Argus-Leader from Sioux Falls, South Dakota • Page 29

rra Argus Leader, Sioux Falls, S.D. Sunday, September 26, 1982 rr Eating disorders spur women's love hate relationship with food Starving attention for By DEBRA O'CONNOR Arqus Leader Staff i. helley Wilson is a registered nurse at Sioux Valley Hospital. She is intelligent, articulate, slim and attractive. Her make-up is tasteful, her hair i neatly groomed, her fingernail polish impeccable.

She is in remission from a about eating diseases often doesn't differentiate between bulimia and bulimarexia. Eating disorders affect women much more often than men. Bulimics are an estimated 98 percent women; anorectic women outnumber men by 19 to 1. A bulimic or anorectic is excessively concerned about her weight, especially about weighing too much. She may weigh herself 15 or 20 times a day and be so sensitive about the results that she'll carefully lower herself down on a scale so the dial doesn't jump up in the high numbers.

She may bake for everybody on the block, but content herself only the aroma from a chocolate cake. She starts out losing weight and often ends up in the hospital. The medical toll on the body is extreme. Beside general malnourishment, the lack of nutrients causes heart abnormalities, up to and including heart attacks. Constant vomiting can cause everything from dental decay to a ruptured stomach.

A woman in Sioux Falls recently collapsed at a shopping mall with a heart attack attributed to an eating disorder. Last summer another local woman, Diane Berthelson, died from starving herself. An estimated 15 percent to 20 percent of people with eating disorders die. The girl who develops an eating disorder, Wilson said, is "a real perfectionist, the type of girl who'll get up at three or four in the morning to check her homework. To you, being thin as a rail is attractive.

(But) you look in the mirror and see fat." Studies on the disease show that its i iff i I i I r- 4 I Argus Leader photo by FRANK KLOCK Shelley Wilson, right, spoke about her comeback against an eating disorder that was a combination of anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Wilson, with Connie Briggs, have formed a support group for people with eating disorders. disease that kills up to 20 percent of the young women it affects. The disease in her case, a combination of anorexia nervosa and bulimia is an eating disorder. Wilson didn't' like to eat.

When she did eat, she felt guilty. And that made her want to vomit. It started when she was a teen-ager. "I was in a hurry to lose weight because I wanted boys to like me," she said. "I lost 45 pounds in three months." That brought her weight down to about 100 pounds, plenty thin for 5-foot-2 Wilson.

But she thought the more weight she lost, the more attractive she would be. As she continued to lose weight by simply not eating, her parents began to object. So she'd eat food at the dinner table and secretly make herself vomit after dinner so she wouldn't gain weight. "You think you can control your entire life by the way you eat," she said. "I anorectic and I went into bulimia." Those two terms, and a third, 'bulimarexia, are increasingly familiar to doctors and psychologists in Sioux Falls, the nation, and all over the world: .0 Anorexia nervosa Anorectics won't eat.

They lose 25 percent or more "of their normal body weight. They may exercise like crazy one local woman was accustomed to swimming 100 to 200 laps a day. They may handle their food strangely, such as eating a single pea at a time. Women quit menstruating. Anorexia may begin as early as 13, Bulimia Bulimics maintain or lose weight by throwing up or eating quantities of laxatives up to 50 or 100 a day so food won't stay in their bodies.

They may start this at the end of a strict diet. About 65 percent continue to stay close to their proper weight, leverage age at onset is 18. Bulimarexia is a condition where a bulimic woman will periodically eat large quantities of food and then throw or use laxatives. The person affected 'with this disease will binge and purge an average of 11 times a week, eating an average of 4,800 calories each time. The diseases tend to overlap.

Some anorectics, for example, will throw up occasionally if they are forced to eat something. Some bulimics don't usually 'overeat and some do. Medical literature fil just lived and breathed food, but I didn't eat any of it. 9 Shelley Wilson has revolved around food for the past six years. "I basically just starved myself.

I quit eating. I just lived and breathed food, but I didn't eat any of it," she said. "I still have this fear that if I eat someting I'm just going to get huge. I know better logically. Her disease still bothers her, and during times of stress she finds it very difficult to eat.

Like many women who recover from eating disorders, she is under the care of both a physician and a psychologist after several disappointments. The disease is not well understood and many health care professionals don't know much about it. "I had a medical doctor tell me that at 69 pounds I was just thin. I went through three shrinks before I found one that works," Briggs said. "The hardest part is people lack of understanding.

I think that's why a lot of people don't tell anybody." Like any other physical or emotional problem, eating disorders are much easier to treat if help is sought early, Wilson said. "Anorexia nervosa, bulimia and bulimarexia are all a disease," Wilson said. "It doesn't mean you are a bad person. If you come to the point where you hate the disease and not yourself, you're going to make it." said. "You turn on a television set, you open a Cosmopolitan magazine, what do you see? Really thin-looking women." The mere mention of Tab cola commercials is enough to set off a wave of laughter in an eating disorders support group because there's so much pain associated with the longing to be thin.

"It's body. Everything is just body. And being thin is socially acceptable," Wilson said. Wilson and a friend, Connie Briggs, started the support group in August. Already there are 25 members and Wilson has received several calls from outlying areas from women who want advice.

The group meets at 8 p.m. Sept. 29 and then every second and fourth Tuesday through December at the Sioux Valley Wellness Center. Members are mostly college and young working women. victims generally have overprotective parents who try to keep their daughters from growing up.

They're achievers who get high grades in school and are hard on themselves when they don't measure up to the standards they or their parents have set. Their self-esteem is low because they tend to see their own worth through the eyes of others. After successfully losing weight, the person with an eating disorder can't stop dieting, vomiting or using laxatives. Psychologist David Hylland compares it to someone who has been smoking for 20 years and just can't stop. Hylland, in conjunction with physicians, has treated many people with eating disorders, and he said he still can't identify with the disease.

From a psychological point of view, he can understand how it starts, however. "It's not simple, like you're a brat kid who throws up to get attention," he College campuses are rife with bulimics, Hylland said; from what one local college student told him about the women in her dormitory, "I just pictured that whole dorm as a big rush to the bathroom." Wilson said: "Girls will get to be good friends (and) they'll throw up together." For the most part, however, it's a secretive disease. Bulimics will excuse themselves and run the tap water in the bathroom while they vomit. When offered food, anorectics will claim they've just eaten. A bulimic may spend $50 in one day, eating at a half-dozen restaurants and throwing up in between each meal, but she certainly won't tell anyone about it.

The secrecy is part of the problem, too. "You feel so isolated," Briggs A 5-foot-4 anorectic who at one time weighted 69 pounds, Briggs said her life KELO-TV seeks bigger share of already huge audience by adding half-hour of local news By MARSHALL FINE Argus Leader Staff aving stretched Keloland to cover most of South Dakota, KELO-TV Monday will try to expand its grasp on the area audience by adding an early news show. I 1 the set and even the telephone. We could have five or six sources of information for one story. "Of course, we want to be cautious with it," Overman adds.

"There is a lot of technology involved just in getting the feed from Washington. We may start with one or two source of information but we'll build cautiously from there." Sherman Sail, "Early News" producer, already has "On Assignment" topics in the works through mid-October, including pieces of the controversy over I.Q. testing, alternatives to nursing homes, alcoholism and even Fire Safety Week. But the key to "Early News" will be its flexibility to drop everything and cover a breaking story such as a fire or weather catastrophe with the kind of depth it couldn't receive at 6 p.m. "My job is to see that, when something is going on, we can drop the entire script and get on it," Sail says.

"We'd dispatch a crew and an anchor to the field, get the video and be able to get it on the air live at 5." "Early News" will try to make extensive use of live feeds, whether from the newsroom or the field. The show also will make use of satellite-beamed reports from Washington, D.C., correspondents, though not on a daily basis. "One of the things we've found out is that, at 5, we have more latitude in getting to people in their own place of business for a live interview," Ertz says. "We expect to be able to do a lot of things with the live shots." The show will not be a carbon-copy of "The Big News" at 6 or at 10 p.m., the Early NewsSee 3D Called "Early News," it will run from p.m., kicking off a 90-minute block of local and national news that will include "CBS Evening News" with Dan Rather and "The Big News" at 6. The question is: Is there an audience for news at 5 p.m.

4 p.m. Mountain Time? "We feel there's a big demand for news," says Evans Nord, president of Keloland stations. "We're willing to commit the people and the resources to make it a damn good newscast. Our projections are that the audience will be about 75 percent of the size of our 6 p.m. news." Fred Ertz, KELO news editor, agrees: "I think people are genuinely concerned about what is happening during the day.

When they get home from work, people want a quick look at what's going on. We give them that, in terms of local and national news, weather and sports." The idea of expanding KELO's news has been bandied about at the station for more than a year, though it was only this past April that a commitment was made to the new show. Since then, Ertz, KELO assignment editor Bill Overman and Tom Sheeley, vice resident for news and programming, ave been developing the concept and putting together a format for the show, which premieres Monday. A dress rehearsal Thursday gave a Argus Leader photos by PAUL HORSTED Fred Ertz watched as Ken Hirsch and Judy Grant went through a dress rehearsal of The Early News last week. weather, leading into Dan Rather's newscast.

At Thursday's dress rehearsal, "Early News" had a slick, smooth flow, though rough edges were apparent occasionally in the anchors' frantic search for the camera they were to speak to. The most obvious difference between "Early News" and "The Big News" is "On Assignment." At the dress rehearsal, Hirsch and Grant combined good idea of what the new program will be like. Anchored by Ken Hirsch and Judy Grant, "Early News" will open with national headlines, followed by a newsroom-based capsulization of local stories to come at 6 p.m. There will be brief summaries of weather and sports before the program turns to "On Assignment," a daily in-depth story which will be its centerpiece. The show will close with sports and taped segments with live interviews with experts, who were involved in the story, either on the set or through a two-way hookup with the newsroom.

"We patterned 'On Assignment' after ABC's fNightline" Overman says. "We want to look at one subject in depth, using as many experts as we can. We've got the capability of live feeds from Washington by satellite, live people in the newsroom, more people on.