Prisoners of the plate: can a meatless diet mask an eating disorder?

Vegetarian Times, April, 1995 by Judy Krizmanic

* Is the person's diet rigid and socially isolating? Most vegetarians will attest that their diet doesn't limit them in social situations, especially with all of the great veggie fare on today's menus. Parents and friends should pay attention when a person uses his or her vegetarian diet to pull back from others, says Terence J. Sandbek, Ph.D., author of The Deadly Diet (New Harbinger, 1986) and director of the California Clinic, a Sacramento, Calif.-based outpatient program for eating disorders and phobias. "A girl who has an eating disorder withdraws a bit from food situations and has a general lack of enthusiasm about them."

There are other, less vegetarian-specific signs that can help determine whether or not a vegetarian you know has an eating disorder. Many restrictive eaters also exercise compulsively, even when they are clearly sick or fatigued. And how a person eats can be a big clue: Restrictive eaters tend to move food around on their plate without actually eating very much of it.

GETTING BETTER

IF ANYONE YOU KNOW shows signs of an eating disorder, it's important to seek help right away. Experts emphasize that early intervention--within the first few months that signs start showing--greatly increases the chances for recovery. Because eating disorders are typically multifacted illnesses with physical and emotional implications, it's best to seek help from a trained professional. Treatment begins with a medical evaluation to assess any damage that may have been done. Then the real task begins: helping the patient develop a new relationship with food.

Can someone recover from an eating disorder as a vegetarian? After all, a vegetarian diet by its nature excludes certain foods. Vegetarian Times once received a letter from a young eating-disorder patient whose counselor told her that she had to eat meat to get well. Fortunately, not all therapists hold that opinion. A person doesn't have to eat meat to get better, says Herzog. "My personal approach is that the vegetarian part of it should be respected." Other experts agree. "I help to change people's relationship with food," says Weitz. "A patient doesn't have to eat meat to change that relationship. The main point is to eat a more flexible, varied diet and more calories. If they're not going to eat meat but they're eating other things, that's OK." A vegetarian gets better the same way as anyone else, she adds--through counseling and getting at the real issues behind his or her dieting and eating patterns.

There are examples of people for whom a vegetarian diet actually provided hope for a healthier future. Debi Seiffert, 19, of Carlyle, Ill., says she has suffered from eating disorders since she was "knee-high to a grasshopper," first struggling with compulsive overeating and more recently bulimia and anorexia. After Seiffert's fourth trip to the hospital, including a two-month stay on an eating disorders unit, she decided to become a vegetarian. She's the first to say that her initial motivations were not entirely virtuous: At first, she went veg to rebel against her father (a butcher) and to get away with limiting her food intake. "Meat contains so much fat and so many calories that I could not conceive of putting it in my mouth, much less swallowing it."