Field Trips, Crayola, Connect the Dots, and Anorexia

Justine Gallagher, now 10, started obsessing over her weight when she was just 5 years old. She even ate paper in an attempt to lose weight. (ABCNEWS.com) She also appeared on Oprah. One of Sacker's young patients, Justine Gallagher, started eating paper when she was 5, because she worried that she was as chubby as she had been in her baby pictures. Gallagher ate as many as 10 pieces of paper a day, believing that filling up on paper — rather than food — would help her lose weight. "I thought if I ate my regular meals that I would get heavy and people would make fun of me," Justine said. Her teachers noticed that pages from her books were missing, and at home her mother found that she was also eating the cotton from Q-tips. Her mother, Yvonne Gallagher, then took Justine to three separate pediatricians, but they all told her it was just a phase that Justine would grow out of. One night Gallagher walked into her daughter's bedroom and found her running laps with a timer. "She said, 'I ate too much today. I have to exercise.' That was really the breaking point," Gallagher said. She took Justine to Sacker, who recognized that the 5-year-old had an eating disorder.

N E W Y O R K, Dec. 19 — Sydney Forbis seems like an ordinary teenager: She wears skin-tight clothing, worries about her figure and painstakingly picks out each new outfit when she goes shopping with her mother. The extraordinary thing about Sydney is that she is only 6 years old. "I think sweatpants make my legs look fat," she said on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. Even though she is thin, the little girl said she runs to keep her weight down. "I don't want the fat to spread all over my body." Eating disorder experts say prepubescent girls are developing eating disorders as young as 5 and 6 years old. They may be getting their obsession from parents who are preoccupied with their own body images, and media images of skinny pop stars like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears, the experts say.

An estimated 78% of adolescent girls wish to weigh less.

Young Girls are more afraid of becoming fat then of nuclear war, cancer, or losing their parents.

It Starts So Young Young children are at war with their bodies. They are frightened of food. Food will make them FAT! Preschool girls are telling their mothers they want to go on diets. Elementary schoolchildren are counting the fat grams in their cafeteria food. Six-year-old children are being diagnosed as anorexic. Eating disorders were once the domain of teenagers and collegiate women. These days, preteens and young children have joined the ranks of those obsessed with their bodies' size and shape. David Herzog, M.D., director of the Harvard Eating Disorders Center at Massachusetts General Hospital says, "We're seeing more kids under ten with eating disorders." The seeds of future eating disorders can be planted at a very tender age. Eating disorders specialists warn us that the four-year-old who hates her fat body can easily become the nine-year-old who diets and then the eleven-year-old who suffers from anorexia. We're teaching little girls, and increasingly, little boys to be scared and embarrassed by anything other than a thin body.