“I thought…If I came back and I’m cuter and thinner…then I’ll get the role.” For six months, Clarkson was bulimic, until a friend discovered her problem. “One of my guy friends caught on to it, and I just felt so ashamed and embarrassed,” she tells the mag. “I literally went cold turkey and snapped out of it.”

Breakfast

Eating a good breakfast boosts your concentration and revs your energy, particularly in the morning when you may need it most.

You can help keep your blood sugar on an even keel with complex carbohydrates. Avoid refined carbohydrates, such as white bread and white sugar. These have a high glycemic index, which can cause spikes and dips in your blood sugar levels.

The right complex carbohydrates provide your brain and muscles with the steady flow of the energy they need. Grains are great sources of B vitamins, which aid in the metabolic production of energy. Natural whole grain breads and cereals are good carbohydrate choices for breakfast.

For the best breakfast, add a lowfat protein, such as yogurt, cottage cheese, or skim milk, and watch your fat intake as well as your meat consumption (since meat takes more energy to digest).

Mid morning snack

Turns out, snacking may not be such a bad idea. Eating every few hours helps your body use nutrients more efficiently. It stimulates your metabolism, keeps your blood sugar levels steady, reduces stress on your digestive system, and decreases hunger, which means you will be less likely to overeat when mealtime finally rolls around.

If you are craving carbs, which many of us do at this time of day, choose whole grain bread, cereal, or fruit.

Fruits and vegetables deliver a lowfat, high fiber alternative to the vending machine choices. Raw carrots and sugar snap peas, for example, provide a crisp, satisfying crunch and will not zap your energy. Challenge yourself to eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables each day.

For maximum energy throughout the day, avoid foods that are laden with simple sugars, such as cookies, pastries, candy bars, and sodas, which can bring on erratic blood sugar levels.

Instead, try some lean protein (lowfat yogurt, cottage cheese or lean meat) to help tide you over until lunch.

Lunch

At midday, go light. Because a hefty helping of carbohydrates can increase the amount of seratonin in the brain and cause that sleepy feeling, focus on lowfat protein.

Protein can actually raise energy levels by increasing brain chemicals called catecholamines. Eat a lunch of lowfat cheese, fish, lean meat, poultry, or tofu.

Mid afternoon snack

Choose something that will keep you satisfied until dinner. A little bit of fat is fine. It gives those carbohydrates and proteins some staying power. Try a bit of all natural peanut butter and a few crackers, for example.

Before your workout

Carbohydrates are fastest to digest and pack quick energy. Add protein for staying power, but stay away from fats. They can make you cramp.

Dinner

The agenda for the evening can dictate what you will eat for dinner. Need to stay on overdrive for a couple of hours? Choose lowfat proteins. If you are in relax mode, indulge a little.

Whatever is on the menu, remember the Pie Test. Envision your plate as a pie. Seventy five percent of the pie should be filled with fruits, vegetables, and grains and 25 percent with other foods, such as diary products and meat.

Before bed

Before turning in, a carbohydrate rich snack can supply seratonin to help you fall asleep. But go easy. Too much food can reduce the quality of your sleep.

Author: Susie Cortright

The Grease star is deeply concerned for her only child Chloe Lattanzi, 21, who said her eating problems started when Olivia, 59, fell desperately ill with breast cancer 15 years ago.

But Chloe’s eating disorder spiralled out of control 18 months ago when her mother’s long-term boyfriend, Patrick McDermott, disappeared during a fishing trip and hasn’t been seen since.

Chloe said: “I’ve gone through an eating disorder. I don’t hide that. It’s nothing I’m ashamed of. Everything happens for a reason.”

She kept her anorexia secret from her famous mother for two years. Devastated Olivia said: “Did I notice? Yes. I was obviously very concerned and worried. Eating disorders are usually nothing to do with food. Parents need to be with their child to see them through it. All the therapists in the world can’t help if the parents aren’t present, loving and pro-active.”

When Olivia discovered her daughter’s potentially-fatal illness, she hired a daily therapist and nutritionist. Her ex-husband Matt Lattanzi - Chloe’s dad - also rallied round to support her.

Chloe, who lives in Olivia’s mansion in Malibu, said: “I’m taking good care of myself, but I’m not going to be like, ‘Oh, I eat pizza every day!’ and I’m honest about that. I’m lucky I got through it because it’s a fatal thing if you don’t pull through it.”
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Chloe’s eating disorder started as she watched Olivia battle cancer. Just 12 months later her parents divorced and she suffered depression.

Then in June 2005 Patrick, 48, went missing on a fishing trip from Los Angeles. He was feared drowned but investigators suspected he jumped ship to evade bankruptcy.

In an interview with Australian magazine Woman’s Day, mother and daughter confessed they had a rocky relationship. Chloe said: “But we have always had a deep love for each other.”

Chloe is now following in the footsteps of her singer mum, who played Sandy opposite John Travolta in hit movie Grease, with the release of her debut album Lonely Night In Paradise.

Sunday Mirror, Mar 18, 2007 by LOUISE FORD
louise.ford@sundaymirror.co.uk

Weaver, 48, tells how the 20-year-old Mean Girls star:

ATTACKED a gun-wielding cocaine dealer for ripping her off.

SNORTED line after line with Simple Life star Nicole Richie in a TEN-HOUR binge.

SLASHED her wrists with knives, sobbing that she “didn’t belong on this planet”.

ENJOYED frenzied lesbian romps with scores of girls she picked up at parties — and even made a play for chart star Mariah Carey.

“I have looked after some of the wildest stars in Hollywood — but never anyone as out of control as Lindsay is,” says Lee, 48.

“She had a total death wish and took more drugs and drank more than anyone I’ve met.

“I lost count of the times I thought she was overdosing and had to carry her out of parties. Every morning I’d breathe a sigh of relief she was still alive.”

Lee spoke out after seeing our pictures of drunken Lindsay last week, pretending to cut a pal’s throat with a kitchen knife.

But any weapon — even a gun — doesn’t faze her if she’s gagging for cocaine. “In April she asked me to take her to her dealer in Beverly Hills. I knew if I refused she’d go alone — so I took her.

“He was waiting for her in some bushes. Suddenly she started screaming and punching him for selling her short.

“He pulled a gun. I got out and he threatened to shoot me unless I got her to back off — but she kept hitting him. Luckily he got distracted and I punched him down.

“I dragged Lindsay into the car and drove off but she was screaming at me to go back. It was like Pulp Fiction. I knew then she was just too dangerous to be around.”

Lee reveals how he often drove Lindsay to join her pal Nicole Richie, 24, for cocaine binges. “Nobody was as wild as Lindsay,” he says. “But Nicole came close. Sometimes Paris Hilton would be there but the most I saw her do was drink and strip.

“One night Lindsay and Nicole were making trip after trip to the bathroom — she wouldn’t snort in front of me because she knew I’d get mad.

“But the more wasted they got the less she cared. In the end they carried in a mirror from the bedroom, laid it on the coffee table and emptied a mountain of coke onto it. They went at the stuff with straws, hoovering it all up then piling more on.

“I tried to tell Lindsay to stop but she just told me it was cool. After ten hours I’d had enough and threatened to throw the mirror out of the window. I had to carry her out to the car.”

But that was no surprise — Lee had been carrying her home since first night he began working for her.

His first job was to take her to a party in Beverly Hills. “She’d been snorting all night,” he recalls. “As soon as they walked into the party she was snorting more.

“She got on the coffee table and danced, flinging her dress above her head, her eyes rolling about all over the place.

“I told the guy providing the drugs to stop and he just said, ‘No way, Lindsay will go berserk’. Then she started screaming at people and swinging her fists around at anyone near her.

“At the start of the night she seemed such a fun-loving, angelic girl but under the influence of drugs she was psychotic. It was 10.30am the next day by the time I carried her to bed.”

And when she wasn’t snorting coke, she was snogging GIRLS.

“She used boys for drugs and girls for thrills,” says Lee. “I lost count of the women she took back to her hotel room from clubs.

“I even saw her try to grope Mariah Carey’s bottom and boobs one night as they danced. One time I went to look for her in a club bathroom and found her in the corner French-kissing a girl.” When she wasn’t snogging them she was just as likely to attack them.

One night, paranoid Lindsay went for blonde actress Jessica Simpson in a club. Lee says: “Jessica was sat with her pals and Lindsay became convinced she was shooting her dirty looks.

“She jumped over the table and dived at Jessica pulling her hair out. I had to pull her off her.”

As Lindsay spiralled more and more out of control she started to self-harm, cutting her wrists with a knife.

“One night I looked at her hands and wrists and noticed they had bright red wounds all over them,” says Lee.

“She tried to tell me she had fallen but when I looked her in the eyes and demanded to know the truth she just broke down.

“She told me, ‘I don’t belong on this planet any more’. She said she cut herself because she did not think life was worth living.

“The pictures in your paper of her fooling with knives show how disturbing her behaviour is.” So do today’s pictures taken of her partying in her messy booze-littered room, half-dressed,looking painfully thin and spaced out.

They emerge just weeks after Lindsay went into rehab for the second time in six months after crashing her Mercedes into a tree.

Lee — who earned £1,500 a week as her bodyguard — is now writing his memoirs about the years he spent minding stars, including Kim Basinger, Brad Pitt, Eddie Murphy, Pamela Anderson, Jamie Foxx and Hollywood’s most infamous drug addict Robert Downey Jnr.

But the minder, who also tells of his adventures on his website leetweaver.com, says Lindsay was the biggest handful of all of them.

“I’d never even heard of her when I was asked to do the job. She was only 18 but guarding her was a nightmare and the stress it put me under was unbearable.

“I would pray every night she wouldn’t kill herself on my watch.

“I desperately hope she stops doing drugs but I fear that will only happen when either she kills someone else with her reckless ways — or kills herself.”

By Georgina Dickinson for News of the World

Kelly Jad’on: Why the title, Gaining?

Aimee Liu: That is the word which strikes fear and loathing in the hearts of those with eating disorders. It is associated with gaining fat. It has richer meanings, though. Gaining pleasure, gaining independence, gaining confidence. All of these appetites are connected. To gain freedom from eating disorders, you have to gain in power and maturity. This is central to recovery from eating disorders.

In our culture, women are told implicitly to be afraid of gaining weight both in pounds and purpose; a lot of women portrayed as celebrities or in fashion magazines are encouraged to remain in a state of immature adolescence. The unspoken message has long been that an “ideal” woman is a perennial child whose sole value and responsibility is to look cute. But today, with the creation of Size Zero clothing, the message is even worse. Now the “perfect” woman is a zero - in other words, nonexistent.

Aimee, where did the anorexia begin? How old were you when you began losing or wasting?

Wasting has multiple meanings related to one’s life and body. I originally began dieting in 7th grade. I developed what is now considered true symptoms of an eating disorder in the 8th grade. That was back in the 1960s, when few were diagnosed. I was obsessive, and at 5’6”, remained below 100 lbs until college, around age 19-20.

I was never as severe as some anorexics, near death; I maintained a weight that was too low. Like a vast majority who hover on the brink of anorexia, the real damage is psychological.

We tend to focus on the physical when people talk about eating disorders. This is problematic because it’s really a psychological problem. The misunderstanding occurs when a person appears to come back to normal weight; the anorexia is a distress signal or an expression of an under-lying emotional problem. If not addressed, the symptoms or eating disorder, will recur later in life.

As a teenager, what effect did your dieting have on your peers?

I was in the early vanguard, influenced by Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn - all who clearly had eating disorders before eating disorders were diagnosed. They were ideal, perfect, driven women.

As I lost weight in junior high, being thin became my identity. I was the girl who could lose weight, and was known to only eat yogurt for lunch; it felt great. I had no other identity to help me stand out in the crowd. I had been the chubby elementary school pupil, and not good at sports. As weight became a bigger issue in our culture, I realized that others were imitating me. In particular were some peers who were severely thin and withdrawn.

What I discovered later was that most of those who were severely sick had experienced major trauma. The eating disorder was how they coped with the trauma. Their bodies were trying to express that they were in tremendous pain.

In my case, what I hadn’t realized, was my attitude about becoming female. I’d been molested as a seven year old, and had blocked it out. I had no conscious memory of it as an anorexic, but in retrospect I could see how my molestation had caused me to be disgusted with sex and that aversion extended to emotional intimacy.

My molestation was relatively mild. I’d been molested by a couple of older boys; these boys told me to keep it a secret, and not tell my parents. That was perhaps as damaging as the physical aspect. My parents had been in the house when it happened. Breaking trust with my parents, mistrust began to weave itself through my life. As a child, I began to do bizarre things. Falling into the typical pattern of children who’ve been traumatized - I broke into the house next door. Children will behave shamefully after being treated shamefully. They do this in order to make sense of their shame.

Parents blame and punish the children when they know they’ve done wrong. This is comforting in a perverse way.

How old are you today?

53

How do you keep anorexia at bay?

For one, write this new book. It goes a lot deeper though. The best way is by developing a flexible diverse identity; I use other interests as sources of satisfaction. A person with an eating disorder’s only source of satisfaction is what the scale tells her.

Closely linked to obsessive-compulsive disorders, eating disorders have strong family histories. It is thought that 60% or more of the risk is genetic. Our DNA shapes certain temperament traits that make some of us vulnerable to anorexia or bulimia. These traits are core to our personality, and we cannot simply turn them on or off, but we can learn to redirect or channel them toward interests and behaviors that are healthier and more fulfilling. In other words, we need not change who we are, but become aware of who we are at the deepest levels. By directing ourselves in ways to satisfy ourselves, we’ll feel well, rather than satisfying others and feeling bad.

Scientific research on genetics is very new, within the last 5-7 years. No prior books incorporated information about the role of genetics and eating disorders. The assumption was that culture makes us sick and anyone can get an eating disorder. This is not true now.

Your marriage unraveled. Was your anorexia part of the problem?

Yes, but in an unpredictable way. My first response at separation was to restrict my eating. This had nothing to do with food or my weight. But had everything to do with a pattern of withdrawal. People with a history of anorexia, are adverse to conflict and personal criticism. They withhold themselves in marriage from their husbands, sex, and pleasure, just like they do with food.

After a while it takes a toll on marriage. Some women marry men who don’t want an intimate marriage; some are ok with this. It wasn’t working with my marriage. It played a big part. We worked with a tremendous therapist who helped us sort this out. Now we’re back together and the marriage is light years better; it’s totally different. I reveal myself by being honest and sharing with my husband. Fear and anxiety had kept me separate from him. This involved so much more than food, but food is the basic deep metaphor for life itself.

Is perfectionism “the single most consistent trait among both anorexics and bulimics,” the eating disorder utopia?

Yes. It’s the trait most common, because both strive toward perfection.

What are the signs in children for a potential eating disorder?

With anorexia there is a higher genetic component. We are still discovering the genetic markers. Traits in children are: an extreme sensitivity to criticism, perfectionism - as in needing to have everything lined up, a strong expression of disgust for colors, food, substances that others consider to be ok, or a kid who can do anything forever.
Another sign is when there is a disturbance in the family: A child withdraws, and goes to a corner, and does some work. I did this.

Aimee, is your struggle with who you are and who you’d like to be a dangerous journey?

It’s dangerous because some people are single-minded and focus on an artificial rule. You have a choice of roads in life. If you choose a road to nowhere over and over again, eventually it turns into a superhighway, eliminating all alternatives until you have no choice but to take that road. That’s the danger. People with eating disorders that start early and last a long time need to get help early on, before the cow path turns into a superhighway.

Why can’t some people face the conflicts of daily life?

For vulnerable people, the way they deal with anxiety and depression is huge. Those predisposed to anorexia, even when well, have high levels of serotonin, even when resting; those with serious bulimia show low resting rates of serotonin and are more impulsive. This occurs naturally in the brain. Self-awareness is critical; anorexics need to develop healthy ways of coping to calm down, and bulimics need to find ways to pick themselves up.

No one has been teaching children how to find coping strategies. Kids kind of happen on behaviors which make them feel better. Purging falls into that pattern.

Aimee, what is the correlation between anorexia and plastic surgery?

It is an artificial idea of perfection. There’s an emptiness inside, or no core sense of self. Ideally we develop as a child, with a strong sense of who we are, a parents’ reflection of nurturing. Then when we enter the world, we know these are just images in magazines. Something goes wrong with women who fall prey to eating disorders and plastic surgery.

They are empty inside, and desperately ashamed of who they are naturally. They try to show the world they’re different than who they feel themselves to be inside. This happens more in status or image-conscious families. They are surrounded by people who judge them by how they look and what they have, rather than what they think. They become confused with who they are.

Your recovery you say is an “ongoing process of restoration and discovery.” Are you gaining more than just weight?

I think at the risk of sounding sort of new agey, I’ve discovered principles of scientific mindful awareness. It’s been relegated to spiritual-psychobabble, but researchers are now proving how and why mindful awareness holds the key to many mental problems, such as OCD and eating disorders, and also helps to raise auto-immune levels. With mindful awareness deep attention is given to everyday life - the moment I’m living in, what’s going on inside my head, and who I am physically in this life. It is central to more and more recovery treatments. Pay attention as more science comes out about this; it is a rapidly expanding field.

Aimee, what do you consider yourself - a recovered anorexic, a recovering anorexic, or another category?

I consider myself to be a healthy human being - people can’t recover from being who they are. You can’t recover from having an innate temperament, but you can redirect it. This is a tricky thing, particularly with eating disorders.

Vía BC Books