CARDIO VS. STRENGTH TRAINING

Treatment for her eating disorder helped Emma Strom as she prepared to enter college, where— inspired by RWJUH Somerset providers— she now plans to study nursing.

CONFRONTING AN EATING DISORDER

AN INNOVATIVE PROGRAM GUIDES A TEEN TOWARD HEALTHIER BEHAVIORS.

For Emma Strom, 18, of Doylestown, PA, the trouble started in 2018 when she was in middle school. “I had a crush on a guy and thought if I wanted to impress him, I should lose weight,” she says. “Then I could look like all the girls who are super pretty.”

Emma, an “A” student, began restricting her food and shedding weight. But the boy didn’t return her interest. It broke her heart—and drove her to become even thinner. “I would only eat a little, and eventually was also bingeing and purging, and that made everything worse,” she says.

Emma’s disordered eating patterns, with symptoms of both anorexia and bulimia (see sidebar), persisted when she entered high school and felt even more pressure to be thin. Food restriction and excessive exercising kept her weight low. But they didn’t make her happy.

“I wish I could say that it felt really good and that I felt confident,” she says. “In reality, I was miserable. It was the middle of winter and I was freezing all the time because I was so thin. I would go home, do my homework, exercise for two hours and eat a small dinner because I didn’t want my parents to know I was starving myself during the day.”

When Emma had turned 16, she managed to eat just a small piece of birthday cake. “I enjoyed it,” she says, “but then I felt horrible. I spent the evening crying because I just felt so bad.”

PANDEMIC PERILS

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, being confined at home only made her eating behaviors worse. That isn’t unusual, according to Lisa SchadeButton, RN, MSN, MBA, director of the Eating Disorders Program at Robert