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FMH Background and History 1 What is it with Annette? She has changed so much over the past few months that I hardly recognize my long-time good friend. She’s constantly staring at herself in the mirror, and she’s started wearing the ugliest clothes, much too big for her and not at all fl attering. And it’s weird to be around her in the cafeteria. She won’t even look at most of the foods we’re served, and she takes only the smallest portions you can imagine. She says she’s a vegan now . . . the same girl who used to gobble down hamburgs almost every day for lunch. Why, I even saw her at lunch turn her head and spit out the food she had been chewing. I think there’s something wrong with Annette. Th ere is. Annette almost certainly has an eating disorder. An eating disorder is defi ned as any condition in which an indi- vidual follows an irregular pattern of eating, either eating less or more than one would or should normally eat. Th ese eating patterns refl ect a person’s (usually incorrect) perception of his or her body characteristics, such as “I’m too fat” or “Parts of my body are too big or too large.” In most cases, an eating disorder is a mental or emotional issue, not a malfunction of the body’s biological functioning. New Jersey school children determine changes in their weight by compar- ing past and present weights on the blackboard, ca. 1940–1950. (National Library of Medicine) 3