Young Girls Start Eating Disorders Early

N E W   Y O R K, Dec. 19 -- Sydney Forbis seems like an ordinary teenager: She wears skin-tight clothing, worries about her figure and painstakingly picks out each new outfit when she goes shopping with her mother.

The extraordinary thing about Sydney is that she is only 6 years old.

"I think sweatpants make my legs look fat," she said on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. Even though she is thin, the little girl said she runs to keep her weight down. "I don't want the fat to spread all over my body."

Eating disorder experts say prepubescent girls are developing eating disorders as young as 5 and 6 years old. They may be getting their obsession from parents who are preoccupied with their own body images, and media images of skinny pop stars like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears, the experts say.

Spotting Eating Disorder Symptoms

Dr. Ira Sacker, an anorexia specialist who founded the organization Helping to End Eating Disorders, or HEED, told Good Morning America he has been treating a lot of very young girls for eating disorders.

One of Sacker's young patients, Justine Gallagher, started eating paper when she was 5, because she worried that she was as chubby as she had been in her baby pictures. Gallagher ate as many as 10 pieces of paper a day, believing that filling up on paper — rather than food — would help her lose weight.

"I thought if I ate my regular meals that I would get heavy and people would make fun of me," Justine said.

Her teachers noticed that pages from her books were missing, and at home her mother found that she was also eating the cotton from Q-tips. Her mother, Yvonne Gallagher, then took Justine to three separate pediatricians, but they all told her it was just a phase that Justine would grow out of.

One night Gallagher walked into her daughter's bedroom and found her running laps with a timer. "She said, 'I ate too much today. I have to exercise.' That was really the breaking point," Gallagher said.

She took Justine to Sacker, who recognized that the 5-year-old had an eating disorder.