Forced to fight for her life

Jessica Garrison

To see Ann Hatfield today, perched on the couch, the phone ringing

off the hook with friends calling, it is almost impossible to believe her

story.

She pulls out the pictures to prove it: “This is me when I weighed 90

pounds,” she says, pointing to a sickly looking waif with skeletal

features and a pinched, vacant smile. Look closer and you realize with

shock that the girl in the picture is Ann.

Today Ann, a third-generation Balboa Island resident, is a healthy 125

pounds, with ruddy cheeks and an engaging dimply smile. She waves happily

to her neighbors and works two summer jobs to save money for school and

fun.

She spends a lot of time with friends, sitting in the living room of the

house built by her grandfather, which she shares with her mother, her

older brother, and her big furry dog.

She’s on the cheerleading squad at Corona del Mar High School and is a

heroine to girls and their parents for the way she has used her illness

to help fellow students who are struggling with food issues.

“Annie cracked the ice at Corona del Mar High School,” said school nurse

Debbie Norman. “She was just the biggest instrument.”

Last year, while Ann was recovering from anorexia, she spoke to her

schoolmates about her ordeal. In the days after her speech, 10 students

came forward and said they were worried about friends who weren’t eating.

Two years ago, Ann, an aspiring soccer star, decided she needed to lose

10 pounds over the summer.

Ann and her mother, Gretchen, believe that social pressures to be

beautiful and perfect dovetailed with personal issues and created a

deadly caldron in which her eating disorder flourished.

That summer, Ann came up with a meal plan that consisted mostly of fruit

and chicken.

“But I wasn’t counting calories or anything -- yet,” she said.

She lost 10 pounds. Everyone -- all her friends, her soccer coach, boys

she ran into at the movies -- told her she looked great. She decided if

she could lose even more weight, her life would be even better.

During the first months of her dieting, Ann spent hours at a time with

fashion magazines, willing herself to resemble the models in their pages.

“I flipped through issues of Seventeen Magazine, jealously analyzing the

models’ beautiful, skinny bodies, fantasizing about how perfect my life

would be if I looked like that,” she said.

Gretchen Hatfield believes her daughter’s desire to emulate the

perfection in the magazines -- which, even today, fill their house --

nearly killed her.

“The girls are not rebelling,” she said of anorexics. “They’re striving

to be perfect.”

That summer, she was already putting herself through three hours a day of

volleyball practice and three hours a day of soccer practice. Not to

mention her parents were getting divorced that summer, and she was trying

to cope with all the changes that entailed.

But while her teammates wolfed down giant bowls of pasta and then

retreated to their beds to recover from the exertion, she spent her

afternoons running more than 10 miles.

“I was shedding pounds like a snake sheds its skin,” she wrote months

later in an English paper. “I constantly ran and exercised until I could

no longer move my legs and they wobbled like Jell-O. I would collapse on

the floor in a puddle of sweat after long, grueling hours of huffing and

puffing with nothing to eat but lettuce between a scrawny, flimsy piece

of fat-free pita bread.”

She stopped eating anything at all except fruit and the occasional

nonfat, sugar-free yogurt.

“I developed a fear of fat,” she wrote. “Fat was a monster scaring me

away every time I saw it. Knowing I could resist the temptations gave me

power and authority, which gave me pride, self-esteem, and assured me of

my assertiveness.”

The notion that abstaining from food is a way of expressing power is

classic anorexic thinking, said Meg George, a marriage and family

counselor in Newport Beach.

Girls who suffer from anorexia, she said, typically have difficulty

expressing their feelings, or even figuring out how they feel, George

said. The see their families as being “very controlling,” she said.

The girls have learned not to express themselves but are often under

tremendous pressure to achieve. This can lead, said George, to a feeling

-- often unconscious -- that they have no control over their lives.

So they resort to a rigid control of their bodies and what goes into them

as a way of controlling their lives and managing their feelings.

“If I’m a girl, and I know that I can’t be angry in my family, or upset,

what do I do with my anger? I suppress it,” she said. “Food is the

easiest thing to control. Food is the thing they use to cope.”

Before long, friends from her soccer team noticed that Ann was moving

slower and didn’t seem to have as much energy as she used to.

Behind Ann’s back, they went to her mother with their concerns.

For Hatfield, it was like a nightmare repeating itself.

“I was anorexic at Corona del Mar High School 30 years ago, before they

had a name for it,” Gretchen Hatfield said.

She had been distracted that summer by her devastating divorce but turned

her full attention to her daughter, asking her if she thought she had a

problem with food.

Her daughter said no.

A few weeks later, school started. Ann had lost nearly 50 pounds over the

summer. Classmates she had known her entire life didn’t recognize her.

Just after noon on the first day of school, Hatfield recalled, the phone

started ringing with concerned teachers, the school nurse and a

counselor.

A few days later, Hatfield physically pushed her tiny, angry daughter

into the car and drove her to the doctor. Mother and daughter, each for

their own reasons, sobbed all the way.

The doctor told Ann she was in severe danger of dying from a heart

attack. If she did not gain weight, he said, she would be sent away to a

hospital. She would be strapped down, and tubes would be threaded through

her nose and down into her stomach, forcing calories into her.

He made her quit soccer and volleyball, warning that her heart couldn’t

take it.

Ann was devastated about having to quit soccer and refused to believe she

was really in danger. She went to a different therapist, who told her the

same thing.

“I was scared out of my skin, as reality finally slapped me across the

face,” she wrote.

The day Ann finally accepted that she might be killing herself was the

day she began the long, dark period of her recovery.

It was not an easy, straight path back to ruddy-cheeked health.

All the feelings she had been starving away erupted, but -- mentally and

physically - she was barely able to cope with them. Rarely a day went by

that she did not come home early from school and collapse into an

exhausted sleep.

“My thoughts were jumbled,” she wrote. “I could not understand anything

my teachers explained, and even worse, I could not focus enough to

think.”

Rarely did she have an afternoon when she did not visit her psychiatrist,

her doctor, her nutritionist, or her counselor -- all of whom forced her

onto the scale, eyeing her weight like a hawk.

“I had no breathing room,” she said. “I was constantly at different

doctors’ appointments, while trying to get enough effort to live through

the day.

“I felt so alone,” she said. “My friends were not within reach.”

Ann, in turn, pulled away from them.

“I became really unsocial,” she said. “I wouldn’t go out. I got

depressed.”

She was trying to cope with the aftermath of her parents’ divorce. Her

dream of following in her older brother’s footsteps and becoming a sports

star was shattered. Her perfect grade point average was in shambles. She

was terrified of eating, and no one could understand why she wouldn’t

eat. Relationships that had once been filled with inside jokes, slumber

parties and a shared love of sports were reduced to tense confrontations

over the lunch table at school.

“They examined my food piece by piece, making sure I gulped down every

last crumb. ... I was sick of the whole concept and wished everyone would

go away.”

Somehow, she continued on.

She went to school as much as she could -- and her teachers and

counselors were “incredibly understanding.” She kept going to all her

doctors -- although this once-golden girl was not above trying to trick

them.

“I would drink gallons of water before going, and then it would seem like

I had gained weight,” she wrote. “When I was told how much fat to

consume, I would lie about what I devoured. This convinced her of my

success, until I hopped onto the scale, revealing my secret. I began to

strap weights onto my ankles, with long pants hiding them from

suspicion.”

Of course, eventually she was caught, and her doctor, her mother and her

friends felt betrayed, heartbroken, and confused. Finally, her friends

and family were able to pull her back into the world.

“I was fed up with the lie I was living, and I really made an effort

toward overcoming this disease,” she said.

As she began to gain weight, as her hips filled out and her cheeks

rounded, her doctor allowed her to start participating in light exercise.

People started to compliment her. And she began to enjoy life again.

“I wish all of the pain I caused could be locked inside of a bottle and

buried deep in the ground and forgotten about forever,” she wrote. “Now

my smile shines so bright with joy, it is blinding.”