For most of her life, Susan B., now 51, has struggled with eating disorders of one kind or another. As a child, she was a compulsive overeater; as a “size 16” teenager, she was taken by her mother to a doctor who prescribed diet pills. She spent most of the next decade on a dietary roller coaster – “I’d go up and down 20 to 25 pounds,” she says – but didn’t think she was abnormal until, at 28, she was diagnosed with hypoglycemia and told to cut sugar out of her diet. She tried, but the “withdrawal” drove her into bulimia, the disorder whose victims compulsively purge their bodies of recently eaten food, usually by vomiting. Though she repeatedly underwent therapy and hospitalization, this condition plagued her for years. Read more [...]