One woman’s challenge: Jewish eating disorders

Temimah Zucker, 24, is a modest young woman with an equally modest frame. But her smile, vitality, and drive fill a room. Her message and mission — that eating disorders are an expanding challenge in the Jewish community and need to be tackled head on — is not always a popular one, but it is a calling for which she has an intense passion. It is also a fight she knows could save lives.

Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, according to the Journal of American Psychiatry. A report by the Renfrew Center Foundation for Eating Disorders states that as many as 20 percent of people suffering from anorexia will prematurely die from complications related to their eating disorder.

Zucker was almost part of that statistic. She developed anorexia at 18 when she left her Teaneck, N.J., home to attend college in the New York City borough of Queens. Before starting college, she had experienced several social-emotional traumas, such as her grandmother’s passing, betrayal by one of her best high school friends, and a difficult breakup with a boyfriend. The youngest of three children, she had never been away from home and wasn’t sure she was ready to grow up or that she could handle the responsibility. 

 In a matter of months, Zucker had started restricting her food in what she described as an effort to “take control.” It wasn’t a conscious decision, she says, meaning she didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become anorexic. Rather, she calls it a “natural progression of not feeling hungry, and then this full-blown development of a clinical eating disorder.”

Within months, he weight dropped (she doesn’t give out numbers), and she became irritable and withdrawn. Finally, her parents confronted her and “forced” her to see the doctor.

“The doctor told me that based on my blood work, that I was hours if not a day away from slipping into a coma that I probably would not have woken up from,” Zucker tells JNS.org. “I was a walking shadow.”