. "It went like this: anorexia, binging, pot, cigarettes ... you just interchange these obsessions."
Last year Rachel lived in her sorority house on campus, where she believes at least five girls at any given point were "sick" -- not necessarily diagnosed, but blatantly grappling with their eating habits. "The culture is weird," she says. "There will be a group of girls sitting at a table, and one won't be eating and the other five will be, and soon enough the other five will stop eating because they feel they shouldn't be because that one is not." Some girls leave for college and can't handle the stress of a new environment, so they seek an outlet. She declares emphatically, "Some freshman girls start smoking cigarettes. Some freshman girls develop a coke habit. Some freshman girls become anorexic -- every girl does something different."
Although she no longer deprives herself, binges, purges, or even smokes (cigarettes or marijuana), her struggle is far from over. "I still think about every single thing that I eat. I'm still always losing or gaining." Now, Rachel won't allow herself to skip meals anymore, under any circumstances. "I can't allow myself because it's so easy for me to do it. I have to have the willpower to not not eat." Still, it's hard to reconcile her past experiences with the present life, and understand the roots to every facet of her psychosis. "We're describing one aspect of my life when I was crazy. This is just the beginning of it. It was never about the weight -- period, end of story. Looking back I was probably doing it a little bit to spite my parents, a little bit to have control over something, a little bit to be self-destructive, a little because I truly believed I was fat -- who the hell knows?"
To this day Rachel still sees a therapist, where three years removed she's still trying to figure everything out. "I had a definite reason to hurt myself. I have no idea what it was. I can't go back to being 17. I have to look at it now and piece together the puzzle [three] years later; there's no way I can ever fully understand it, ever."
Names in this article have been changed.
