Sally Odenheimer hungry because she was athlete and thought she would run faster in the empty stomach.
Karla Wagner hungry because she wanted to be in charge of at least one aspect of her life.
Janice Bremis was simply too fatty.
They all asked for perfection and control. Not eating helped.
These are women in sixties and the 1970s who have trouble with mental anorexia since childhood or adolescence. Years later, their life is still governed by the calories consumed, the miles run, the swarming towers, the lost books.
“This is a dependence that I cannot get rid of,” said Ms. Odenheimer, 73, a retired teacher who lives outside Denver.
For decades, few people connected food problems with the elderly; They were considered an affliction of adolescent girls and young women. But research suggests that an increasing number of older women have sought treatment for diet, including bulimia, excessive diet (known as bed) and anorexia, which has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorderAnd brings with it a high risk of suicide.
In a 2017 paper In the BMC Medicine journal, the researchers reported that more than 15% of the 5,658 women questioned met the criteria of a lifelong diet during the thirties and 40 years. A 2023 goodbye Recent research has indicated that prevalence rates in women aged 40 and over with full diagnostics of food disabilities were between 2.1 and 7.7%. (For men, they were less than 1%.)
