Authors: Harriet Brown
Brave Girl Eating (26 page)
A veritable and virtual
army of generous people helped us help our daughter. To all of you, I'm forever grateful. Beth Neary and Susan Neff are my heroines; I don't know what we would have done without you. Thanks to Ellyn Satter, who keeps me in her heart; the feeling is mutual.
A million thanks to the friends and neighbors who fed us, walked with us, listened to us, supported us. In particular, Joan Laurion and Barbara and Bob Koechley traveled places none of us wanted to go; the fact that we didn't have to go there alone made all the difference. Many thanks as well to Asja and David Young, Bobbie Johnson, Elaine and Dave Glowacki, Gale Petersen, Joan Fischer, Judy Woodburn, Kay and Nick Cahill, Laurie Zimmerman, Lisa and Harry Webne-Behrman, Margaret Krome and Steve Ventura, Melissa Schulz, Nancy Holyoke, and Pamela Reilly. Thanks to Scott Klug for being the kind of boss who puts families first.
And thank you to Daniel le Grange, Jim Lock, and Walter Kaye for answering my questions at length and ad nauseam, for your work on eating disorders, and for your compassion toward patients and their families. Eternal gratitude to Jane Cawley, my cochair at Maudsley Parents (www.maudsleyparents.org)âfriend, colleague, adviser, and fellow traveler. Keep those videos coming.
Thanks as well to Cris Haltom for helping later, and to Laura Collins, who wrote the book that got us started.
As always, I owe a lot to Miriam Altshuler, agent and friend. Who would have predicted where we'd end up twenty years ago? To Nancy Miller, for believing in this book before it existed, and to Mary Ellen O'Neill, who championed the book from the beginningâthank you from the bottom of my heart.
My early readers offered invaluable feedback. Pam Reilly, Kasey Brown, and Shander Bawden, you're the best! I'm also grateful to Ilena Silverman at the
New York Times Magazine,
who helped me shape the article that led to the writing of this book.
Thanks to my research assistants, Lin Lin and Simone Becque, who helped me collect and organize hundreds of studies so I could find exactly the statistic I wanted when I wanted itâa miracle.
The Vermont Studio Center, Edenfred, and the Corporation of Yaddo gave me residencies where I was able to step outside my life and think and write. I am grateful beyond words for the gifts of time and space and creative camaraderie.
Thanks to my husband, Jamie, for his thoughtful, unwavering support; I'm so lucky to have you in my life. To Emma, for her powers of observation and her capacity for empathy; you once told me that no one ever talks about how hard anorexia is on the parents and sisters and brothers. Now, I hope, they will.
HARRIET BROWN
grew up in South Jersey and has lived in New York City and Madison, Wisconsin. A regular contributor to the
New York Times
Science section, Brown has also written for the
New York Times Magazine, O, Redbook, Health
, and other magazines and newspapers. Her previous books include
Feed Me!
, which is also the title of her popular blog that covers food, eating disorders, and obesity (harrietbrown.blogspot.com). Brown is a sought-after speaker and an assistant professor of magazine journalism at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her family.
www.harrietbrown.com
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Jacket photographs: Arms Holding Apple © by Martha Schuster; Background Image © by Jan Cobb
This book is written as a source of information only. The information contained in this book should by no means be considered a substitute for the advice, decisions, or judgment of the reader's medical, or other, professional adviser.
All efforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this book as of the date published. The author and the publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein.
BRAVE GIRL EATING
. Copyright © 2010 by Harriet Brown. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition © July 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200861-9
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*
The only way to tell an athletic heart rate from a true bradycardia is to measure the size of the heart: an athlete's heart gets bigger, whereas the heart of someone with anorexia shrinks.
*
A 2007 study comparing anorexic women with control subjects showed a fascinating difference in how they process images of themselves and others. Using functional MRI scans, researchers Perminder Sachdev, Naresh Mondraty, Wei Wen, and Kylie Gulliford looked at which areas of the brain lit up when both groups were shown images of themselves and others. When looking at images of other women, anorexics and controls responded similarly. When looking at images of themselves, though, several areas of the brains of anorexic women did not “light up,” most notably the insula, two small neuro organs where physical sensationsâtastes, smells, hunger, cravingâare transformed into emotions like disgust, pride, guilt, love, and deception.
*
Pauline S. Powers, “Psychotherapy of Anorexia Nervosa,” in
Current Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia,
ed. Pauline S. Powers and Robert C. Fernandez, 18â46 (New York: Karger, 1984), 22.
*
Ibid., 43.
â
Richard A. Gordon,
Anorexia and Bulimia: Anatomy of a Social Epidemic
(Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1990), 11.
*
Hilde Bruch,
The Golden Cage
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 34.
*
Shannon Zaitsof and Andrew Taylor, “Factors Related to Motivation for Change in Adolescents with Eating Disorders,”
European Eating Disorders Review
17 (2009): 227â33.
*
One of the proposed changes for the next edition,
DSM-V,
removes the word
refusal
.
*
In 2007, Laurel E. S. Mayer and other researchers at St. Luke'sâRoosevelt Hospital Center in New York City published a study showing that recovered anorexics with lower levels of body fat do worse, in the long term, than those with higher levels of body fat.
*
Theories put forth by, respectively, Joanna Poppink and Annette Kluck.
*
Ancel Keys et al.
The Biology of Human Starvation
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 833.
*
Harriet Brown, “Go with Your Gut,”
New York Times
op-ed, February 20, 2006.
*
Harriet P. Lefley and Mona Wasow, eds.,
Helping Families Cope with Mental Illness
(Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994).
*
Julian Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
â
J. E. Downhill Jr. et al. “Shape and Size of the Corpus Callosum in Schizophrenia and Schizotypal Personality Disorder,”
Schizophrenia Research
42, no. 3 (2000): 193â208.
*
Each state sets its own laws about insurance, creating an inequitable and variable picture across the country. In 2008, a New Jersey woman named Dawn Beye sued her insurer for failing to cover her daughter's inpatient treatment for an eating disorder. That suit forced insurers in New Jersey to cover eating disorders as biologically based illnesses.
*
Keys et al., 917.
â
Ibid., 906.
*
Interview with the Associated Press, February 21, 2007.