Annette had anorexia nervosa in high school. At one point she weighed 97 pounds. She remembers that she couldn't admit that she had a problem, that she would look in the mirror and see herself as fat, even after losing 30 pounds. Her mother finally forced her to see a doctor.

After a year and a half of therapy she was back to her normal weight. At Harvard, she stopped going to therapy, but she still worries about eating and her weight. Sometimes she plays with her food without eating; other times she indulges in sweets and then is depressed for days because she went off her diet.

In the spring of her freshman year at Harvard, Jenny realized that she had gained 10 pounds over the winter and decided that she needed to go on a diet. She shed the 10 pounds without much effort, but with the summer ahead and the prospect of seeing her old high school friends, she became convinced that she needed to lose even more weight.

But instead of dieting more she began eating more, especially late at night when she was studying. Finally one night she tried throwing up and felt she had resolved the two pressures working on her--wanting to eat, yet afraid to gain weight. Jenny found herself eating more and more food and then vomitting.

When Jenny visited the dentist for her checkup, he asked her if she threw up often; the acid had been affecting her tooth enamel. Her dentist scared her, but when she tried cutting back on her binging and purging, she found it almost impossible.

Jenny is not a Harvard student, but she is typical of the many women at Harvard who have bulimia, says Ellen Porter Honnet, assistant dean of the college for co-education. Annette is a real student. And people, men and women, like them are a growing population at Harvard. Bulimia and anorexia have not struck Cambridge in epidemic proportions, but the eating disorders on campus can't be ignored either.

Anorexia has been recognized since the Middle Ages, while bulimia, Jenny's problem, has only been recognized for a decade. Anorexics have an intense preoccupation with dieting and lose at least 25 percent of their original body weight but still see themselves as fat. Bulimics are more difficult to diagnose because they binge and then purge, not greatly affecting body weight. The most difficult type of eating disorder to diagnose is the irregular eating habit. Large numbers of students pursue very unhealthy eating patterns, going on crash diets, eating unbalanced meals, binging on sweets.

These problems affect predominantly female Harvard students, but many men also suffer with eating problems. People who have a disorder can suffer severely; it can psychologically and physically control their lives, drawing them into a cycle which is difficult to escape.

Coping Strategy Gone Awry

"Anorexia and bulimia are not diseases. If labeled as such people think they can take pills or something to get rid of it. I call it a 'coping strategy gone awry.' It's a combination of the psychological and the physical," says Honnet, who is also an assistant psychologist at University Health Services dealing with eating disorders.

"Bulimia is much more common than anorexia, but it is very difficult to get reliable statistics," according to Dr. Margaret S. McKenna '70, a psychiatrist at UHS. In medical literature, many surveys of college age women have yielded a wide range of results: from 2 to 25 percent of the female college age population have eating disorders McKenna says.

According to a 1982 and 1983 Radcliffe survey that stringently defined bulimia as binging once a week, between 4 and 8 percent of the 400 women and less than 1 percent of the 200 men surveyed at Harvard and another Boston area college could be classified as having bulimia, says Norma C. Ware, assistant dean of Radcliffe.

"The results of our survey corresponded to the results of surveys [that used comparable definitions of bulimia] done in other parts of the country on other college campuses," Ware says.

"Our conclusion is that bulimia has increased, but it is not nearly as prevalent as has been widely believed. At the same time, there are many individuals who have bulimic-like syndromes that don't fit all the stringent requirements of the operational definition," Ware says. "The same would be true for anorexia," she added.

Honnet says that the number of students coming to Harvard who either have eating disorders or develop them is increasing. "The incidence at Harvard parallels incidences in the population as a whole," she says. Indeed recent studies found that 75 percent of the fourth grade girls in a San Francisco school were dieting. Other studies indicate that even if the number of people with outright disorders is not increasing dramatically, the number of people on diets who weigh a normal amount is large and growing.