At first, Charlotte Evans would starve herself or throw up after the occasional meal.
But her eating disorder soon consumed her life: She started skipping classes at Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y., so she could purge, sometimes as often as five times a day.
“I want to get better but sometimes I don?t want to give it up because it makes me feel better,” said Evans, 21, who moved home to Towson last semester so she could battle her bulimia with help from doctors at Sheppard Pratt Health System.
“If I haven?t done it, I feel depressed,” Evans said. “When I do it, I feel better and think that other people like me more.”
Doctors say eating disorders abound on college campuses because students are away from home ? often for the first time ? and under a lot of stress to make friends and get good grades.
Dorms, off-campus apartments and even sororities and fraternities can often turn into breeding grounds for body-image problems. Teenagers and twentysomethings drink more, struggle with the “freshman 15” weight gain, compare themselves with one another and adopt bad eating habits, from skipping meals to consuming entire pizzas.
“Making the transition to college can be stressful and eating disorders are coping mechanisms for stress,” said Graham Redgrave, assistant director of the eating disorders program at Johns Hopkins Hospital. “There is also some evidence that these behaviors are contagious.”
As many as one in four female college students suffers from an eating disorder,according to the Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery at Texas Tech University.
Some colleges don?t even acknowledge that their students have eating disorders, a revelation that shocked Mia Holland at Capella University in Massachusetts. She had her students call public and private universities nationwide to inquire about what they do to help students with eating disorders. About 80 percent of colleges that responded, Holland said, denied “having a problem.”
But some are reaching out, especially during National Eating Disorders Awareness Week this week.
At Goucher College, health educator Ellen Snydman is handing out bookmarks with positive statements about body images.
Loyola College in Maryland recently hosted a summit, said organizer Sharon Peterson, a former bulimic who started the Eating Disorder Network of Maryland in June to help patients and their families.
At the College of Notre Dame, not a day goes by that Nancy Gallart doesn?t hear friends and classmates complain about their bodies.
“My 5-year-old niece told me the other day she?s fat; I was so upset,” said Gallart, 21, a senior who competed Saturday in the Miss Frederick pageant on the platform of promoting a healthy body image to teenage girls.
Her friend suffered from anorexia and bulimia during high school, and as a ballerina and aspiring model, Gallart has fought society?s constant, celebrity-perpetuated ideal that thin is beautiful.
At 14, Gallart, who stands at a slender 5-foot-9, was told she could be only a plus-sized model. And her ex-boyfriend had kept telling her she was fat.
“People look up to Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie and they are teensy-tiny things,” she said.
“These women weigh nothing so we have horribly unrealistic goals.”
