Megan Murphy had a happy childhood growing up in West Des Moines. She had a close relationship with her parents. When Megan was five, she started playing soccer and excelled at it throughout her younger years.

But at age 15, her life changed. She began holding in a dark secret. She started lying to her family and friends. She began a struggle that would dominate the next eight years of her life.

Megan, senior in chemical engineering, suffered from anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that 1 percent of American adolescent females suffer from, according to Anred.com.

Megan said her high school was the kind of place where one could harbor eating disorders. When she came to Valley High School her sophomore year, she said she felt as though she wasn’t doing the right thing to fit in.

“No matter what, you’re around somebody that you want to aspire to be like,” she said.

Her parents, Tom and Diane Murphy, describe their daughter as a perfectionist who is very self-sacrificing for others.

“She studies really hard and always makes sure her friends are comfortable, taking care of them,” Diane said.

Megan’s best friend Lindsay Boland, senior in chemical engineering, said she always saw her as a positive, self-assured person. “I guess I’ve always thought of Megan as a really confident, very nice, very smart, pretty girl,” she said. “I’ve always just kind of seen her as somebody that exudes this kind of glow.”

Megan remembers her self-image starting to suffer when she started taking birth control pills. She noticed changes in her body and wondered if others did, as well. Megan asked her boyfriend if he thought she was fat. When her boyfriend admitted he had noticed her weight gain, her life changed. She said she made the decision to stop eating. There were many factors leading to her decision, but that comment was the final straw.

“That was it, it was night and day,” she said. “When he said that, I was like, ‘OK, I’m not eating.'”

For Megan, the obsession started out small. She avoided food and eating in front of people.

“I worked nights at the mall in West Des Moines,” she said. “I would go there and I would tell my mom, ‘OK, I’m eating at work’ and I would tell work ‘I’m eating at home.’ It would be all good. I would be like, ‘Yeah, this feels really good.'”

It took some time, but signs of Megan’s behavior began to show. When Megan graduated and came to Iowa State, her secret became more intense without the watchful eyes of her parents.

Megan said although she spent a lot of time alone in her room, she still found a way to be with her friends and hide from her problem. She started frequenting the bars, but her nightlife was making her anorexia worse.

“The alcoholic scene makes it easier,” she said. “I mean, you don’t have to eat at night because you are going to go out and get wasted and you don’t want to look horrible in your slinky-ass clothing. I would go out and get hit on all the time. And of course every single young girl likes that.”

Megan soon realized she couldn’t hide forever. One weekend she went home and her mother noticed her weight loss. Megan claimed she just didn’t like the dorm food, but her mother became persistent.

“She kind of did the mom thing. She would call every so often and she would be like, ‘Oh honey, have you been eating? Is everything OK?'” Megan said. “And then she would relax a little bit and she would feel better. Then she would start doing it again if I saw her.”

As a sophomore, Megan prepared for a semester-long internship in Houston in the fall of 2001. Initially, the trip was supposed to be a resume builder. Instead, it became something that helped fuel her anorexia.

“At the time, I was so excited because now I wouldn’t have anybody to nag me about what I was doing,” she said. “I could be as skinny as I wanted. “

“Going in with that mind-set was just setting myself up for trouble.”

In Houston, where Megan worked with Equistar Chemical Company, she still had to be around people. Social situations forced her to eat so she eventually became bulimic.

After a while, she went back to avoiding her co-workers. She said she tried to leave the office at lunch – time to avoid people.

Megan said while in Houston she contracted a bladder infection. She was constantly sick and made several trips to the emergency room. She said she wrote her illnesses off as genuine sickness that had nothing to do with the fact that she wasn’t eating.

“I honestly didn’t put two and two together because when you’re going to a doctor and they’re telling you something is literally wrong with you, and they’re not asking you, you know, ‘Are you not eating? How is your diet?’ or anything,” she said.

Megan said she went to the emergency room and started seeing specialists. She was put on antibiotics that gave her ulcers and colon polyps.

She was having surgeries, but she was not getting better. During all this, she said she was surprised her doctors were not asking about her eating habits.

“I was like, ‘I don’t really eat very regularly.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, that’s normal for your age. Don’t worry about it,'” she said. “To me that would be a red flag.”

Boland remembers how hard it was to watch her friend continue to be sick.

“I guess that, for me, was like watching her almost fully deteriorate from the person I knew. She became really frail. It was really sad to watch because you were like, ‘With all these doctors, can’t they figure out what’s going on?'” she said.

Finally, Megan said she decided she could no longer stay in Houston. She had lost nearly 50 pounds in two months. In October 2001, she went back to Des Moines with her parents. She weighed less than 90 pounds.

Megan struggled on her own to get better, but her stomach had problems from the medications she was taking.

By the time she went to the hospital in Des Moines, she couldn’t even keep water down. After following a liquids diet and a battery of tests, she was sent home. To get her walking again, she worked with a physical therapist, who told her to keep eating.

In the hospital, she said she finally admitted her dark secret to her father.

“It was very difficult,” her father said. “It was almost a spiritual moment at that time. She felt a lot of relief, but it was hard for her to admit it after that.”

Megan said her family and friends had no idea what she was going through. Boland said it had never crossed her mind that Megan had anorexia.

“Every time we hung out she ate, so I never thought anything of it,” she said. “Actually my boyfriend at the time was like, ‘Well, maybe she has an eating disorder,’ and I literally said, ‘That’s not possible.’ I thought Megan was perfect.”

Megan started seeking treatment with ISU Student Counseling Services, and in the spring of 2004, she returned to Iowa State. After two weeks, however, she said she realized she had rushed into going back to school. Her mind had shut down and she was uncomfortable around other people.

“I developed this sort of anxiety disorder,” she said. “I was really skinny at that point and I thought everybody was looking at me and that’s not what I wanted.”

She started working at a deli, but said being around food made her extremely uncomfortable. Also, the antidepressants she was on were giving her side effects.

“I’ve never been a suicidal person no matter how sick I was. All of the sudden I’m like, ‘Oh, I want to kill myself.’ That’s just horrible,” she said.

It was at this point that Megan said she realized she needed intense help. She told her parents she needed to go to treatment. In April 2004, Megan left for an eating disorder treatment center with the hope of getting better.

When Megan arrived at Rader Programs in California, she said she realized how long people can suffer from their disorders.

“When I went for treatment in California, there were women there in their 60s who still had eating disorders, like horribly, because when they were my age there was no treatment available for them,” she said. “So they just have to sit and sit and it just grows and grows.”

The intensive work started when Megan was forced to look at all aspects of her life. She learned to take out the negative things and replace them with positive things. She got back in touch with the things she loved.

“I would go out and kick the soccer ball around by myself or I’d talk to people more,” she said. “That was a huge thing for me.”

She looked closely at her situation and how it may have started from influences around her. Then she learned to accept it as a problem that is not her fault.

Megan said she recognizes the benefits of her new life. She said what used to take her 12 hours to do now takes her an hour and a half, making school easier. She said people need to be aware that problems could be happening to anyone. Megan said she hopes that coming forward will help others with their problems.

“I feel that I’m at a point now where I can spread the word and make people aware that it happened and do it in such a way where I’m not mad at anyone. I have it as part of me, I learned a lot from it and to be able to say that I can look at it as a blessing, that’s a good thing,” she said.

Megan, along with Michelle Roling, program coordinator for Student Counseling Services, want people to know that National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, which runs from Sunday to Saturday, is not intended to make people more aware of eating disorders, but to make people more aware of their behaviors.

“I don’t think that people realize how oblivious they are to people’s suffering from the things they might say or the things they might not think are that important,” Megan said.

“Just so people know that it does hurt, it does sting and you don’t know who’s like that, it can be completely smiling and happy on the outside and just dying on the inside.”