That message is particularly important in college, Reel added, when students are under pressure from coaches, roommates and dates to be thin. Many students, she added, don't even recognize they are heading toward an eating disorder or may already have one because it doesn't fit the classic signs of purging or binge eating.

In addition, college students often only get positive feedback from peers who comment on how much weight they have lost. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, 91 percent of women on college campuses have attempted to control their weight through dieting and 22 percent diet "often" or "always."

That atmosphere creates a "fear of fat," which recovered anorexic student Cari Morphet said drives many students to curb eating and develop eating disorders.

Morphet, a SPEAK member and graduate student at the U., battled her bulimia for years before finally accepting that she needed help. At the worst time of her illness, Morphet was purging five times a day.

"I was thinking it was really bad, but I didn't have anyone to turn to. I felt I needed to hold on to it," she said.

Morphet also attributes much of her bout with bulimia to low self-esteem, a problem she said runs rampant on college campuses. Often away from home for the first time, college women are desperate to fit in and to have some control over their lives, she said.

"The behavior was just the surface. There's all the stuff you have to deal with underneath — the self-esteem, the anger," she said. Morphet will be talking about her experiences as part of the SPEAK panel, hoping to draw attention to the underlying causes of eating disorders. Many college students, she said, are at some point on the continuum of eating disorders and may not realize realized it yet because they are not vomiting or skipping full meals.

Cindy Harling, a social worker at the U. Counseling Center, said it's difficult to find any woman on a college campus who doesn't have some body-image concerns. By focusing on shedding society's views on beauty, Harling said, the "Love Your Body" activities are aimed at getting women to realize they may be headed toward more dangerous habits. "When you are involved in eating disorders it can be kind of a shameful thing," she said. "That's a barrier for coming in for treatment. But the sooner you get treatment, the more hope there is for recovery."

And while parents aren't around on campus to raise concerns about rapid weight loss, Reel said college students can help each other by looking for key signs of an eating disorder. Those include fatigue, irritability, excessive exercise, canceling social dates to work out, being secretive about eating and having food disappear from the cabinet.

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E-mail: estewart@desnews.com