Carni says that often the seeds for an eating disorder may be lying dormant in a student who arrives at college and then learns a type of food abuse. "Some girls come to college totally unequipped to deal with sharing a bedroom with a roommate and her boyfriend, and for solace they turn to food," she says. "In large dorms it is extremely easy to learn how to vomit or use laxatives because you see people around you doing it."

Women are not the only people who have eating disorders, Carni notes. Occasionally men who have become hooked on the binge-purge syndrome to make weight allowances for crew, boxing or wresting will seek her help. "It is extremely hard for men to seek counseling because there is such a stigma attached to bulimia," Carni says. "And everyone who comes to me thinks that their problem is the most bizarre and that they are the only people in the world with the disorder. I guess that men think they are the minority of the minority."

JANICE IS a Harvard senior with an eating problem that has caused her weight to fluctuate by as many as 60 pounds in one year. Although attractive and healthy looking now, Janice lives from meal to meal in constant fear that she will either go haywire and overeat, or that she will stop eating altogether and revert to the 96-pound anorexic girl she was six years ago.

"It started out very normally," Janice remembers. "I just wanted to lose about five or ten pounds because my brothers and my dad used to kid me about being fat. I bought one of those exercisers you attach to your door and I became obsessed with it. Sometimes I spent four hours moving my arms and legs in rhythm."

Janice eventually lost more than 30 pounds on a frame that was normal to begin with, and when she hit the 96-pound mark she even thought she could stand to lose a little bit more weight. The months she spent starving herself are almost obliterated from her memory. "I can't remember what I thought, what books I read, what movies I saw--anything," Janice says.

This loss of memory is due to a constant obsession with hunger and food, and is not uncommon, Carni says. "Anorectics have the attention span of three-year-olds. I've treated women who can't sit through a movie, read a book and who are totally insensitive to cold."

Janice's painfully thin frame finally caught the attention to her parents, who ordered her to start eating. "My dad made me sit down and eat a half-gallon of ice cream in front of him," Janice recalls. The pounds piled on, and soon she was much heavier than when she had started dieting. Like some anorectics, Janice then started trying to make herself throw up after food binges. "I drank mustard powder mixed with water because it burns your stomach," she remembers, adding, "Now just the thought of mustard makes me sick," Janice also experimented with laxatives but developed an allergy to the ingredients which left her skin red and blotchy.

Today, food is still an issue of overriding importance in Janice's life, and she says that it affects her emotional stability. "Food definitely affects how I feel--I always think about it," she says. "It's hard to tell if it's cause or effect because it's such a vicious cycle. But I know one thing: I'll always be obsessed with food. It'll never be just a way of staying alive."

MEN AND WOMEN who have never had an eating problem often find it difficult to sympathize with someone who suffers a food disorder. Says one slender Harvard male whose sister throws up several times a day: "When I first found out Mary was throwing up I was struck with disbelief. The whole thing seems so pointless--why eat if you're just going to throw it up?"

"I think it's a glaring weakness in someone's personality if they let food affect them so much," he continues. "I look upon the whole habit as a vice that's just as bad as heroin addiction."

Despite his disgust with his sister's problem, however, Jim brought up the issue with his parents in the hope that a psychiatrist could be contacted by the family. Their reaction, however, was typical of parents who prefer to deny that an eating problem exists until directly confronted with evidence.

"They thought I was crazy," Jim says. "They just said they thought it was great that Mary could eat so much and stay so thin. They just said that she had small bones and that she exercised to much that she was bound to be slender."

Sherry, a Harvard junior, had a similar problem when she talked to her parents about her older sister's habit of gorging and purging in secret. "They got really angry with me and told me to mind my own business," she remembers. "They totally shut their eyes to the situation and didn't deal with it. I suppose it's because if they did admit there was a problem it would be a poor reflection on them as parents."

SUFFERERS OF anorexia and bulimia are not the only victims of eating disorders at Harvard. There is another malady, which Carni characterizes as "the least destructive of them all"--spitting chewed-up food into one's napkin.

People afflicted with this problem often find chewing on "taboo" food to be the only way to stay thin, yet still enjoy the taste of high-calorie foods. After eating a low-calorie meal, "napkinics" will indulge in breads, pies, casseroles, cakes--in short, anything solid that can be chomped on and not swallowed--and then surreptitiously spit the food into a napkin when they think no one is looking. They will then either drop the napkins onto the floor, make frequent trips to the garbage to throw them out, or stuff them into their pockets or purses.

Susan is indignant when she discusses this form of weight control. "The people who do this think that they aren't being noticed, when in fact they're incredibly obvious," she says. "I take it as a direct personal insult that someone would spit their food out in front of me at a meal, as if they don't respect me enough to eat normally. At least laxative abuse and vomiting are things that you do in the privacy of a bathroom."

ALL THE STUDENTS interviewed for this article estimate that eating disorders among Harvard undergraduates are widespread; all guessed that from 75 to 90 percent have an unhealthy relationship with food. Carni, however, estimates that 60 to 65 percent of the Harvard population--including employees, undergrads and graduate students--have a disorder of some sort, and she ironically notes that the largest group of patients she treats are from the Harvard Medical School, where the intense pressures to perform often drive students to compulsive eating habits.

Doctors and researchers who study eating disorders emphasize that the sooner a victim seeks medical help, the more quickly and painlessly he or she can be diagnosed and cured. Carni has found that small groups of about four to six members meeting once a week have been particularly successful in curing gorge-purge behavior. She notes that within seven months of group sessions, women who had been vomiting for five to seven years respectively had resumed eating normally, and that similar sufferers of 11 and 13 years have drastically curtailed their habit. Carni emphasizes, however, that group sessions are not for everyone. The slow, step-by-step recovery can be painful and difficult, bringing problems to the surface which for years have been submerged under an obsession with food.