by Lynda A. Brogdon, Ph.D., C.E.D.S., C.E.A.T.

Dreams become realities when we remember to follow them.  As a child, maybe it was simply the chance to see a horse that was enough to settle your urgent yearning to have one of your own.  Or maybe riding a horse at a nearby stable was as far as your dreams could possibly carry you.

As adults we sometimes forget to honor our childhood dreams.  No longer dependent on parental permission or financial assistance, some of us decide to obtain the object of our girlhood affection -- our horse.  We buy our first horse; one that meets our requirements for breed, color, age, size, gender and price.  Then, after a period of complete devotion and obsessive behavior we realize something is missing.

We mistakenly reasoned that our life-long dream was fulfilled with the purchase of our trusty steed.  We forgot, however, that what we really longed for was a relationship, not just ownership.  We forgot to consider the weighty correlation between our personality and that of our new horse.

by Trish Higgins Kurowski
* Some names have been changed

Lynne Hinnant on
Christmas morning in 1994

The day Miriam Richardson* reached the end of her rope, she went out and bought a large chain and a padlock.  When she brought it home, she placed it around the refrigerator, locked it, and left for work.  While she was gone, her 19-year-old daughter, Abigail, used a metal file to break the links and get to the food.

Miriam was not abusing her daughter by withholding food; she was simply trying to stop her from eating every morsel of food in the house.  I had to protect myself and my other children.  If I didn't lock it up there would be nothing left for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.  She would eat everything that was edible."

Miriam's daughter is one of an estimated eight million Americans who suffer from an eating disorder.  Some, like Abigail, struggle with bulimia nervosa, a condition that drives the victim to consume huge amounts of food and then resort to vomiting, laxative abuse, or excessive exercise to rid the body of the calories.

Others restrict their caloric intake so severely that their bodies slowly starve.  This disease, known as anorexia nervosa, is what killed pop singer Karen Carpenter and, more recently, gymnast Christy Heinrich.  According to Vivian Meehan, president and founder of the Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), more people die each year from eating disorder illnesses than from AIDS.  The disease affects both genders, but 90 percent of the known victims are female.

Though the vast majority of people who suffer from eating disorders report the onset of the illness during their teenage years, recent research suggests that the seeds of the disease are planted at a much earlier age, when children are developing their sense of "self."  It is blatantly clear that eating disorders are linked to our society's love/hate relationship with food and our absurdly idealistic definition of self, but that's not all there is to it by any stretch.