Overcoming Anorexia
Peggy Claude-Pierre's controversial eating-disorder cure
She is a pale young woman dressed for a much colder day in long jeans and a heavy blue sweater. She stands motionless as a group of young adults attempts--somewhat comically--to learn to country-dance on the lawn in front of her. Although her clothes are bulky, they appear almost empty. At 26, Anja is nearly 6 feet tall but weighs only 81 pounds, a ghost of a woman, made even more ghostly by the glare of the bright sun on her sunken cheeks and bone-thin limbs. She can't imagine, she says, what it would feel like to have the strength to dance. Her heart is weak and her body fragile after years of self-starvation. She expected, she says, to be dead long ago.
So did many of the others dancing on the lawn of the Montreux Counseling Centers in Victoria, British Columbia. Like Anja, they were wasted to near nothingness by years of anorexia and bulimia, and left without hope after repeated hospitalizations and endless hours of therapy produced only relapses. Often given up for dead by doctors, they, too, sought help from this small clinic and its charismatic founder and director, Peggy Claude-Pierre, whose unconventional methods for treating the most severe eating disorders have earned her a reputation as everything from saint to witch doctor.
Claude-Pierre, though she has received some publicity, is still relatively unknown outside the eating-disorder treatment community. That could change dramatically this month with the publication of her book, The Secret Language of Eating Disorders (Times Books, $25), one of a handful of high-profile new offerings on women and their bodies, including The Body Project by Joan Jacobs Brumberg (Random House, $25) and the re-release of Hunger Pains by Mary Pipher (Ballantine, $10). Times Books reportedly paid Claude-Pierre a celebrity-style advance of $1 million for her manuscript.
Deathtrap. Seven million girls and women in the United States currently suffer from serious eating disorders, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. Of those, 30 percent will have continuing difficulties, and 5 to 6 percent eventually will die of the illness, most from either suicide or heart failure. Although researchers cannot be sure if deaths from anorexia and bulimia are increasing, they believe the incidence of eating disorders is rising, particularly among men, who now account for roughly 1 million victims, and among preadolescent girls and boys.
Anorexia is an ancient disease yet its cause remains unknown. Over the years, explanations have ranged from a bad mother-child relationship to a culture that prizes thinness above all else. Most experts now believe eating disorders stem from a complex mix of biological, psychological, and environmental factors. But there is no way to predict who will develop one and no simple or universally effective treatment for those who fall ill.
Claude-Pierre's clinic is sought out by parents who are desperate, their children actively flirting with death. Doctors, however, view her skeptically, questioning her methods and her success rate. She has no formal training in treating eating disorders yet says both that she knows what causes anorexia and bulimia and that she can cure anyone who gives her the chance. In the most simple terms, Claude-Pierre believes that eating disorders stem from an extreme "negative mind-set," which may be present even at birth. Anorexics and bulimics, she says, want to make everything right. When they realize they cannot, they turn their sense of worthlessness inward in an unconscious attempt at suicide. "Anorexia isn't about thinness," says Claude-Pierre. "It's about death. Victims starve themselves in order to disappear." But anorexia and bulimia can be completely reversed, she believes, with unconditional love, freedom from feelings of responsibility for the illness, and "objectivity training," a technique that teaches patients to separate their illness (the negative mind) from their true selves.
advertisement
