If their parents even know. :(

There have been some recovering anorexics and bulimics here on GC who have mentioned that they successfully managed to hide their problem from their parents. Especially in college, when you can blame weight loss on how bad the cafeteria food is, your busy schedule, or taking on a new activity...it's easy to explain it away.

These parents know but feel powerless to help, short of hospitalizing their daughters. One mom has been blaming the high school cheer coach for her daughter's illness; it's certainly true that the cheer coach weighed them in front of each other every couple of weeks and announced their weights to shame them into losing weight. I think there's a special place in hell for that coach.

The other family lives down the street and their daughter looks like a skeleton with skin pasted on it. She used to be on the high school volleyball team with BlazerCheer and Ballerina and she was a great player. She goes to Valdosta and last year her sorority played against theirs in intramural volleyball. She's been far too weak to play this year and it used to be her favorite activity.

Baby Berry and I saw her right before recruitment and neither of us recognized her.:(

There are two types of people on those kind of sites. The first kind are the ones who really do have a problem (some more severe than others), the second kind are those who think anorexia & bulemia are the 'cool' things too do. Of the ones who are actually sick there are those who know they have a problem and wish they could get help and there are those who don't see anorexia as a problem.
Most people with anorexia do it as a form of control and are perfectionist. Ana & Mia are not easy diseases. I struggled with them (ana mostly) for several months. My mom had serious cancer, my life was spiraling out of control and it seemed like my eating (or lack there of) was the only thing I could control. It wasn't too hard to hide the disease either, even living with 3 roommates. I knew I wanted help and needed help, I dropped almost every clue possible without actually telling people that I had an eating disorder. When I moved home for the summer, things got back under control and I was able to get the help I need.

Anyway, It is a disease and many people who have it cannot help it.

hijack: It's their brand thing. Everything is "Local 4", they claim to cover local news first. I'm watching Local 4 Weather as I type. Every reporter finishes every report with "This is blah blah, local first" (because they are not only Local 4, but they beat all the other news stations at everything .. or claim to) It does get annoying.
/hijack

Dee

If they are over 18, it is very hard to force hospitalization. If the girls are under 18, the parents can have them committed to a hospital. If they are over 18, either the girl must decide to have herself hospitalized or the parents must prove that the girl is a serious danger to herself (which seems like a no-brainer, but this can be very difficult within the legal system). That said, if there is any way these parents can get these girls in the hospital, they need to do it. I've never heard of a case where a girl recovered from a serious eating disorder on her own. These girls will either struggle with eating disorders for the rest of their (shortened) life, or die due to complications from the e.d. It's definitely not something that they should be ignoring.

That said -- it's so unfortunate, and frustrating, that only the girls who are visibly disordered are getting attention for their anorexia. For every girl who looks like a walking skeleton, there are 20 more who are doing things just as harmful to their bodies but aren't nearly as thin. This was a frequent topic of conversation at one of the eating disorder boards I visited -- the attention given to the visibly ill girls just reinforces the disorders of those who aren't as sick, and they feel that they are never going to feel noticed/validated until they are as sick-looking as those girls. Parents rarely notice until their children are VERY ill. I struggled with eating disorders on and off for six years, and the only time my parents noticed that something was wrong was for a few months when I was at my very worst. (And we were a family who ate dinner together most nights, etc., so it's not as if they were the type of parents who saw me so little they didn't even know what I looked like, let alone what I was doing on the weekends or how I was spending my time.) I never got sickly thin, although at the height of my disorder I was pretty tiny, and people did comment. I knew a number of other anorexics in my high school, including one who ultimately died of complications relating to the disease, and none of them looked like skeletons either. And of course bulimics tend to be normal to overweight, so size is not an accurate predictor there, either.

Parents really need to pay attention to their daughters' (and increasingly, their sons') relationships with food these days. Weight isn't really an accurate measure of the harm they're doing to their bodies, and it's very hard for girls today to go through adolescence without acquiring some screwed-up body image to varying degrees.