Frank Bruni’s cover article in the Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine, “I Was a Baby Bulimic,” provides a great window into adolescent and young struggles with body image along with the planning, thinking and strategies of a practicing bulimic.

Of course- a large part of the article is that eating disorders aren’t localized to women. The article is required reading if you work in residential student living/management.

From the boarding school perspective, it’s important to see how Bruni finds his co-conspirators- other bulimics to reinforce unhealthy thinking and behaviors. At  Loomis Bruni found a friend & co-bulimic; at Carolina, his friends called-out his behavior.  The bulimia stopped. Not cured, Bruni replaced the bulimia with other eating controls and diets.

“…I had more discipline and did better with other things: chemistry, American history, Steinbeck, Wharton. At Loomis Chaffee, the private school outside of Hartford to which Mom and Dad sent us, I got A’s in my classes and had editing positions on school periodicals and was a star on the swim team. I was, as Mom and Dad had always prodded me to be, well rounded. Only, the rounded part, well, I felt that it applied to me just a little too literally.

I either had 6 or 7 or 12 pounds that wouldn’t go away: I never knew exactly how many, because at a certain point I just stopped getting on scales. I didn’t like what they told me. I was about 5-foot-10, only three-quarters of an inch under what I’d grow to be, and according to those rigorous medical charts of ideal weights at certain heights, I should have been 170 pounds. But I often weighed above 180, and I could blame only some of those extra pounds on big bones and a genuinely broad frame.

During physicals in doctors’ offices, I averted my eyes from the scale and instructed the doctor not to tell me the number. Usually the doctor just chuckled as he wrote it on his chart. Sometimes he said, “I’d like it if you lost 5 to 10 pounds.” He never said, “You’re fine the way you are.” I know because I listened for that — listened for some indication that I was wrong about myself.

Ten pounds: it wasn’t a disaster. I recognized that. But it was aggravating. Maddening. It was the distance between me and some confident, enviable, all-American ideal that might well be mine if I could just turn away from yet another quarter of club sandwich, from the third buttered yam at Thanksgiving, from the second bowl of ice cream I carried up to my bedroom on a weeknight when I was up late studying.

The extra weight was the confirmation: once a fat kid, always a fat kid, never moving through the world in the carefree fashion of people unaccustomed to worrying about their weight, never as inconspicuous…” (New York Times)