In Hollywood, where the camera-like a binge itself-adds 10 pounds before you can say Twinkie, eating disorders are commonplace. Jane Fonda was bulimic from age 12 until 35 and admits that at one point she threw up 20 times a day. Sally Field began her three-year bout with bulimia at 20, spurred, she said by the perception that everybody then was twiggy, except me. Ally Sheedy, the War Games star who at 11 danced with the American ballet theater, later developed bulimia and wrote a searing 1991 poem, Portrait of a Bulimic, in which she described "the bloat/the skin/stretched so tightly/over her abdomen she fears/it will rupture."

Pat bone's daughter Cherry Boone said that in the midst of her seven-year siege with bulimia, she would eat until I could barely stand up. Consuming a box of doughnuts, a bag of cookies, a pint of macaroni salad and half a gallon of ice cream at a sitting-sometimes four times a day. And there are many other examples of many other stars like Karen Carpenter Patti Catalano, who developed anorexia at 25 and then bulimia.

In the end, most anorexics and bulimics find that battling with their disease is akin to an endless marathon.

At least 80 percent of anorexics are also bulimic. Even though anorexia is defined as self-starvation, most anorexics also binge on food, and follow by purging. This purging, whether through vomiting or laxatives, has horrific and long-term consequences. Therapy must not only halt these actions, but also treat the many physical side effects. Often, it is only after these side effects become so pronounced that the victim cannot ignore them, that he/she seeks help. Five years is the average amount of time before a victim of bulimia seeks help. It may take this ling for a disorder to produce symptoms of a life-threatening condition.

It is estimated that 40 percent of all American women are trying to lose weight. Over the last 30 years there has been a marked trend toward an increasingly unrealistic thin ideal of women's beauty. Subsequently, pressure is put on young women to restrict the food intake, dieting so they may achieve the ultimate thinness.

Most attempts at long term weigh loss fail. You can add anorexia, bulimia, even chronic dieting to the long list of today's modern civilized civilized-diseases that undermine the immune system and result in disability and death. In today's teenage world, dieting is a fad, and fasting a common practice. Obsessed over being thin, ashamed for being overweight teenagers - male and female-are risking their health by going on dangerous diets which last far too long.