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This Issue 09/29/2005

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• From the Editor
• Guides

You're a freshman, a neophyte in the real world. As Friday night rolls around, you and your friends sashay into a swanky downtown eatery, swarm a booth, peruse the menu and maybe even order some drinks if your fake is decent or the place doesn't card. And finally your entree arrives and you can plunge your fork into ... a heaping pile of lettuce, sans dressing, while everyone else is diving into immaculate pasta or chicken dishes. They moan with pleasure and plead for you to taste a bite, just try it. Or maybe you order that, too, but promptly shuffle to the bathroom when you're finished to throw it all up, the acid still burning your nostrils as you return to the table.

You're fat. Maybe that's the "Freshman Fifteen" beckoning, but college girls are keenly self-conscious of their weight and appearance. At Penn, the desire to be perfect is a compelling force, and girls will suffer to be thin. The critical part is understanding why some are willing to sacrifice their health, their relationships and to a certain extent their sanity, for a skewed sense of beautiful.

*

Looking at Rachel* now, one can hardly envision her ever struggling with her body. Presently a College junior, her dimensions are the same as three years prior -- 5'3" and 113 pounds. Imagining her much slimmer is a painful thought to entertain. Her eyes are a muted blue that sit above a snippet nose and pouty lips. She pulls taut her side swept bangs to join the rest of her hair, returned to its natural rusty brown from the blond she maintained in high school.

She found her competitive streak long before she arrived at Penn. Growing up in an upper-middle class suburb of New York City, Rachel's surroundings were much akin to hers now at Penn: people were consumed by status and appearance. She attended a ritzy public school, where Mean Girls and Election collide to uphold many cherished high school stereotypes. The school sits on a hushed road, where its outside landscape is grassy and welcoming, and its inside corridors cast a sterile yet soothing bluish hue. Rachel experienced her most hellish days as a teenager inside these hallways, harassed for four years by an image-conscious environment and entranced by a delusion that she was fat. Though her illness didn't culminate until her senior year of high school, the obsession with weight struck her and her girlfriends hard and fast early in their freshman year.

Rachel and her friends were increasingly preoccupied with weight. "My best friend [Laura*] developed such a serious problem freshman year. She was very religious and her parents would force her to eat Shabbat dinner and she would throw it up, and she'd throw her lunch away every day."