A first-time mother tries to conceal her new curves.
A teenage boy endlessly compares himself to the bulked-up bodies he sees online.
An elderly woman, in an attempt to avoid the ailments that took her mother, grows fragile instead.
They all struggle with disordered eating.
The Free Press spoke with 11 people from Michigan about their struggles, triumphs and paths toward understanding their condition ― and, finally, healing.
While each story is unique, many share common experiences. Some developed unhealthy habits, such as restriction ― limiting what kind of food they eat, how much, or going for long periods without eating. Many acted on societal cues that correlate thinness with health. Others felt pressure to look like the idealized images they flip through in magazines or scroll past on TikTok.
Those who sought help said the health care system routinely overlooked their struggles and used an industry standard of health, the Body Mass Index (a measure of body fat based on a person’s height and weight), that failed to signal their eating disorders. It’s a number that does a disservice to patients, said Judith Banker, founder and president of the Center for Eating Disorders in Ann Arbor.
“People abuse themselves with that number. The medical system abuses people with that number,” Banker said. “We should be looking at blood pressure and heart rate and how the internal systems are working because weight is just a very, very poor proxy for body health.”
In Michigan, some 900,000 people, or about 10% of Michiganders, will develop an eating disorder, according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The percentage is about the same across the country, where more than 10,000 people die from an eating disorder every year.
People who struggle with disordered eating say helping people relearn what it means to be healthy, and making treatment more accessible are crucial steps to saving lives. So is understanding that recovery is a process with successes and setbacks.
At a time when millions of Americans clamor for appetite-suppressing drugs, when the negative effects of social media on body image cycle through headlines and congressional hearings, and when studies show that pandemic-induced isolation has worsened eating disorders, the people who spoke to the Free Press say they want to share their stories to help others who may struggle to find hope. They also shared, in handwriting on some of their photos, what they wish they knew at the start of their recovery journeys.
Samantha Barash: What healthy really looks like
Crisp, tender falafel, aromatic mejadra, delicate dolmas and warm pockets of wood-fired pita. This is the food that brings Samantha Barash home.
But that’s not how Barash has always felt.
“Food was a big way that I didn’t fit in with others growing up,” said Barash, 31, who grew up in a Middle Eastern household. The food at Barash’s home didn’t look like what her classmates ate. It also clashed with the messages she heard about eating healthy.
“I remember being at my grandmother’s house after I read in one of those silly ‘health’ magazines about damned rice and I didn’t want to eat white rice,” Barash recalled. “I remember not eating the grape leaves that my grandmother made.”
Barash developed a fixation on food, starting her first diet in the eighth grade, and deciding to become a dietician. But it was in college while studying to be a dietician that her eating disorder worsened.
“You come into this with a fascination with food and then you start to truly think food is the most important thing in the world. It can spiral very, very quickly,” Barash said.
Barash’s journey to recovery began when she started working as a dietician after college.
“I had the realization that no matter how much weight I lost, it would never be enough,” she said.
Barash now helps others mend their relationships with food and body image at her own practice, Tap Into Nutrition.
Barash tells her clients that “true health is way more than a body size.”
“Some foods have more nutrition than others, but all foods are healthy,” Barash said. “If you go to your grandma’s house, and it’s her birthday and she’s 90 years old, and you guys are eating a birthday cake, eating that cake with your family at that moment is healthy.”
Racheal Rickabaugh: Rewriting her story
Racheal Rickabaugh was the face of successful weight loss — literally.
In 2018, Rickabaugh, 36, of Grand Haven, sought help from an obesity specialist through a local hospital group. Two years later, the hospital published an article marveling over her weight-loss journey.
But Rickabaugh quickly realized that she had taken the weight-loss strategies she learned to an extreme and was, in fact, suffering from unhealthy eating habits.
“I ate mostly vegetables almost to the extent that it was almost my entire diet, and my body wasn’t happy with that.”
Rickabaugh grew up as one of the only girls of color in predominantly white Spring Lake, Michigan, where trying to fit in meant trying not to look like herself.
“I think it made me ashamed, I just wanted to act like I look like them,” said Rickabaugh.
In adulthood, Rickabaugh’s regimented diet developed into severely restrictive eating habits, and eventually, she fell into a dangerous cycle of binging and restriction. She exhibited symptoms of malnourishment, losing her period and frequently feeling freezing cold, she said.
And yet, according to body mass index (BMI) calculations, she was healthy.
“I thought, ‘I’m not underweight, so there’s just no way there could be anything wrong,’ ” said Rickabaugh , who didn’t hear others talk openly about these issues.
In 2021, Rickabaugh pursued therapy and said that the experience has been “life-changing.”
“Before therapy, it was really isolating,” she said. “On my own, I felt like I was crazy. I didn’t understand all the things that were happening to me.”
Rickabaugh is an elementary school teacher, and says she has seen kids fixate on weight loss and food as early as second grade.
“I wish they knew everybody is different and self worth isn’t attached to the shape or size of their body,” she said.
Fran Betz: Realization, recovery later in life
When Frances Betz was 25, her 52-year-old mother, who was diabetic, died from a heart attack. Betz vowed to avoid the same fate.
“I did not want to die when I was 50,” Betz said. “I wasn’t going to go through life like that.”
Betz dieted throughout adulthood. The fear of suffering the fate as her mother followed Betz into her 70s, when she decided to cut processed sugar out of her diet.
She began to rapidly lose weight. Betz’s daughter became increasingly worried about how frail her mother was and pushed her to see a specialist.
In doing so, Betz discovered a different danger: eating disorders.
“I never thought there was any danger in being too thin. We don’t hear that anywhere. All we hear about are the diets. I had no idea that people my age had eating disorders,” Betz said.
Research support’s Betz’s assessment. Treatment guidelines tend to be based on case studies of adolescents and middle-age adults.
By the time Betz sought help, she was tired frequently and moving slower ― signs of malnutrition.
“I felt my brain slowing down,” Betz said. “It just took me longer to do things. That’s when I realized the absolute danger.”
Starving the body of nutrition can cause parts of the brain to thin, suggesting that people who are heavily restricting are destroying their brain cells and breaking connections between brain cells, according to a 2022 study by the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
The study also found that malnutrition can also cause heart damage: the very thing Betz was trying to avoid.
Betz blames her doctors for not realizing how her weight loss could impact her health.
“They didn’t do a damn thing,” Betz said. “That’s a remiss on their part, I thought I was doing OK.”
Betz is working to rebuild the way she thinks about eating, but trying to unwind a lifetime of bad habits can feel overwhelming, she said.
Betz, however, said she is working hard toward recovery and that her goal has always been to be with family for as long as possible.
Jacy Kirby: A healthy relationship with exercise
Jacy Kirby was 14 years old when he first sought help for binge eating. His primary care physician simply told him to “just stop eating.”
At the time, Kirby was bullied about his weight and appearance and he spiraled into a deep depression.
“I’ve always used food to cope,” said Kirby, now 25, of Clinton Township. “The binge eating aspect, the full blown disorder, was when I was struggling with depression and I pushed into it further.”
For Kirby, cycles of severe restriction and bingeing started in 2017. The slightest frustration, like hitting a couple of red lights in a row, might trigger a bingeing episode, Kirby recalled.
During a binge, Kirby went to multiple fast-food restaurants and gas stations and ordered food from each location. He returned home to sit in his room for days at a time, “gorging on all that food,” he said.
Afterward, Kirby called off work, exercised excessively and starved himself for days, trying to rapidly purge the calories he had consumed.
“You enter a sort of euphoric bubble where the world could literally be ending outside and it wouldn’t matter,” Kirby said. “But as soon as you take that last bite, it’s immediate self-loathing”
Though Kirby tried to change his behavior, he didn’t know how.
“Behind the closed doors of my room, I would try to sort things out and deal with it on my own. But I literally had no sense of coping mechanisms whatsoever,” Kirby said.
Kirby forged a new path after he began kickboxing, started therapy and met his fiancee, Chloe.
Before, Kirby saw exercise exclusively as a way of purging from binges.
“Exercise was about doing something to my body, instead of for it,” he said.
Now, Kirby is a fitness trainer at Planet Fitness in Clinton Township, where he teaches his clients how to build healthy relationships with food and exercise.
Kirby has also found an outlet through writing. In January, he published a collection of poems titled “To My Eating Disorder,” in which he details his struggles and seeks the strength to heal.
“I have a lifetime to go dealing with this eating disorder,” he said. “One of the biggest points I’ve learned is, you slip up, it doesn’t mean you relapse. I’m just taking it moment by moment.”
Dana Demeter: Beauty in a new body
Dana Demeter was 5 years old when a doctor told her mother that Demeter was overweight.
After that, sweets were off-limits. She hadn’t thought much about her appearance before, but it wasn’t long until she started to compare her body to those around her.
By the time she turned 12, Demeter had developed bulimia.
“I learned about purging in health class and I thought, ‘That could be a good way to lose weight,’ ” said Demeter, remembering that it became a pattern for her when a friend did it, too.
Demeter started to cycle through restriction and binge-eating, which got worse in college. Hoping to start a new chapter after graduating, Demeter managed to quit purging on her own and thought she was cured. About a decade later, Demeter became a mother, which brought another set of pressures.
“It’s normal to talk about weight gain during pregnancy,” said Demeter, now 39 and a mother of three. “Then after you have the baby there’s very little talk about healthy weight loss, or just being OK with (your) new body.”
When her mother passed away in 2020, Demeter’s disorder worsened and she turned to food to cope with her grief.
Demeter sought therapy in 2022, after realizing that the way she talked and thought about food could hurt her first-born daughter, Frankie, then 6 years old.
“I would catch myself saying things that were said to me and having to stop myself,” she said. “It wasn’t just about me anymore.”
With therapy, Demeter has relearned how to think and talk about food.
“I’ve realized weight loss isn’t always healthy,” Demeter said. “I have always been told that I would be beautiful if I was thin. I’m not. But I am beautiful.”
NaJaRee Nixon: Grounding in self-realization
NaJaRee Nixon spent much of her life fixated on losing weight.
Nixon, 32, of Southfield, faced relentless bullying over her weight and battled depression and anxiety during childhood and adolescence.
Nixon spent years bingeing, overexercising and then undereating just “trying to feel comfortable” in her own skin.
When Nixon would lose weight at an alarming rate, she remembers hearing praise.
“No one even gave a second thought that I was sick,” Nixon said. “No one thought that maybe I was doing dangerous things. Because I was small, I was prettier.”
Nixon said the search for external acceptance caused her to lose sight of herself. When Nixon was 28, she was sexually abused twice by separate people in the same year.
“Self-sacrificing for the sake of others became a part of who I was,“ Nixon said. “I sacrificed so much of myself that I couldn’t even recognize when I was being harmed.”
Nixon started therapy in 2021 and found support for her depression and anxiety, as well as her eating disorder. Along the way, Nixon was diagnosed with autism and dyslexia, two diagnoses that she said helped her on her healing journey.
“I’ve been living with these things my entire life and didn’t know,” said Nixon. “Learning about my needs helped me deal with my eating disorder, depression, anxiety ― everything.”
Nixon is now a certified reiki practitioner and an advocate for people with disabilities as a community organizer at Detroit Disability Power.
Nixon said she is proud of how far she has come and her ability to stay grounded.
“I’m not trying to force my body into society’s standards anymore.”
Katie Whitney: Listening to cues
As her mother took part in Weight Watchers, 10-year-old Katie Whitney was there, tracking points alongside her.
From fourth grade on, every summer Whitney, 41, of Ann Arbor, said to herself, “I’m going to get thin.”
Whitney found it hard to fit in at home. “Petite and slender,” is how Whitney described her mother and sisters. She was the youngest in a family with four much older siblings who all seemed to have it together.
“I felt like a different species,” Whitney said.
She remembers feeling like she was floundering.
“I didn’t have a lot of skills for managing everyday stressors and anxiety,” Whitney said. “I thought being sad or being angry was wrong, that there was something wrong with me if I felt those things, so I needed to get rid of those feelings.”
Whitney coped with binge eating through her teens. Tired of the self-loathing, restriction and bingeing, Whitney sought therapy at 22 years old, when transitioning out of college, and was prescribed an appetite suppressant.
But it didn’t work.
“It didn’t stop me feeling like I couldn’t get enough,” she recalls. “And that there was something wrong with me.”
Whitney’s therapist directed her to a dietician, who taught her about intuitive eating, which relies on trust internal hunger and satiety cues to help decide what and how much to eat.
“I didn’t even recognize those cues anymore,” Whitney said.
Working with a dietician helped Whitney, but she still faces challenges.
“Other people are seeing you first as fat and then as whatever else,” Whitney said, noting that she constantly thinking, “there’s going to be some place where I am not allowed, where I don’t belong.”
Whitney sees a therapist and a dietician once a month. She has learned to put her struggles into perspective.
“Like, OK, I’m fat, but I’m here, living my life and it’s pretty great.”
Raya Lasiewski: Forging a career to help others
For the first seven years of Raya Lasiewski’s life, she starved in a Russian orphanage.
After being adopted and moving to America, Lasiewski’s childhood trauma continued to affect her relationship with food. As a child, Lasiewski, 30, of Northville, hoarded food at home, hiding it under her bed because she was worried about returning to the orphanage.
In high school, Lasiewski lost a close friend to suicide and fell into a deep depression. To cope, she wanted to control something in her life, Lasiewski remembers. She restricted how much food she ate and rapidly lost weight.
Despite her dangerous eating habits, however, Lasiewski found that doctors and peers praised her weight loss instead.
“Why is it that all of a sudden when I’m losing weight, I’m attractive?” she asked.
Lasiewski began to seek treatment after fainting at work. She had always dreamed of becoming a social worker, but realized her eating disorder was keeping her from reaching her goals.
Doctors, she recalls, told Lasiewski she “wasn’t skinny enough” to be diagnosed with an eating disorder. After that Lasiewski sought out treatment.
Lasiewski said she finally found the help she needed at Timberline Knolls Residential Treatment Center in Illinois.
“I probably wouldn’t be here today without them,” Lasiewski said. “They actually believed me. They made me feel safe.”
Lasiewski said she is working to help those around her understand that overcoming an eating disorder can take years of consistent work.
“Once you go into treatment, people think of you as a car going into the (repair) shop and coming out fixed,” Lasiewski said. “But it’s a lifelong journey. That’s the hardest part.”
Lasiewski is the coordinator for the annual Ann Arbor National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) Walk, which is scheduled for April 13, helping to raise awareness for eating disorders. She also is studying to earn her master’s degree at Eastern Michigan University to become a therapist, specializing in eating disorders.
“My eating disorder was taking away my goals of becoming a social worker,” said Lasiewski, who is slated to graduate in April. “But I want to be an example of the light at the end of the tunnel for those struggling like I was.”
Alisha Washington: Reconnecting with beloved foods
Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, Alisha Washington remembers being one of a few Black kids in her community.
“Nobody is saying anything to me, but I just felt like I’m not supposed to be here,” Washington said. “You just feel like you’re very different from the people around you and you’re just trying to do everything possible to assimilate.”
For Washington, 30, assimilating meant changing her body.
“Fitting in meant literally shrinking myself down to fit down to what everyone else around me is,” said Washington, who now lives in Detroit.
That included rejecting the food her family loved: Fried chicken, bread, collard greens, ham.
“It felt like my food didn’t have value to the health-conscious people and I was ashamed,” said Washington. “The food that I loved, the food that my mom made for me, the food that was at my family celebrations wasn’t good.”
Washington struggled the most when she was at college. She frequently skipped meals and once fainted in the cafeteria.
“Perversely, the worse I was taking care of my body, the more positive feedback I got, which feeds into the cycle of ‘I should keep doing it, because everyone’s giving me compliments,’ ” said Washington. “I don’t blame anyone for doing it, it’s just our social conditioning.”
Washington sought help in her mid-20s. The COVID-19 pandemic had set in and she had recently gotten married and bought a house with her husband. She thought about their future together and the family they want to build.
Washington’s therapist suggested she start working with a nutritionist. Washington agreed, but previous experiences with healthcare professionals made her cautious.
“Doctors tend to start conversations about weight loss before they know anything else about me,” said Washington.
In 2022, Washington began working with a dietitian who steered her away from focusing on weight loss and toward mending her relationships with food and eating.
Now, Washington is reconnecting with the foods that her family loves, even as she fights an inner voice telling her she’s not good enough, that she needs to change.
“It’s one of those things where you want to buck the system and be like ‘screw this,’ but at the same time you know that you’re a person and exist in a world in which certain bodies are praised and other bodies are punished.”
Tommy Hojnicki: Beating the algorithm
For Tommy Hojnicki, lifting weights is as routine as brushing his teeth.
The habit for Hojnicki, 23, was triggered after his father’s stroke, which put his dad in a coma for a month. Hojnicki’s dad recovered and needed years of rehab and therapy. The stroke, doctors said, could have been mitigated through diet and exercise.
The next year, Hojnicki, 12 at the time, joined his local gym.
“Something just clicked that was like, ‘Hey, I don’t want this to be my future,’ ” he said.
At 13, Hojnicki started lifting. Throughout high school he viewed exercise as a stress release and a path toward health. In college at Michigan State University, however, he turned his focus to size.
“It’s college when you just start seeing more people bigger and stronger than you,” said Hojnicki, who earned a master’s degree in computer science at MSU, and recently moved to Colorado. “It became normal for me to be in (the gym) for three hours a day.”
Hojnicki said he experienced muscle dysmorphia, a preoccupation with the idea that one’s body isn’t muscular or lean enough, sometimes causing compulsive behaviors aimed at achieving an unrealistic physique.
Approximately 25% of adolescent males are worried about not appearing muscular enough, according to a 2021 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
“We don’t really talk about it, because if you do, you’re seen as weak,” he said.
Social media makes it worse.
“Every other video, you’re seeing shirtless guys with washboard abs, huge arms and you don’t know if they’re natural or on steroids,” Hojnicki said about TikTok. “The algorithm identified that weightlifting and exercise is something I’m into, so that’s all the content I’m seeing.”
In real life, Hojnicki realizes that body dysmorphia isn’t something he can solve completely on his own. He said he hopes, however, to change his inner and outer dialogue.
“I just want to strive to be healthy,” Hojnicki said. “I just want to work on not being as hard on myself.”
Makenna Silverman: Always reaching for recovery
Green light. Yellow light. Red light.
Makenna Silverman, 22, of Bloomfield Hills, imagines a stoplight when she thinks of where she’s at in terms of her eating disorder. At a green light, Silverman glides, free from the weight of her illness. When she hits yellow, she struggles with negative thoughts but can move forward. At red, Silverman’s eating disorder brings her life to a halt.
Silverman was in the red in the fall of 2022 when she lost the ability to walk and fainted in front of her young cousins.
“I was bedridden,” Silverman said. “I had to sit down to brush my teeth.”
During Silverman’s childhood and teenage years, she often saw her mom receive compliments about her body. Silverman wanted the same, she said.
“If I had that much self control, then people would be saying that to me, too,” Silverman recalled thinking at the time.
Silverman carried her search for validation to Michigan State University.
“I noticed the type of girls that made it farther socially,” Silverman said. To fit that mold, Silverman dyed her hair blonde, and started to pair restriction with intense exercise to lose weight.
After a year, Silverman had isolated herself from friends and family to avoid their concern, was dizzy and aching from undereating.
In October of 2022, Silverman’s friends held an intervention ― gentle but insistent that she get help. They convinced her to seek treatment.
“I realized I was sacrificing my friends and my family,” Silverman said. “I didn’t want that for myself anymore.”
But the intensive in-patient program Silverman sought was hard to find.
C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital had a seven-month waiting list. Silverman researched several other in-patient treatment facilities, trying to find one her family’s insurance would cover.
In December of 2022, Silverman found Focus Integrative Centers in Tennessee, and spent two months receiving in-patient treatment there.
Silverman credits Focus with saving her life.
Silverman continues therapy with a care team and says she lately finds herself somewhere between yellow and green lights.
Last year, she reached one of her biggest goals, attending one of the Taylor Swift concerts in Detroit with a group of friends, the same ones who intervened to stop Silverman’s spiral seven months prior.
“I stood and screamed for three hours straight,” said Silverman. “I thought, ‘this is what recovery feels like.’ ”
Green light.
How to find help
Here are some resources for people seeking help with an eating disorder:
Eating disorder information, screening tools and support can be found at National Eating Disorders Association (nationaleatingdisorders.org/screening-tool)National Alliance for Eating Disorders (allianceforeatingdisorders.com) offers a list of treatment providers in each state, free therapist-led virtual support groups and additional resources.In Michigan, Kirsten Haglund Fund (kirstenhaglundfoundation.org) offers treatment scholarships and a transitional living program for patients returning from treatment. For people requiring more intensive care, the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital (mottchildren.org/conditions-treatments/eatingdisorders) offers a partial hospitalization program and an outpatient program for patients ages 8-22.Stanford Behavioral Health in Marne, Michigan, near Grand Rapids, offers residential treatment (sanfordbehavioralhealth.com/eating-disorders).To learn more about recently published research on eating disorders, you can go to the Academy for Eating Disorders website (aedweb.org).
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