Fighting eating disorders
DALIA SABLE
ELI Szental is a vibrant, intelligent woman who has grown up in a loving, close-knit family. Speaking with her, it is difficult to imagine that she has spent almost half her life battling for her survival.
For most of us, eating is a basic part of our day, but for Szental — and for one in 20 Australian women and many men — it consumes their lives.
While commonly associated with weight loss and an obsession to be thin, eating disorders are much more complex psychological illnesses, which are not necessarily about the desire to lose weight.
“They are usually connected to someone’s underlying negative feelings about themselves, their self-confidence, and the way they feel about their body [and] their body image,” Romy Roth from The Butterfly Foundation told The AJN.
Roth said that eating disorders, most commonly manifesting in anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa but also constituting binge eating and disordered eating, can affect anyone at any stage of their life.
In Australia, eating disorders have been recorded in people as young as seven and as old as 70, but the majority of initial diagnoses occur in young females aged between 12 and 14, often in high achievers, or perfectionists, who are concerned with pleasing others.
For Szental, now 29, it began when she was 15 following the death of someone close to her and a subsequent comment that she would look so much better if she were thinner.
“So I started dieting,” she said. Szental lost 20 kilograms over the next two years.
“I didn’t even think about it. My mission just became to lose weight. I didn’t talk to anyone and being in year 11 and 12, the stress I guess, it all just worked its way together.”
After completing year 12, the condition subsided, but it was to return with a vengeance.
“I went away after first year uni and when I was over there, I started becoming bulimic. I was in a Yeshivah and there were a lot of girls there with a lot of problems. I don’t know why, but one day I just felt like I had to vomit. That was when it started again,” she said.
A few months after returning to Australia, Szental’s parents noticed their daughter’s mood-swings and her tendency to become “a lot more withdrawn”. They arranged therapy sessions for her.
“I started to see someone but I didn’t tell her until about a year later that I was bulimic. I was so ashamed by it that I didn’t want to talk about it,” Szental said.
“Once I told her I was bulimic I didn’t see her for about another six months. Then it got out of control and I was vomiting about five or six times a day and I started with the bingeing.”
At that point, Szental was 19 and forced to defer her university degree “because it was so out of control”. Despite small periods of improvement, Szental was seriously struggling with her condition, something, she said, that devastated her family.
“It rips families apart because you have a daughter, but your daughter is not really there,” she said.
She was hospitalised on a number of occasions, as well as undergoing treatment in a world-renowned facility in Sweden.
“You always want to get better, but the illness is so strong. On an intellectual level you want to get better, but emotionally, when there is so much going on, it is so hard.”
A change came a year ago when someone gave Szental an article about a unique program in New York called Magen Avrohom, run by Orthodox rabbi Dovid Dewick.
Magen Avrohom is a mentoring program designed to create a network of support for, what they call, “the struggler” and their family.
Recognising that the condition is physical and emotional, the not-for-profit organisation seeks to surround the patient with “an environment that is conducive to recovery”.
“I read about it and thought it was amazing, so I got in touch with them and they told me they don’t deal with people outside of New York. I was a bit devastated because the mentoring program sounded like the missing link for me,” Szental said.
It was not, however, to be the last of Magen Avrohom for Szental and her family. On a subsequent trip to New York, she took it upon herself to phone Rabbi Dewick who agreed to meet with her.
Rabbi Dewick was so taken with Szental that he agreed to train someone for her, in addition to establishing an arm of the organisation in Australia to assist others.
Still in its early stages, seven anonymous mentors have been trained through Spiritgrow Holistic Centre in Melbourne and a phone line, for the cost of a local call, has been established connecting Australians directly with the organisation in New York and simultaneously with a local mentor.
For Szental, this mentor is “someone separate from your treating team”.
“It is not your family, it is not a friend. It is an outside source that you know you can speak to about anything and you won’t be judged and it won’t have repercussions on your relationships.”
Szental said it is “an objective view” between regular therapy sessions.
“When you’re in therapy you have a session for one hour a week and you bring up all these things and afterwards you have all these thoughts, but you don’t have the opportunity to talk things through until the following week. The mentor is someone you can call anytime and tell them, ‘this is what I am going through’ and you can just talk it out.”
While it is still a daily struggle, Szental is now working part-time and with “a great team together now” feels she is on her way to a better place.
“Slowly, slowly I am living my life as opposed to living the eating disorder. I am still drawn into it more than the healthy side of things, but there are more moments. Recovery is definitely in the future and I can see I have come a long way.”
Magen Avrohom’s Australian helpline is anonymous and now operational. Phone (03) 9001 5940.
For help or more information:
The Butterfly Foundation: www.thebutterflyfoundation.org.au
Eating Disorders Foundation (Vic): www.eatingdisorders.org.au.
Eating disorders in Australia: fast facts
* After obesity and asthma, anorexia is the most common medical condition in females aged 15 to 24.
* Five in 100 Australians suffer from bulimia nervosa.
* Eighty-three per cent of bulimic patients vomit, 33 per cent abuse laxatives, and 10 per cent take diet pills.
* Ten per cent of young adults and approximately 25 per cent of children diagnosed with anorexia nervosa are male.
* Twenty per cent of 18 to 22-year-old Australian women have symptoms of binge eating disorder.
* Fifty per cent of primary school children want to weigh less according to a survey of pre-adolescent Sydney children.
* Twenty-five per cent of seven to 10-year-olds in Australia have dieted to lose weight.
* The chances of an active Australian woman aged 18-35 years having the same weight, height, waist and hip measurements of a shop mannequin is 1.1 per cent. She has a miniscule chance of matching the measurements of Barbie.
Source: The Butterfly Foundation, The Royal Children Hospital’s Centre of Excellence in Eating Disorders.
Some eating disorder warning signs:
* Deliberate self-starvation
* Weight changes (loss or gain)
* Intense fear or preoccupation with food, weight and/or shape
* Compulsive exercise
* Giving food a moral value (“good” or “bad”)
* Feeling dizzy or faint
* Persistent headaches
* Frequent trips to the bathroom after eating
* Mood swings and irritability
* Avoiding social situations that include food
* Displaying rituals around food (only using a certain cup or spoon)
Source: the Royal Children Hospital’s Centre of Excellence in Eating Disorders
Changing the trend
TO help the community become more aware and better equipped to tackle eating disorders, there are a number of things people can do:
* Preventative programs in schools
* Encouraging internal qualities and focusing less on what is liked/disliked about the external
* Building up an understanding of the way images in the media are enhanced, changed and airbrushed, in order to sell
* Encourage the message that anyone can feel good about themselves, no matter what they look like.
Source: The Butterfly Foundation
Hungry to be Heard
AN in-depth documentary examining eating disorders in the Orthodox community was screened last week in Melbourne.
Titled Hungry to be Heard, the documentary showed how food is often central to life in a Jewish home with Shabbat and festivals revolving around large meals. The documentary also revealed how the matchmaking process in ultra-Orthodox circles often puts focus on physical appearance, rather than internal beauty.
In addition to the focus on weight, some girls have developed eating disorders as a subconscious way of controlling their future, which can be otherwise out of their control.
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