On Tuesday, I wrote about four girls from East High School who wound up at Children’s Hospital at the same time, all diagnosed with anorexia nervosa.
They happen to be Caucasian and middle class, fitting the stereotype that anorexia strikes affluent white girls because supposedly they have a thinner body ideal than girls of color.
But in a consumer-driven society where one ad beckons us to eat something “sinful” to “reward ourselves,” followed by another featuring a bony model, followed by another for the latest diet fad, females of all stripes are getting the message that eating is bad.
The more insecure the advertisers make us, the more thigh-blasters and low-carb products we’ll buy to become skinny. But the only path to stickdom is starvation – and unfortunately more young women are taking that route.
The message has trickled down to 12-year-old girls who recently have immigrated to this country from Latin America, making it clear anorexia and bulimia are not far-flung illnesses just of the upper crust.
At Rachel B. Noel Middle School near Montbello, where minorities make up 96 percent of the school body, officials are grappling with ways to help six girls diagnosed with eating disorders.
All six are Latinas from low-income families. Two of the girls are recent arrivals from Latin America. They struggle to speak English, yet they’ve learned the twisted logic that skin-and-bones is beautiful.
“One of the girls is thin, she has no fat on her, but she said she didn’t want to gain weight because she didn’t want to have ‘love handles,”‘ said Keli Laverty, an addictions counselor from Arapahoe House who works at the school.
The girl is 12.
One of the other girls has been taken to a hospital emergency room twice. Another says it hurts her stomach to eat because she’s not used to it.
All admitted to Laverty they never eat breakfast and usually skip lunch.
“I asked them, ‘Aren’t you hungry when you get home from school?’ They say, ‘Yes, but if I start eating I can’t stop,’ ” Laverty told me.
She has been working alongside a therapist, the school nurse and an eating-disorders specialist to help the girls understand what they are doing to their bodies and why. They brought in their parents, who were baffled by their daughters’ eating behavior.
But the girls don’t see a problem. They’ve told Laverty lots of the friends skip meals because they are dieting.
Dieting at 12?
Across town, in another Denver middle school, the same is happening with another group of girls. The mother of one called to talk, but she didn’t want her name published.
She said she overheard her daughter and a group of friends talk about how they force themselves to throw up to lose weight.
She later confronted her daughter, who admitted she did it too. Now she watches her daughter to make sure she eats and doesn’t go somewhere to purge.
She hides catalogs from her daughter because her daughter will look through them and cry out, “I’m so fat!” – even though at 5 feet 5 and 115 pounds, she’s on the thin side.
But she can’t see that. All she knows is she doesn’t look like the skinny girls she sees on TV, in movies and in magazines.Those creatures and their messages are at every turn, taunting our girls. All our girls.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays and Thursdays in Scene. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
