Dieting and exercising brought her weight down 15 pounds, then another 10. By age 16, Jane had dropped 35 pounds, leaving the petite 5'4" teen with only 85 pounds left.

Clothing began to seem too big. "That was when I got kind of scared," she says.

Although her parents tried to talk to her about her eating habits, their intervention didn't really help. "When you look at yourself in the mirror, you don't see the true picture," she says.

"Many anorexics obsess about when, where and what they eat," she says. "The symptoms are so formalized. I weighed myself more than once a day, I would make it difficult to go out to eat, I was really fixated on how much fat content and how many calories exactly I had eaten that day. It takes a lot of enjoyment out of food."

And like many anorexics, even when she realized her habits were detrimental to her health, she was reluctant to give them up.

"We [at ECHO] get a lot of calls from people who realize their eating habits aren't normal. But it's something to hold onto," she says.

Things began to get better for her senior year of high school, when pressures seemed to decrease. But recovery has been by no means short-term or easy, she says.

"For me it was a long, slow, peeling away and realizing there was more to life. Food takes up less brain space [now]. At my last family gathering, my cousins were like 'wow, you look really great.'"

Through counseling at ECHO, she hopes to help others who are in a similar situation. People with eating disorders and concerns should know, she says, that their problems have serious underlying causes that need to be unearthed.

"They should maybe step back and realize what it is that's really eating at them," she says.

Reaching Out

While eating disorders are widespread at Harvard, most who suffer from them choose not to use the available resources for help, according to Heatherton's survey.

But while sufferers often feel confident they can handle their own problems, doctors disagree.

"If someone has a significant eating disorder, rarely can they deal with it on their own," says Dr. Richard D. Kadison, who now heads the eating disorders program at UHS.

ECHO Co-Director Amy E. Langston '96 says the organization's 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. hotline receives about five or six calls a week.