A row of solitary confinement cells.
oni Saiber was going through a divorce when
her soon-to-be ex-husband made a passing
comment about her weight. The jab stung and reverberated in her head: She was 30, about to be back out on the dating market, and felt particularly vulnerable. She wasn’t overweight, she knew that, but there was certainly room for improvement. Saiber, a successful interior designer in Denver, liked things to be perfect.
Once she stopped eating much of anything after 4 p.m. – a tip from the diet program she enrolled in – the first 10 pounds fell off. She was good at achieving tasks she set out for herself, and restricting her food intake was no exception.
But at some point, during the calorie counting, meticulous planning and obsessing about the food she was and wasn’t going to allow herself to eat that day, something clicked. Soon, it wasn’t enough to weigh herself once a day. She was compelled to check in the morning and in the afternoon and before bed.
"If I didn't gain anything or better yet, lost even an eighth of a pound, I would be in a great mood,” Saiber said in a recent interview with The Huffington Post. “If I gained, I would be very irritable.” She didn’t trust her bathroom scale to be accurate, so she went out and bought a medical-grade doctor’s scale. And so began her over two-decade-long struggle with anorexia.
Eating disorders are typically ascribed to the young: in particular, female teenagers. But experts say that portrayal is inaccurate. Adults develop eating disorders too, some much later in life. Because of the lingering stereotypes about who gets sick, they can face lower rates of diagnosis, unique medical complications
and limited treatment options, as well as the stigma that comes with having a disease associated with teens.
Cynthia Bulik, the director of an eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina, said that when their program launched in 2003, she expected to see mostly adolescents.
But within five years of opening, almost half their patients were over the age of 30. “This has been mirrored across the country,” she said. “We are seeing both women and men in midlife and beyond who are presenting for treatment.”
Curious about what she was seeing in the clinic, Bulik began to do some research. In 2012, she published a study, which found that 13 percent of women aged 50 and older exhibited symptoms of eating disorders.
From a medical perspective, that's a serious concern.
Bulik explained that older patients can have more severe medical complications, including issues of the heart, reproductive system and teeth, simply because their bodies are less robust.
"Pretty much every system is being affected," she said.
Triggers in the body
Margo Maine, a clinical psychologist who treats patients at her practice in West Hartford, Connecticut, said adults with eating disorders typically fall into three categories: those who have struggled with disordered eating since adolescence, but don’t develop a full-blown eating disorder until later in adulthood, those who may have successfully been treated for an eating disorder as a kid but relapse as an adult, and those, like Saiber, who develop eating issues for the first time as an older person.
“We’ve paid too much attention to the challenges of young people when it comes to body image, and managing self-esteem and a healthy relationship to food, and we’ve really ignored what happens as women get older,” Maine said. “Later adulthood is a ripe time for an eating disorder to develop.”
Times of big biological change, such as a pregnancy or menopause, put women at heightened risk, she explained. The natural signs of aging, like wrinkles, reduced muscle tone, gray hair and added weight around the midsection may be especially troubling to some people.
T
A man is helping out a baby as refugees from Afghanistan and Syria disembark from in a life boat on the shores of Lesbos near Skala Sikaminias, Greece on Nov. 10, 2015. Lesbos, the Greek vacation island in the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece, faces massive refugee flows from the Middle East countries.
Etienne De Malglaive via Getty Images
Developmental life events, which raise questions about one’s identity, such as divorce, as in Saiber’s situation, retirement or even becoming a grandparent, can also serve as triggers.
“When we are questioning our identity as women, a big part of that is our weight and body image,” she said. “Weight loss or controlling our bodies in some way might become a real focus during those transitions, without us even knowing we are turning toward it because of stress.”
No one asks, no one knows
Experts say one of the biggest issues in adult eating disorders is low rates of identification. Saiber, who is 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed less 95 pounds for two decades, experienced that very phenomenon.
She said that throughout her struggle with anorexia, not a single medical professional asked her about her low weight or whether or not she had an eating disorder.
There was certainly opportunity. She had annual check ups with her OBGYN, who never said a word. Then there was the surgeon who operated on her after she broke two bones in a gentle fall while skiing. The surgeon said her bones were unusually soft for her age, and recommended she get a bone density scan, but didn’t mention her weight.
Florida Governor Jeb Bush in 2006, his last year in office. Associated Press
"I don’t think it’s because they don’t care. I think they care very much," Saiber said, reflecting on why her doctors never talked to her about her weight. "I just think they’ve never been educated. They don't know how to broach it and they don't want to do more harm than good."
Bulik said Saiber’s experience is relatively common.
“The misconception that eating disorders only happen in adolescence has done a huge disservice to detection and treatment of people in midlife,” Bulik said. "I’ve had situations where older women and older men tell me they’ve gone to their primary care provider and said 'I think I have anorexia or bulimia', and their physician has said, 'You can’t have that, that’s a kid disease.'"
Maine points to another factor: The war on obesity.
"Everybody, even very knowledgeable health care professionals think that being thin is really important and weight loss is very important," she said. "Doctors will say, I just don't want you to gain weight. I just don’t want you to gain weight, when in fact, weight is a much more complex story for all of us."
She recounted a story of one patient who was suffering from bulimia and lost 20 pounds over a year. The woman finally worked up the courage to tell her OBGYN so she could get help. But before she got the chance, her doctor began the appointment by commenting on her weight loss and then asking her how her husband was enjoying her new body.
Leslie Sim, the clinical director of the Mayo Eating Disorders program, said that primary care physicians are in a unique position to identify eating disorders, but often don’t.
“Providers might be uncomfortable asking about eating disorders for fear that it might offend someone, or assume that people are reluctant to talk about their eating," she said. "It's not on a lot of people's radar, and unfortunately they tend to look for other medical reasons for unexplained weight loss."
Letting go of the secret
Saiber kept her eating disorder to herself for almost 20 years. She remarried in 1987, but she never told her husband about her anorexia.
“Of course, there was so much shame, I would never have shared it with him,” she said. “I kept it secret from everyone.”
They tried to have a baby when she was 37, which was difficult as her periods were irregular. After seeking out fertility experts, Saiber finally got pregnant but miscarried at nine weeks, which she accounts to her low weight.
It wasn’t until 15 years later, when she was 52, that she was no longer able to keep up the exhausting ruse.
John Spenkelink was the first inmate in the modern era to be executed involuntarily. Associated Press
Still, after Spenkelink's death, Gov. Bob Graham (D), then in his first year in office, saw his popularity rise. Early in his tenure, Graham pursued reforms to make the death penalty more efficient. He established a special counsel in the governor’s office to oversee capital punishment cases and started signing death warrants earlier in an inmate's appeals process to prevent convicts from using the legal system as a stalling tactic.
"If you were taking a poll in Florida, I’m certain it would have been a majority of the public for the continuation of the death penalty," Graham told HuffPost. He was right. One poll in the early '80s showed support for the death penalty near 90 percent.
During the same decade, Florida led the country in the number of people sentenced to death. As of May 1, 1985, “almost one out of every six persons condemned to die in the United States" lived in Florida, wrote Michael Radelet, who researched the state’s death penalty when he served on the faculty at the University of Florida.
Florida's broad sentencing laws helped swell its death row population. It was – and remains – the only state in which a simple majority of the jury is enough to recommend a death sentence, meaning that the judge may condemn a defendant to death after a 7-5 recommendation by the jury (Diaz was given a death sentence on an 8-4 vote). It’s also the only state that permits a death sentence without requiring jurors to unanimously agree to the presence of statutorily defined aggravating circumstances. The issue of jury unanimity under Florida law is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The state is one of very few that allow judges to sentence a defendant to death in cases where the jury recommended life in prison. From 1972 through 1999, there were 166 cases in which Florida judges sentenced defendants to death after a jury recommended life, according to Radelet's research.
"We are run by Alabama people. We are run by redneck motherfuckers. We are run by those assholes in Tallahassee."
—Defense attorney Hilliard Moldof
There has been a carnival-like element to executions in Florida. Since prison officials often didn't want to pull the switch, the legislature passed a law to pay $150 to anonymous executioners. Vomit bags were occasionally handed out to witnesses. When lawmakers passed a mandatory seat belt law in 1986, Floridians placed bumper stickers on their cars reading: "I'll buckle up when Bundy does." "Bundy" referred to Ted, the notorious serial killer who had been sitting on death row since 1979.
During the 1986 gubernatorial campaign, one candidate demanded that the state Supreme Court start "burning the midnight oil" to plow through the appeals backlog. Another promised to personally "pull the switch" if elected. Tampa Mayor Bob Martinez pledged that if he was elected governor, "Florida's electric bill will go up." He won.
In 1990, Martinez oversaw the execution of convicted cop killer Jesse Tafero, whose head caught on fire and whose body convulsed in a cloud of smoke and ash as he fried in the electric chair. He was shocked three times over the course of seven minutes. According to the medical examiner, Tafero did not die instantly; in fact, it took him six or seven minutes. Witnesses recalled 6-inch and 12-inch flames shooting from his head. Another witness described seeing the body after the execution: The entire top of Tafero’s head was "covered with wounds," and his eyebrows, eyelashes and facial hair had been burned off. Prison authorities would later blame the gory scene on a synthetic sponge they had used in place of the usual natural one. (Years later, evidence emerged suggesting that one of Tafero's accomplices was the actual shooter.)
Jesse Tafero was executed in 1990. AP
Near the end of Martinez's single term as governor, the Florida Supreme Court established a commission to look at racial bias in the criminal justice system. Its 1990-91 report found that people of color were racially profiled and “too often” were victims of police brutality. The commission also reported that people of color were underrepresented in all areas of the legal system, from the cops on the beat to the judges on the bench. African-Americans and Hispanics made up just 8.7 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively, of all law enforcement officers. Juries did not reflect the race and ethnicity of the communities they were drawn from.
For similar homicides, Florida defendants were 3.4 times more likely to receive the death penalty if their victim was white than if their victim was black, according to research by Radelet the commission funded.
These biases are baked into Florida’s DNA, said defense attorney Susan Cary. "There’s an incredible culture of violence here. Very politically conservative, very violent. We are the Deep South,” she said. “We are run by Alabama people,” said defense attorney Hilliard Moldof. “We are run by redneck motherfuckers. We are run by those assholes in Tallahassee.”
In the second half of the 20th century, the racism that had fueled decades of lynchings hid behind a badge and within the jury box. But it endured and, along with a political system that rewarded tough-on-crime lawmakers, ensured that the death penalty remained a central part of Florida's identity.
"Florida was the vanguard," said David Von Drehle, who wrote about the state's capital punishment system in Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Death Row. "Through the ‘80s, it was the leading state for capital punishment. It had the most inmates on death row and most executions. … That’s the milieu in which Jeb got started in political office."
Florida State Prison Associated Press
When Bush first ran for governor, in 1994, he mimicked Martinez's fry-'em playbook. He produced a list of 10 death row inmates whose executions he believed had been unnecessarily delayed and spent the closing days of the campaign attacking Democratic incumbent Lawton Chiles for being soft on capital punishment.
During the campaign, Bush proposed limiting death row inmates to just one appeal in state court. (Defendants could still pursue federal appeals.) "I believe the one trial, one appeal will speed the enforcement of the death penalty by two to four years in most death cases," he argued.
In one ad, Bush featured a murdered 10-year-old's mother who accused Chiles of not doing enough to speed the execution of her daughter's killer. The ad began with photos of the beaming girl and then cut to her mother. “Fourteen years ago,” she said, “my daughter rode off to school on her bicycle. She never came back. Her killer is still on death row, and we’re still waiting for justice. We won’t get it from Lawton Chiles, because he’s too liberal on crime.”
The ad backfired. Chiles noted that he had no power over an ongoing court case. "It was a gross distortion," recalled Mark Schlakman, Chiles’ special counsel. "They were just upside-down wrong on it."
Within days, Bush admitted as much. In the closing debate, he was excoriated as a crass opportunist. His poll numbers never recovered.
Chiles won re-election and the executions continued.
On March 25, 1997, another death row inmate, Pedro Medina, caught on fire in the electric chair, with blue and orange flames shooting out from behind his mask. According to court documents, “after the flame went out, more smoke emanated from under the head piece to the extent that the death chamber was filled with smoke.” The court went on to describe Medina’s body as “mutilated.” “Deposits of charred material” and third-degree burns were reported on the top of his head within a “burn ring.” There were also first-degree burns on his face and head “caused by scalding steam.”
Glenn Dickson, Medina’s minister, recalled watching from the chamber. He was so shocked that he couldn't perform the funeral. “He didn’t die instantly,” Dickson said. “It was the most gruesome thing I have ever seen in my life.”
The Florida legislature responded to the execution not by eliminating the electric chair but by passing a law affirming it as the state's sole method of execution. The vote was 36-0 in the Senate and 103-6 in the House.
Old Sparky being photographed a year after Pedro Medina's execution.
Associated Press
By the time Bush ran for governor again, in 1998, he was pitching himself as a different man. He had converted to Catholicism in 1995 at the urging of his wife, Columba, and said it had softened his approach to politics in general and the death penalty in particular.
But it was tough to tell how great a conversion he'd undergone. On the campaign trail, Bush claimed to be "conflicted a little by my faith" but not to the point that he would drop his support for capital punishment. He said that if the pope called to ask him to change his position, he'd be "in awe" but not convinced. "The church does allow for capital punishment in the most heinous of capital crimes," Bush explained.
Sally Bradshaw, Bush's campaign manager in 1994 and 1998, called it "an evolution in message delivery."
Still, when Bush won, his victory gave death penalty foes a sliver of hope that a rising-star Republican governor might become an ally in the cause.
“I believe that, as a thoughtful person and a good Catholic, he was terribly conflicted,” said Talbot D’Alemberte, then president of Florida State University and an opponent of capital punishment who emailed with Bush on the topic. “I had hopes that he would leave the dark side.”
D’Alemberte and others of his ilk were mistaken. In emails, Bush more often expressed impatience than empathy with those who questioned how his faith was compatible with capital punishment. In one email, he rationalized his position by arguing that executions happened “rarely” in the state. In another, he lamented a “double standard that exists in public life. Catholics, it seems get greater scrutiny, than folks of other faith.” In yet another, Bush complained of the church's lobbying on the subject. On June 10, 1999, aides wrote to tell him that a local monsignor wanted to talk. “Ugh! On the death penalty,” he responded.
Bush Email Archive
In a recent interview with The Huffington Post, Bush recalled breakfast meetings with Catholic bishops at which the issue would come up. “The last thing they always talked about – after feeding the poor, and dealing with homelessness, and giving parents school choice, and protecting the lives of unborn babies – was the death penalty,” he said. “It is a tenet of my faith and there was a conflict there."
In July of his first year in office, Bush oversaw his first execution.
Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis had been convicted of brutally killing a pregnant woman and her two daughters. He spent 17 years on death row, exhausting appeals and receiving stays from two earlier dates with the electric chair. During his entire time on death row, Davis' weight concerned officials. As his execution neared, it became an urgent matter. The electric chair had a 350-pound limit. Davis came in at 349. The prison put him on a diet and spent $706 for red oak lumber to build a new chair that was wider and less rickety. The electrical current remained the same.
On the day of his execution, July 8, 1999, an arthritic, 344-pound Davis had to be wheeled to the chair by his guards.
At approximately 7:01 a.m., leather belts were strapped around his arms, chest and legs and a 5-inch-wide leather strap was placed across his mouth, forcing his nose upward. A mask was then lowered over his face.
Witnesses said that at this point Davis began issuing muffled screams or moans. When the switch was flipped, blood started to drip from under the mask, over his chin and neck, forming an 8-by-12 inch puddle on his white button-down shirt. Then-state Sen. Ginny Brown-Waite (R) claimed to see the shape of a cross in the blood – a sign of God forgiving Davis for his sins. Brown-Waite, who was in the room, recalled the execution as "pretty gruesome,” but just.
Davis' muffled screams quieted. But he still appeared to be breathing. After the electrical current was switched off, his chest rose and fell 10 times.
“It took a few moments, seconds really, to realize what was going on, that this was not the normal, quiet, efficient execution that the state wanted portray,” said veteran Tampa reporter John Sugg, who also witnessed the execution in person. “He wasn’t dead. You could hear him. I heard him.”
By 7:15 a.m., Davis has been declared dead. His body was covered in burns – on his head, his groin, and behind his right knee. Photos taken shortly after showed his face had turned purple, likely the result of partial asphyxiation.
GRAPHIC PHOTO
(Tap to Reveal)
Bush was unapologetic. In the days after the execution, he insisted, as prison officials would too, that the bleeding started before the electricity, and he pleaded that sympathy be directed toward Davis’ victims. The controversy, he said, was “an argument over a nosebleed.”
Following the Davis execution, another death row inmate challenged the state's use of the electric chair. In September 1999, the Florida Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that the chair was legal. In a scathing dissent, Justice Leander Shaw wrote that Davis was “brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida” and described the state’s record of bungled executions as “acts more befitting a violent murderer than a civilized state.” To make his point, he included photos of Davis’ body in his dissent.
"Execution by electrocution – with its attendant smoke and flames and blood and screams – is a spectacle whose time has passed," Shaw wrote.
The sorry state of the death penalty in Florida was on the mind of Stephen Hanlon, then the partner in charge of Holland & Knight’s pro-bono department, when he spotted Bush in the law firm’s Tallahassee office shortly before Bush took office. He knew what he needed to do. He dug out his copy of Von Drehle’s book and handed it to Bush.
The book detailed what Hanlon knew all too well: Florida struggled to find and fund qualified lawyers to defend the condemned and qualified judges to oversee the trials. The judicial system, as Von Drehle wrote, was “a slapdash machine designed in confusion, built of spare parts and baling wire.”
Between 1973 and 1995, the Florida Supreme Court reversed 49 percent of the state’s death sentences after analyzing trial transcripts and finding errors, a 2000 Columbia University study found. That count didn't include inmates who were freed based on new evidence, faulty witness testimony, or coerced confessions. Florida led the country in death-row exonerations during this period.
Hanlon had worked death penalty cases and knew how overburdened appellate lawyers were. He needed Bush to know that the system was hitting a crisis point. “This is the brain surgery of our profession,” he said, “and we were throwing people at it who just had no idea what they were doing."
At some point early in his first year in office, Bush returned to Hanlon’s office with the Von Drehle book full of passages underlined in red ink. In their conversation, Bush acknowledged that there were problems with defense lawyers and questions about whether the death penalty even deterred crime, according to Hanlon.
“My general impression was this was a very smart guy,” Hanlon said. “He was very much into policy. He knew there were very serious problems.”
"I believe that, as a thoughtful person and a good Catholic, he was terribly conflicted...I had hopes that he would leave the dark side."
—Talbot D’Alemberte,
then president of Florida State University.
But Bush and his staff didn’t see a broken system. They saw instead an activist Florida Supreme Court that gummed up the appeals process and needlessly prevented executions from taking place. Writing for the conservative Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies newsletter in August 1999, Reginald Brown, Bush’s then-deputy general counsel, lamented the high percentage of death sentences the court reversed – at that point, 79 percent.
“Jeb believed in the death penalty and wanted to enforce it,” Brown told HuffPost. “He thought that the Florida Supreme Court was trying to do a pocket veto of the law.”
In October 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up a case from Florida asking whether the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Two months later, Bush called a special session of the state legislature and pushed a bill that designated lethal injection as the main method of carrying out executions while leaving the chair as an option. The bill quickly passed through the legislature. The threat of a U.S. Supreme Court decision gutting Florida's death penalty was averted.
During the same special session, Bush called for legislation to severely limit the ability of death row inmates to appeal their sentences. He and his allies promised that the bill, known as the Death Penalty Reform Act of 2000, would reduce the average time between sentence and execution from 14 years to five years or less. "What I hope is that we become like Texas: Bring in the witnesses, put them on a gurney, and let’s rock and roll," Bradford Thomas, Bush's top adviser on the death penalty, chest-thumped to the St. Petersburg Times. (Bush would later appoint Thomas as an appellate judge.)
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, left, addresses members of the House Republican caucus on death penalty legislation during a special session in 2000.
Associated Press
Raquel Rodriguez, Bush's former general counsel, told HuffPost that the governor "felt the system was being abused and that those delays were an abuse of the system and a disservice to the victims, who were forced to live for years and years knowing that the person who killed their loved one was still sitting in prison even though they had been sentenced to death."
But members of the state legislature's black caucus objected strenuously, even inviting Freddie Pitts, one of the state's most famous exonerees, to testify. Pitts and another man, Wilbert Lee, had been wrongly convicted of the murder of two gas station attendants in 1963 after police beat them into confessing to the crime. Pitts recalled to HuffPost that the sheriff at the time bragged, “This will be two n*****s that won’t be in that March to Washington.”
Pitts said he and Lee were pressured to plead guilty. An all-white jury sentenced them to death. The entire proceeding took less than a day. They remained behind bars even after a white man confessed to the murders. They would not be exonerated until 1975.
A quarter-century later, Pitts addressed the Florida House of Representatives. Republicans had allowed him only one minute to speak, he said. He explained that had Bush’s law been in effect when he was on death row, he would be dead. Then he walked off the floor.
“It was dead silence for a good minute, maybe longer,” Pitts remembered.
It wasn't enough. The bill passed by a single vote after the second-ranking House Democrat defected to back the measure.
Bush heralded the bill as “a historic piece of legislation” that would be "respectful of family members and victims" and “bring a semblance of justice to this very complicated issue.”
Others were shocked. “It just doesn’t make any sense for a guy who was that bright,” Hanlon said. “The one word I would use is inexplicable. That wasn’t the Jeb Bush I thought I knew.”
The Florida Supreme Court had another word for the legislation: unconstitutional. A few months after the governor signed the bill into law, the court ruled that it violated the state constitution’s separation-of-powers clause and the rights of defendants to due process and equal protection. The court voided most of the new statute, but warned that the capital punishment system's problems would endure unless the state provided proper funding "for competent counsel during trial, appellate, and postconviction proceedings."
Bush was unbowed. Bush was unbowed. In his short time in office, he had already seen a botched execution and legal setbacks with the state Supreme Court rebuke, yet he pressed forward. “The problem isn't the means of execution," he wrote in one email. "It is the delays created by a system of excessive appeals.”
As Bush attempted to hasten death row appeals, he sought to calm critics by setting up a task force to analyze whether race played a factor in the state’s capital cases. For those familiar with the death penalty in Florida, it was entirely redundant.
“You didn’t need a task force to know looking at the simple numbers that the race of the victim played a major role, especially in Florida,” said state Sen. Chris Smith (D). “The dirty little secret in politics is the task force was only set up to muddy the waters."
Ultimately, Bush’s task force recommended that the issue of race be studied further. Neither the governor nor the legislature established an initiative or set aside funding to examine the issue again. Instead, executions in Florida continued without pause.
On June 7, 2000, Bennie Demps, a racial justice advocate within the prison system, was put to death by lethal injection. Demps had been convicted of killing a fellow prisoner. He never stopped professing his innocence, claiming he had been set up by corrupt officials. Before his execution took place, Pope John Paul II sent a letter to Bush seeking clemency. The governor declined to grant it.
The execution went awry shortly after it began. Technicians struggled for more than a half-hour to find a vein. When the curtains in the chamber finally opened, Demps screamed out that what was about to transpire was nothing more than a "low-tech lynching."
In a narrative of events he wrote after the fact, George Schaefer, one of Demps' attorneys, recalled the anxiety building in the witness gallery during the delay and remembered hearing “some strange drum beats or perhaps even music while waiting.” That anxiety turned to shock once Demps appeared and delivered his last words. Schaefer wrote that his client “went on to ask that I request an investigation of what had just happened to him. He said that the officials had cut into his groin and into his leg and that he had bled profusely. He said that it was very important that his body be examined because it would show where there were sutures. He mentioned he had been ‘butchered.’”
Schaefer had nightmares for a month after the execution, he said. He eventually moved to San Diego, where he currently works as a lawyer for the city handling civil litigation. “It was very traumatic for me,” he said.
At the governor's office, there was a different reaction. Asked for his thoughts after the Demps execution, Bush replied that the procedure was done "according to the textbook."
"There was no botched nature to it at all."
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Opener: Getty Images/Shutterstock
"Later adulthood is a ripe time for an eating disorder to develop."
- Margo Maine, clinical psychologist
"The misconception that eating disorders only happen in adolescence has done a huge disservice to detection and treatment of people in midlife."
- Cynthia Bulik, eating disorder specialist
"I realized not only that I was very close to death, but I was
hurting the people I loved the most."
- Toni Saiber
Suffering from what she thought was a stubborn cold, Saiber was eventually admitted to the hospital, where she fell into a coma for eight days. She was in such a state of malnutrition that hospital staff commented that they had only witnessed her condition in third world countries.
Seeing her family and friends standing vigil by her hospital bed was her turning point, Saiber said.
"An eating disorder is such an introverted, inward illness. It was this wall between me and everyone," she said. "I realized not only was I very close to death, but I was hurting the people I loved the most."
After she stabilized, Saiber had to travel out of state to Iowa City for treatment, as Denver did not have an inpatient unit for eating disorder patients over the age of 21.
It’s been almost 13 years since her lowest point, and Saiber is grateful to be alive. She helps run The Eating Disorder Foundation, a nonprofit in Denver that provides support services for people suffering from eating disorders and their families. She tells her story to convince others it is possible -- and worth it -- to get better.
“An eating disorder takes up almost all your time and all your energy, from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep,” she said. “When your eating disorder behaviors are no longer there, it allows for all of this other stuff to come into your life.”
Need help? Call the National Eating Disorder Association hotline at 1-800-931-2237 or visit their website.
If you developed an eating disorder in adulthood and want to share your story, email reporter Melissa Jeltsen.