I hadn't seen my friend in a long time, and when we met up for brunch I thought she looked great. The years had seemed to have had no effect on her; she was the same chic, athletic woman she'd been back when we'd lived a few blocks apart. But when I ordered my meal, she said she wasn't hungry and ordered a black tea. And then she told me she'd recently been diagnosed with anorexia.

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For many of us, the default image of someone with an eating disorder is a waif thin adolescent white girl, or maybe a gaunt matron, the kind of woman Tom Wolfe once dubbed a "social X-ray." Yet I assumed I knew better. My own mother struggled with eating disorders her whole life, and I've watched friends of all shapes, sizes and genders go in and out of their own sometimes catastrophic relationships with food. Why then had I been so blindsided that Sunday at brunch? Why hadn't I recognized how invisible eating disorders can be, especially in people we don't expect to have them?

While eating disorders, which can encompass — anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and other conditions and behaviors — typically manifest in adolescence and mostly in females (roughly 90%), they can strike anyone at any time, across a swath of populations. The Center for Women's Health at Oregon Health & Science University reports that "Eating disorders are now on the rise worldwide. Between 2000 and 2018, prevalence more than doubled (3.4% to 7.8% of all people)." And when they show up in older people, the causes can be different, the symptoms can be harder to detect and the stigma around grappling with disorders often flippantly associated with privileged young girls can make them more challenging to treat.

"Adults might not display the 'classic' symptoms we associate with these disorders, such as extreme weight loss," explains Dr. Judith Zackson, the founder and clinical director of Greenwich Psychology. The National Eating Disorders Foundation notes that........

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