It’s one of the disorders with its own prevention week and prominent public notice, yet bulimia is so prevalent among youth that one ASU West professor decided to write a book from the eyes of bulimia victims, hopefully providing inspiration for those who still suffer.

“Usually, you have the brightest girls who get involved with this — everything has to be perfect, and so they obsess about it,” says Nancy Bausch, a psychology professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Division and author of the book “Starving For Affection: A Journey of Eating Disorders, Drugs, and Sex.”

After around 15 years of observing and writing articles about bulimia as a clinical psychologist, Bausch said she decided to write a book.
“I decided to kind of take a different approach to the book. I’ve written self-help things before and I thought, well I’m going to use their voices and make it a first person thing,” Bausch says.

With consent from her former patients, Bausch used a collaboration of their individual characteristics and behaviors to create her unnamed main character.

“They wanted the nitty-gritty to get out: What it’s really like to be addicted to eating disorders and diet drugs,” Bausch says.

The book focuses on a young girl’s journey through bulimia, amphetamines usage and sex addiction all the way until her twenties. The dysfunctional relationship between her and her parents is typical among those who have bulimia, Bausch says.

“I talk to the teenagers and twenty year olds, and they tell me the family situation is sometimes an issue for them,” Bausch says.

To sum it all up, Bausch says, “It’s like a quintessential awful teenage movie disaster horror,” especially referring to scenes of public embarrassment the main character faces because of her condition.
However, she has good humor about it.

“She doesn’t feel sorry for herself. She simply paints her life as it is,” Bausch says.

For example, the main character talks about her experience with the classroom desks: “The classroom furniture was against me, too. Some skeletal freak decided that school desks should fit those perfect blonde-girl butts.”

Gabriela Hurtado, a psychology senior, says that she knows a few people who have had bulimia, and that it usually never goes away because they need a lot of help and therapy.

Most people have a vision of what real beauty, and what they want to look like. But that ideal is “pretty much not real,” Hurtado says.
Hurtado says that people need to work with what they have and focus on their personalities rather than looks.

“It’s important to love yourself the way you are…you need to be comfortable in your own skin,” Hurtado says.

During Body Pride Week at ASU, an annual event that took place February 9-13, speakers discussed eating disorders during forums and shortly in the documentary, “America the Beautiful,” a film by Darryl Roberts.
“The documentary itself is an exploration of why we’re so obsessed with beauty,” Roberts says.

Roberts says his documentary talks more about anorexia and eating disorders in general than bulimia, although one couple he interviewed had a daughter who died at age 16 from bulimia.

He also says he interviewed around 50 to 60 girls that had eating disorders.

Kelsie Sharp, an interdisciplinary studies and nursing junior, says she personally went through anorexia when she was 11 to 13 due to moving to a new city.

“I could control how much I ate, but I couldn’t control where I moved,” Sharp says.

Although Sharp says she is close to her mom, she told her mom that she was going through a “new health kick” instead of the truth. However, Sharp says this experience will help her with her future career as a nurse.

“It’s never a good experience, but it equips you to maybe help someone else down the road,” Sharp says.

With plenty of campus resources and a new book by Bausch, students can learn about eating disorders and how to get help if they have one.
Unfortunately, many girls with eating disorders have the same thoughts as the main character.

“The only way that society will like me is if I’m thin. I don’t believe any of that other garbage they tell me,” Bausch says about what the character learns.

There are those who know they have a problem, but for those who deny this basic fact, there is always a struggle to get them help.

“You really can’t work with somebody who’s addicted to eating disorders until they have the urge to stop,” Bausch says.

Despite the help available, eating disorders and bulimia will continue as long as society upholds the idea that skinny is the way to go — and it likely won’t stop any time soon, Bausch says.

“Unfortunately, [discussing eating disorders like bulimia is] timely no matter what.”
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu.