Quinn told the Times that she wanted to share her story because: “I just want people to know you can get through stuff. I hope people can see that in what my life has been and where it is going.”

After learning her mother had cancer while Quinn was in the eighth grade, she said she began binging and purging as a coping mechanism, to "expel" the things that were fueling her depression: grief over her mother's illness, anxiety about body image and the volatility of growing up in a family plagued by alcoholism.

It wasn't until 1992, after more than a decade of struggling with bulimia and excessive drinking, that Quinn sought help, she told the Times:

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I've read your column for years and have finally decided to come to you for advice on an issue that's very painful for me.

I am 32 now. During my childhood and adolescence, my parents had very maladjusted approaches to food and eating. For my father, this is a kind description of his food madness. A few years ago, he ate nothing but soybean flour mixed with water to form gruel for every meal. This sort of obsession with a type of food (if you could call it that) is completely normal for him, and has been happening most of my life. My mother was simply weight-obsessed — she used diet pills and constantly denied herself food, even though she never weighed more than 140 pounds. She didn't deny me food, but constantly made comments about the fact that I should eat less, and denied herself dinner most nights while watching me eat. When we went out, she would binge on food and desserts because she "loved food," and then feel great shame and regret for it later.

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I wrote once before, many years ago, before a child and a move and the age 40 descended. It was a letter about cheese. About how to get my husband to quit eating my fancy cheese when he had perfectly fine cheese he bought for himself. He would sneak it, hide eating it, but always leave a telltale sign, like a partially zipped Zip-Loc. It was a letter about cheese, but way more than that too. What it wasn't was an admission that I had an eating disorder, even though I knew I did. It wasn't a question about the power struggles we have with ourselves and our spouses, about finding a way to be something true. It looked like a wacky letter from an uptight girl about fancy cheese. This is a different letter. But the same in some ways ... a question about how to be with what's true.

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When her parents forced her into a rehab facility, Haglund began learning the tools to overcome her anorexia and eventually recovered enough to begin competing in pageants. Then, when she won the Miss America crown, she used her platform to educate people on eating disorders and body image issues, eventually starting her own foundation. These days, she is a senior at Emory University in Atlanta and a frequent keynote speaker on the subject of eating disorders. In her exclusive interview with The Fix, Haglund speaks about the dance coaches who expressed concern for her, her brief attempt at pursuing an entertainment career post-Miss America and why she credits beauty pageants with helping her recover from her eating disorder.

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As the name implies, Skinny Gossip is not exactly a bastion of feel-good empowerment for the ladies. It is instead the brainchild of a woman in her early 20s who says she "prefers the skinny aesthetic" and describes herself as weighing in at 5-foot-7 and 100 pounds, which puts her about 30 pounds underweight. She doesn't post too much on her blog, but when she does, it's usually to complain that plus-size models make her "both angry and sick to my stomach" and lament that Lindsay Lohan "looks downright fat," even if she does cop to the distinction between "FAT by normal standards, of course – but fat by our standards." Skinny recently decided that Kate Upton, the woman whose body has been deemed sufficiently ridonk to grace the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, is "thick, vulgar, almost pornographic." She calls her a "piggie" with "huge thighs, NO waist, big fat floppy boobs," and, for the pièce de résistance, decides that "She looks like she would work in the back of a motorcycle shop in Nashville and give (bad) blow jobs for $25." She does, however, give her props for her "bravery" in letting herself go to seed like that. Thanks, girlfriend!

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The attempt to tamp down the shadowy pro-eating disorder community has been raging nearly as long as the community itself has existed. It's a well-intentioned effort. But every new opportunity for social media is also a new opportunity for like-minded spirits to converge in anonymity. You don't have to look far online to see the vibrantly sad and scary pro-ana (as in anorexia), pro-mia (as in bulimia) worlds alive and well and starving themselves to death.

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I’m being intentionally dense here. Obviously the idea was to touch on the role of appearance dissatisfaction in eating disorders, using something plenty of people wear — makeup — as an entry point for talking about the larger issue. (Certainly it’s more on target than cryptically posting the color of your bra on Facebook for breast cancer awareness.) And for something like a week designed to raise awareness about eating disorders, you need a campaign that's simple, accessible and attention-grabbing. But not only does the no-makeup rally willfully ignore the myriad reasons women wear makeup in favor of a one-dimensional shame-based explanation, it treats bodily dissatisfaction as the cause, not a symptom, of eating disorders. And if we keep the focus of eating disorder conversations on women’s bodies, we’re doing exactly what women with eating disorders do to themselves.

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I am writing to you, not so much to seek advice but for the release of putting something down, putting it out there. I am in my 20s, clever, well-educated, feminist and successful. I also have an eating disorder.

I know what I need to do to overcome this disorder. I just need to get over it and eat healthily and according to the principles in which my intellectual mind believes. This shouldn't be hard. For whatever reason, I don't seem to be doing it.

My disorder is not that bad in the scale of things. I eat too little and am moderately underweight (BMI around 17.5-18). Over the past few years, I have been losing weight. I was never fat, but it has improved my health and appearance and was not a problem initially. The problem is that I am continually resetting the goalposts of what is an acceptable weight for me. For a while (about a year and a half) I was quite comfortable with my new, much slimmer frame. I watched what I ate and so on, but I didn't feel constantly hungry or anything -- I felt quite healthy and satisfied and had treats when I felt like it. But over the past few months, I've become obsessed with achieving a new, even lighter weight. And the disturbing thing is that there isn't even a solid figure in my mind -- I just want to lose, lose, lose and never stop losing, the idea of putting on or even maintaining weight appalls me. So I count calories, I exercise compulsively, I obsess and obsess and spend hours every day thinking about food and then I get really hungry and I binge and binge and eat mountains of food that is bad for me, food that doesn't belong to me, food that will make me uncomfortable and sick. (I've tried throwing up, but I'm not any good at it.) And then after the binge my hunger is satiated and I go back to starving for a couple of days and then the cycle repeats itself, except that the binges have been getting more frequent lately, and it's hurting me and making me sad.

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Yesterday, I read about a new study suggesting that sausage, cheesecake and other tasty, fatty foods might actually be addictive -- I mean, cocaine-like addictive, where addicts have trouble feeling pleasure without them. Rats, when fed junk food all day long, showed the same kind of chemical changes in their brain that are common with addictions. We've seen claims of this sort before -- about sugar, about corn syrup -- and, while I can't quibble with the science, it's simply not reasonable to think that we respond to hot dogs the same way we respond to cocaine. Most of us can enjoy these foods safely in some kind of moderation, just as most can enjoy a drink without being alcoholics. So I filed the story away under "Interesting but not earth-shattering." But for some reason, the story kept creeping back up on me. I kept thinking about it, and seeing food in the dark light of addiction finally filled me with a confused sadness.

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ZOMG this shit has calories! And fat! Even light stuff isn't safe! Aieeeeeeee!

Fortunately, our starvation-obsessed -- and uniformly slender -- ladies have a choice. As they head down the aisle groaning with Campbell's Select Harvest Light, they cheer up, "Wow! 80 calories!" chirps one happy lady. "And no fat!" trills another. Oh boy, no cutting myself in the office ladies room for lunch again today!

In her righteous takedown of the campaign on her Deus Ex Machinatio blog this week, Andrea Phillips calls Campbell's "a pro-ana company," and she sure seems to have a point. Are the food choices for women – those pathetically unseeing supermarket cart pushers – really supposed to be limited to "light" and "lighter than thou"? Phillips asks, "Since when is 340 calories a completely unacceptable amount to eat for a meal?"

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In her new memoir, "Hungry: A Young Model's Story of Appetite, Ambition, and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves" (co-written with Marjorie Ingall), Renn tells the story of how she lost 70 pounds and landed a quarter-million-dollar modeling contract at 16 -- which was not her happy ending but the gateway to her personal hell. Renn developed anorexia and exercise bulimia, subsisting for years on "lettuce with a side of batshit," and joining two gyms so that no one would notice her working out up to eight hours a day.

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As you'll no doubt recall, just a little over a year ago Spears wobbled around in her underwear onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards in a performance universally dubbed disastrous -- from her lackluster dancing to her inability to remember the words to her own song (that she was lip-syncing). Among Britney's much-lamented MTV gaffes: Her scantily clad body didn't look exactly like it did before she had her two sons. (Did anyone need another reminder that the maternal body gets no respect in our culture? Right, I didn't think so.)

Well, guess what, folks? Now, apparently Britney's lost a bunch of weight, so it's time to revel in the sordid details of her long-rumored disordered eating! According to a source close to one of her bodyguards  quoted in Star magazine -- and every celeb gossip blog, not to mention the Sydney Morning Herald -- Britney has been bingeing and purging and abusing diuretic diet pills in pursuit of her newly svelte figure.

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I was so proud of this diet that I went to school and told all my girlfriends -- about calories and cellulite and why blueberry muffins were deadly. I practically held court on the playground, as little girls listened with rapt attention to the hell that would happen to their thighs if they ate another Bomb pop. What strikes me about this story is: 1) Wow, that is all kind of sad. 2) Back then, the idea of diets and calorie consumption and starvation diets were foreign to kids, at least the ones I grew up around. 3) I somehow internalized the idea that it was cool to diet, something I really didn't let go of until much later in life.

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Now, brace yourselves for the results of this survey of 4,023: Sixty-five percent of women ages 25 to 45 engage in disordered eating, "such as skipping meals or cutting out food groups." (If skipping a meal doesn't register as particularly unhealthy, note that these are cases in which the women say it's "associated with emotional and physical distress.") In addition, 10 percent of women report behaviors consistent with anorexia, bulimia and binging. Other findings, as summarized by the press release:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/25/eating_2/feed/ 56 http://www.salon.com/2008/04/23/chalked_up/ http://www.salon.com/2008/04/23/chalked_up/#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:26:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2008/04/23/chalked_up In the years between Mary Lou Retton's historic victory at the 1984 Olympics and Kim Zmeskal's dominance in the early 1990s, American gymnastics was in a bad way. Most of our gymnasts lacked the finesse of their counterparts in Eastern Bloc states like Russia and Romania, where children were plucked from their homes almost as soon as they could walk, and U.S. coaches struggled to produce another breakout star. Jennifer Sey was one of their best hopes.

At 15, Sey left her New Jersey home for the Parkettes National Gymnastic Training Center in Allentown, Pa., where she boarded alone in an unheated room in exchange for a chance to become a champion. Under the tutelage of Bill and Donna Strauss, a husband-and-wife coaching team notorious for producing winners by any means necessary, she accomplished just that -- nabbing the U.S. National title in 1986. But Sey was never quite talented or powerful enough to be hailed as the second coming of Retton and eventually, burned out by the pressure to stay skinny and the pain of competing on barely healed broken bones, she retired.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/23/chalked_up/feed/ 54 http://www.salon.com/2008/04/21/john_prescott/ http://www.salon.com/2008/04/21/john_prescott/#comments Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:50:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/04/21/john_prescott "Does John Prescott's admission that he suffered from bulimia while deputy prime minister deserve sympathy, suspicion or ridicule?" asks the Guardian's Matthew Weaver, introducing a roundup of the British media's coverage of Prescott's recent revelation. Unlike Princess Diana, the last famous British bulimic I can recall hearing about all the way over here, Prescott is old, male and fat -- triply turning our stereotypical image of a person with an eating disorder on its head. Predictably, this means the coverage includes mockery from those who think the portly politician must not have been trying hard enough at bulimia, as well as endless variations on the theme of, "But ... but ... eating disorders are for girls!"

While shame is a hallmark of bulimia in general, Prescott notes that his own embarrassment stemmed specifically from the emasculating aspect of having a disorder that's typically associated with young girls. Of his first visit to a bulimia specialist, Prescott has written, "I turned up and found his waiting room full of young women. I was the only man there. I felt a right twerp." Former bulimic and professional weirdo Uri Geller, quoted in Weaver's roundup, puts an even finer point on it: "No one expects a man, especially a successful one, to have an eating disorder. It seems such a weakness."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/21/john_prescott/feed/ 52 http://www.salon.com/2008/04/16/anorexia_2/ http://www.salon.com/2008/04/16/anorexia_2/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/04/16/anorexia Imagine, for a minute, that the webmasters behind pro-anorexia Web sites could be thrown behind bars. That could become a reality if a bill passed Tuesday by the French parliament's lower house makes it through the Senate; the measure would make it illegal for anyone to incite "others to deprive themselves of food" to an "excessive" degree. Offenders could be jailed for up to three years or fined up to $47,000. "Encouraging young girls to lie to their doctors, advising them on foods that are easier to regurgitate and inciting them to beat themselves up each time they eat is not freedom of expression," said France's Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot. "These messages are death messages. Our country must be able to prosecute those who are hiding behind these websites."

But the bill is broad enough that designers, advertisers and fashion magazines could be plausibly targeted as well. For instance, a magazine or designer could be fined for holding a photo shoot with a starved-skinny model. The fashion industry is, of course, outraged. Didier Grumbach, president of the French Federation of Couture, said: "Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny. That doesn't exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/16/anorexia_2/feed/ 28 http://www.salon.com/2008/03/28/sweet_valley_high/ http://www.salon.com/2008/03/28/sweet_valley_high/#comments Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet//2008/03/28/sweet_valley_high I never read Sweet Valley High books. And I'm not being snobby here; I wish I had. I feel as though I missed out on a cultural moment of the 1980s, as if I were in the bathroom when Michael Jackson first did the moonwalk. The lightweight, juicy paperbacks about twins Jessica and Elizabeth may have had the nutritive value of frosting on fudge, but they were the guilty pleasure of nearly every 1980s middle-school girl. Back then, we didn't have "The Hills" and "Gossip Girl." We had to walk a mile in a row of card catalogs just to find a cheap, tawdry sex scene.

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