Exclusive | They got straight As, trained for marathons and built successful careers while anorexia was quietly destroying their bodies
On paper, Meg Sexton was thriving. The recent college graduate was working in event planning and fund-raising by day, and taking classes for her Ph.D.in higher education and leadership by night.
She trained for marathons — regularly running over 80 miles a week — and nurtured a relationship with her now-husband, too.But on the inside, she was starving.Diagnosed with anorexia nervosa around age 23 in 2008, Sexton ate so little and exercised so much, a woman’s hand could fit around her bicep.
She lost bone density, her period and her hair in “gobs.” She even, she later learned, had developed an arrhythmia. And yet, it took two years after her diagnosis — and a blackout during a marathon — for Sexton to commit to professional inpatient care.“My mind told me, ‘I’m not that sick — look what I’m doing!” she told The Post. For Sexton, and many others with what some might call “high-functioning anorexia,” fuel came not from food, but from the adrenaline of depriving herself of it. “It was almost manic,” said the now-mom-of-five in Ohio, where she’s teaching, consulting and finishing her doctorate degree.
“I could go for two weeks and be completely restricting and I would almost feel this high.”Experts say Sexton’s experience is common among people with anorexia nervosa, which generally involves eating so little that you’re significantly below an appropriate weight for your age, sex and physical health.People with the condition also have an extreme fear of weight gain or fatness, and usually find their self-worth is almost entirely tied up in their body’s shape or weight. But unlike many other life-threatening conditions, people with anorexia can often appear to excel in work and life.Indeed, high performance is often both a feature and a bug of the disorder itself — feeding both the restrictive behavior and the perception that nothing is wrong. “I think ‘high-functioning’ really is a myth: It’s more high-m...