I've been thinking about food lately. Actually, I think about food all the time, since I'm the person in our house who shops for it and prepares it and we're all big eaters.

But what I've been thinking about more is how normal it is for women not to eat, how a woman can be engaging in very bizarre behavior when it comes to food and no one really bats an eye. For example:

1. I work with a woman who is thin to the point where her shoulder bones jut out. I seriously could put my fingers around her ankle - and I don't have big hands. She keeps a big jar of candy in her office and routinely brings in homemade cupcakes for the staff. But she never eats the treats herself, at least not in view of anyone else in the office.

2. Another woman I work with, whom I see only occasionally, gets thinner and thinner and thinner each time, like she is slowly disappearing. This is a bright, dynamic person who is very smart and engaging. But I took her out to lunch at a very nice restaurant and had to sit there while she pretended to eat. I seriously don't think she took more than one bite of her food.

This Salon article made me cringe in the way you would if you read a description of a heroin addict injecting smack in her toes. Eek.  

Teen girls with Type 1 diabetes can suffer from bulimia -- in this case known as diabulimia -- like anyone else. Risking blindness, amputations, comas and even death, they eat a lot of fat and sugar and skip insulin shots to lose weight. Eek.

Thousands of the approximately 1 million people with Type 1 (or juvenile-onset) diabetes are willing to take the risk…

These are girls growing up in the same diet-obsessed America as everyone else. They might begin childhood average size, or even a little fleshy. Then, inexplicably, they begin to lose weight no matter how much they eat. The other symptoms of illness -- excessive thirst and fatigue -- are far less compelling than the ability to eat an entire bag of chips without getting fat. But eventually, someone else catches on, a parent or a doctor, and they're diagnosed with diabetes: taught to read food labels as carefully as a scientist; warned to restrict their caloric intake religiously; and put on a medication called insulin that perversely, literally overnight, causes them to plump up like a water-soaked sponge.

Further, they must go through life focused, constantly, on food -- but only its chemical elements, never its comfort or taste. And the cure is hardly attractive: They will gain weight, even eating as ascetically as monks. The untreated disease, however, with its wasting syndrome? Now that has its appeal.

Katie, a young woman from suburban Minnesota, was a competitive gymnast on a team that was Olympics-bound several years ago. At 4-foot-10, she weighed about 60 pounds; she collapsed often, but at the end of every practice, her coach would stand her in front of the other girls. This, he told them, was how a gymnast ought to look.

Katie was banished from the team when she gained weight on insulin shots. She was called “fat” and pushed to diabulimia to the point she was skipping heart beats on her newfound “diet.” Fortunately, she is now married, a stay-at-home mother and cured of diabulimia. She is working with a dietician who is taking her diabetes into account.

But I cringed at the risks these women are willing to take to lose weight. Then again, when you are a teenager you can’t imagine life beyond high school. The temptation to follow such a dangerous diet to lose weight -- not to mention, eat the same foods as your friends -- is too tempting.

God, I hope my daughter never contracts either disease. I love to eat, and fortunately, am the type of person who doesn’t gain weight when she eats. But my poor mother, who I just saw, has Type 2 diabetes and is overweight, yet still eats what she wants. I am afraid I have nagged her too much and now don’t say anything to her. But if I saw my daughter have such a dysfunctional relationship with food, I don’t know what I would do.

Do any of you have children with diabetes? How do you help them deal with temptation when they are alone with friends?