Her mom wanted her to eat just one bowl of ice cream, but Julia Benjamin, 16 years old at the time, said she didn’t feel like having any.

In fact, it had been months since Benjamin, now a Weinberg junior, had been able to eat ice cream without spitting it into the sink to get rid of the calories.

“I couldn’t even eat a fraction of a spoonful of ice cream,” Benjamin said. “Which is just really messed-up.”

For more than two years in high school, thoughts about food controlled Benjamin’s life. Diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at the end of her junior year, Benjamin said the ironic thing about her disease is that there was no reason why it should have happened. She grew up in Madison, Wis., with a supportive family and longtime friends who never made her feel self-conscious about her body.

“Nobody ever told me I looked ugly or anything,” Benjamin said. “But I don’t really remember how I felt about myself before (anorexia).”

Benjamin led what she calls an “ideal” high school life, maintaining a 4.0 grade point average while participating in everything from theater to sports to student government. But at some point during her sophomore year, Benjamin said she became depressed and confused.

“I still don’t really know why,” Benjamin said. “There didn’t seem to be any particular reason. It was just kind of the whirlpool effect — things kept going faster and faster.”

Benjamin’s mother, Pam, said anorexia affected Benjamin gradually and wasn’t noticeable at first. She assumed her daughter’s unusual eating habits were caused by stress.

“It wasn’t like she was all of a sudden pencil-thin,” Benjamin’s mother said. “At first we kind of laughed and went, “Are you kidding? She’s just overexerting herself and involved in too many activities.”

Benjamin’s mom was silent for a moment, then continued, “I was just naive about the disease, you know?”

A mental game

Though Benjamin’s mom knows there is no definite answer to why Benjamin got sick, she said anorexia is typical for people with Type A personalities like her daughter.

“(Julia’s) somewhat of a perfectionist. She has very high standards,” her mother said. “There’s something in the back of her mind that tells her she has to be the best at whatever she’s doing.”

Benjamin had joined the cross-country team after her freshman year and by the end of her sophomore year, she was pushing to make varsity. She began running after practice and also on days the team didn’t train to get an edge on the other runners.

“I ended up trying to control a lot of things in my life, which ended up not being a good thing,” Benjamin said.

She started cutting out all “bad” foods from her diet, including caffeine, sweets, carbohydrates and all kinds of fat. She said eventually there was virtually no food that was OK to eat.

“It wasn’t about losing weight. I wasn’t even trying to lose weight,” Benjamin said. “I was just trying to be healthy and stay at the same place.”

For Benjamin that was about 120 pounds.

Even when her running performance stopped improving, Benjamin continued to do extra workouts and cut calories. By Christmas of her junior year, other people started to notice something was wrong.

“It kept getting worse and worse,” Benjamin said. “But people wouldn’t comment to me. (That Christmas) my relatives told my mom that I looked ‘out of it’ and ‘dead.'”

In February her mom took Benjamin to see a doctor, because Benjamin had stopped getting her period. The doctor said Benjamin might be anorexic and instructed her to gain a pound in the next week.

Benjamin instead lost more weight and told the doctor it was an accident.

“I thought it was stupid,” Benjamin said. “I thought, ‘I know myself better than they do. I don’t need their help.'”

Once a week Benjamin drove herself to the doctor for mandatory weigh-ins. But even that became a “mental game,” she said. Attempting to make herself heavier, Benjamin drank “massive quantities” of water during the day and wore the thickest socks and “heaviest” bras she owned.

But Benjamin said the doctor caught on to her tricks. He diagnosed her with anorexia and told her she needed to be hospitalized.

“That’s when we realized that Julia couldn’t make herself gain weight,” Benjamin’s mother said. “She wasn’t controlling the disease — it was controlling her.”

Benjamin estimated she weighed 78 pounds at her worst.

Not about the food

It wasn’t until a few days later that Benjamin got scared. While watching TV with her family, she stood up to get a glass of water. The next thing she remembered is waking up on the floor and looking into her sister’s pale and tear-streaked face.

“Now I thought, ‘It’s not just the doctors being melodramatic. I really could die from this,'” Benjamin said.

Yet even in the hospital, Benjamin found ways to avoid the “fatty and gross” food she was supposed to eat. She would blot butter off her toast with a napkin and use her allotted 25 minutes of private shower time to do sit-ups and push-ups. She did anything she could to burn an extra calorie — until the day of her release.

A major misconception about anorexia is that it’s a matter of eating more, Benjamin said. It’s not about food, calories or weight, she said. It’s about filling the internal void.

“People look at you and think, ‘Why can’t you just eat and get better? You’re not a stupid person — just eat,'” Benjamin said.

Still, despite her resistance to treatment, Benjamin said the hospital stay was a turning point. She decided she wanted to get better.

“I guess I had a really speedy case of anorexia,” Benjamin said, “because it was a lot better by the end of senior year.”

Although Benjamin still has occasional food issues and suffers from depression, she said eating no longer controls her now “marvelous” life. But she said she is hypersensitive to people with eating disorders.

“It’s so hard because, the thing is, I remember when I was there,” Benjamin said. “Nothing anybody said would have made any difference.”

And though Benjamin said she sometimes worries about relapsing, she has other things to worry about now — such as how to pay for the expensive food she’s eating while studying abroad in London this fall.

“I know the warning signs, I can catch the triggers,” Benjamin said. “I’m thinking I should be OK.”