Editor’s note: This week, Feb. 3-9, is Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

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Jenny, who did not wish to be identified, is a junior in pre-medicine. She weighs 135 pounds and is about 5 feet 4 inches tall.

Jenny has green eyes and a deep dimple in her left cheek when she smiles. Jenny is finally able to accept a compliment. And now she believes it, she said.

Jenny is recovering from bulimia, a binging and purging eating disorder. Many people think bulimia is a habit of gorging large amounts of food, but for Jenny, the story was different. Jenny said bulimia was any amount of food that she just was not comfortable having in her stomach.

What Jenny thought was a simple “obsession with weight and appearance” during her sophomore year in high school gradually grew into a serious problem.

Wearing short uniforms in track and cross country made her feel self-conscious. She started restricting her calories and cutting her fat intake, depriving herself of certain foods and exercising frequently.

“Then you start to obsess with wanting to eat things that you weren’t allowing yourself to eat,” Jenny said. “Then you’re not comfortable with having that in your stomach.”

At first she only purged a couple times a month, so she did not worry about effects on her health, she said.

Then it became a couple times a week, then daily, then maybe three times a day.

“I felt very fat, and whatever I put in my body was just going to make me fatter,” Jenny said. Her weight never fluctuated much through the years, she said, despite her eating patterns.

Brooks Morse, a staff psychologist at Student Counseling Service, said people with a history of dieting are more prone to developing an eating disorder. Human bodies fight diets. They tell us when we are hungry and need to eat, she said, and we should trust our bodies.

“Some women feel immoral and guilty I think if they are not on a diet,” Morse said. “Our body is a wonderful system. It works well for us if we treat it with respect.”

People who have eating disorders are generally perfectionists, have high expectations of themselves and feel a lack of control in their lives, Morse said. They may also be irritable and fatigued due to a lack of nutrients. “Basically their whole life is focused on food and body size,” Morse said.

People with eating disorders come in every size and shape. “Women who our society would define as heavy or normal weight are bulimic or anorexic,” Morse said. “A lot of people have the beginnings of an eating disorder, and they don’t recognize it because they think they have to be that stereotype of anorexia or bulimia.”

Although undergoing some private counseling and out-patient treatment at the University of Iowa during high school, “I don’t think I was doing what I needed to do to get better,” Jenny said.

She discussed her eating disorder with her parents, but found it hard to really talk to them.

“I took a real turn for the worse when I came to college,” Jenny said.

Jenny binged and purged more frequently as a coping mechanism for the added academic stress, the distance from her family and the pressure of trying to form new relationships and make new friends, she said.

Morse said she thinks women in college are more prone to have serious eating disorder problems because they are in a semi-closed environment and a transitional stage in their lives.

By her sophomore year at ISU, Jenny became depressed and isolated herself from others — sometimes not answering the phone or opening the door when she was in her room.

She started having anxiety attacks, her heart racing for no apparent reason. “Tears would just roll down my cheeks,” Jenny said. She became fearful and didn’t understand what was happening, she said.

“I became so unhappy that it was hard for me to even put on the charade that I was fine and perfect like I’d been doing,” she said. “I could no longer hide what I was feeling on the inside.”

When it became apparent to others that something was wrong with her, Jenny decided to go to student counseling, she said. She started counseling again and joined a weekly eating disorder group which she still attends.

Student Counseling, located in the Student Services Building, has two groups for eating disorders.

The group counseling, Jenny said, is very helpful because she meets other people who have the same eating behaviors that she has and they work together to look at the feelings underneath their eating disorders.

“Although deep down you know there are other people with eating disorders, you feel isolated,” Jenny said.

“Before I could get better, I had to get worse,” she said.

Although Jenny occasionally relapses, “a relapse does not change the fact that I have made a great deal of progress,” she said. “I remember that my eating disorder was a long time in the making and so is the healing and recovery process.”