By Jennifer Couzin-FrankelIn college in the 1990s, Alix Timko wondered why she and her friends didn’t have eating disorders. “We were all in our late teens, early 20s, all vaguely dissatisfied with how we looked,” says Timko, now a psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Her crowd of friends matched the profile she had seen in TV dramas—overachievers who exercised regularly and whose eating was erratic, hours of fasting followed by “a huge pizza.”“My friends and I should have had eating disorders,” she says. “And we didn’t.”It was an early clue that her understanding of eating disorders was off the mark, especially for the direst diagnosis of all: anorexia nervosa.