I fit into David's percentile. I suffered from what was a form of anorexia and bulimia for over 14 years that started when I was nine years old. There's a few things I'm really excited to share with you today. The first thing is that the notion that bulimia and other eating disorders last forever is a myth. It's not true, it doesn't last forever. And then I am going to ask you a big favor by the time I'm done and that's just to help educate others. We have these wonderful statistics that explain so much about what eating disorders are, but I'm going to ask you to walk with me for just one minute through my experience. I was nine years old when this started. And it didn't come so much from someone poking me like happened to Naomi. I didn't wake up one morning and say, you know what, today I'm going to starve, today I'm going to feel guilty about the fact that I have a little bigger hips than the person down the street. What happened is it slowly and gradually grew. If you can imagine with me for one minute, and I know we all have them, dark things, something that depresses you, and it goes right where your heart is. It hurts you so deep, it's almost like a monster. That's what this is. It takes you and it possesses you. And then that beautiful control that you had so long, it's gone. You know what the really sick part is? You think you still have control over it all. When I was diagnosed at age 14 with severe bulimiarexia, I was this height (5'8'), I weighed 89 lbs. My doctor looked at me and said, 'Cheryl, let me explain something to you. Honey, if you don't eat, you will die.' Five minutes later, I had a nurse take my mother into another room and blame her for my condition. Now I love my mother to death. The thing is, this woman took my mother aside and said, 'Don't you know what your daughter is doing to herself? You could stop this.' This is what this woman needs to learn... This is what my favor is to you... This was not my mother's fault. It's not my mother's fault, it's me. I'm the one that put on two pair of jeans to go to school every day so no one could notice how thin I was. I'm the one who put on two sweatshirts... I didn't know I had an eating disorder, but like the woman in the video said, 'I know it was wrong.' I knew that I was thin, I was cold all the time. I lost my menstrual cycle for two years. That's not right. So I ask all of you to seriously consider all these statistics in front of you on what happens to women. Please take everything that they've said. Educate parents, educate teachers, educate other professionals because there are lots of us out there, - some recovered, others not. And a lot of us die. And you die depressed, scared, and lonely because you think you're the only one that exists.

I got my Master's Degree after the eating disorder. I'm a happy, strong, healthy, very proud woman to speak out against eating disorders to tell children, men, and women of every age that I can get my hands on about eating disorders after it was over saying, 'You know what? I went through it, I survived it.'

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