The human body relies on calories and nutrients from food to produce energy and maintain vital functions. When Briggs began to severely restrict her food intake, everything became harder.
“People need to realize how much having an eating disorder takes away from your life,” Briggs said. “You can’t do anything if you don’t eat. When you don’t eat, you can’t think straight. Your body doesn’t move the way you want it to, and you can’t enjoy experiences that make life so amazing when you are limiting one of the key functions that are keeping you alive.”
“Fad diets,” eating plans marketed as fast ways to lose weight, can cause weight gain. Restrictive eating triggers metabolic slowing, and when food intake returns to normal, it is easier to gain weight.
“Diet culture is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and they do not make money if diets work, so they craft these images and diet plans that are not realistic for the long term or sustainable to keep themselves employed,” Arnold said. “Most diets are very restrictive, and they then create an overindulgent response when the diet is over. Then we do the notorious yo-yo dieting, which is what changes our metabolism and creates long-term weight gain and less health for our bodies as the genetic blueprint is overridden.”
Briggs felt the negative health effects in both school and her sport.
“For me, I wasn’t eating,” Briggs said. “I wasn’t eating breakfast. I wasn’t eating lunch. I wasn’t really eating dinner. I was pushing myself athletically and academically, but it was still never the place that I wanted it to be because I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t doing as well in school as I wanted to. I wasn’t performing in my sport. That was just so detrimental: the combination of pushing myself so hard just to have it come back and have the opposite effect.”
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health reported that eating disorders have the second-highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness, and every 52 minutes, a life is lost as a direct consequence of an eating disorder. Cassimatis said she was scared to join that statistic.
“I had a really low heart rate, and I started having to sit in my bed at night with a pulse oximeter, and my dad would sit with me, and it would be in the 30s,” Cassimatis said. “I was just so scared I was going to die because it was so low. That was the main thing that scared me because I obviously didn’t want to die, but I also didn’t want to have to change the way I looked.”
Cassimatis’s eating disorder did not just impact her own health. The people around her, including her mother, Sudie Nolan-Cassimatis, noticed as her weight began to plummet.
“There were some actual physical symptoms, and she began to become quite emaciated,” Nolan-Cassimatis said. “She started looking skeletal, which is harder to notice sometimes because at various ages we aren’t around our kids when they are not wearing clothes, but for a while in the early stages of Lilo’s eating disorder, she still really liked looking that way.”
As Cassimatis’ body began to change, her clothing size decreased, but so did her ability to dance, as she was forced to quit dancing for eight months.
“Lilo was dancing, and she started to restrict what she would eat, and then she would exercise a whole lot,” Nolan-Cassimatis said. “Actually, she started to lose a lot of weight, so much so that we had to go shopping for clothes that were like two sizes smaller than what she had worn. Sometimes, she would try things, on and nothing would fit, and we started to become very concerned. She then started to have pain at dance and started to not be able to dance because she was having pain.”
Smith’s disorder extended beyond food avoidance. She developed bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder characterized by repeated episodes of attempts to purge or induce vomiting to prevent weight gain.
“About halfway through freshman year, I started making myself throw up,” Smith said. It started as a way to stay skinny, but I got so used to it, and it just became so normal for me.”
Smith explained that purging evolved from a focus on weight to a broader emotional release.
“The throwing up sort of became an outlet for me,” Smith said. “Whenever I was super overwhelmed, I would make myself throw up almost as a way to escape from my troubles. I had all of this anger and emotion, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I would just use throwing up as an outlet. I would go full weeks without eating, and I was throwing up for both food problems and as an outlet for my emotions.”