A New Outlook

THOUSAND OAKS — Stacey Jensen used to be a star soccer player. She is still an outstanding student.

But compulsiveness and competitiveness, traits that helped shape her into a top performer on the field and in the classroom, eventually led to a condition that threatened her life.

Jensen, 17, a La Reina High senior, is fighting to overcome anorexia nervosa with the same inner fire that she once used to run down soccer opponents.

Only now her success is measured on a scale.

Soccer, Jensen’s passion since she was five, no longer is a priority.

“It’s been a while since soccer’s been a real important facet of my life,” said Jensen, who used to stay after practice for up to an hour, working on her skills. ‘I’ve pretty much accepted that I need to try and aim for new horizons.”

Jensen was able to play only two months for La Reina during the recently completed high school soccer season. She was not nearly the dominant force she was the previous year, when coaches voted her the Tri-Valley League’s top defensive player.

“She was a bulldog,” La Reina Coach Joe Laraneta said. “She did everything she could do to stop you from shooting or passing, and 90% of the time she was successful.”

Not anymore. With Jensen playing only for short stretches, La Reina relinquished its five-year hold on the league title. The team was eliminated in the second round of the Southern Section Division IV playoffs.

“I can really see the effort; she’s trying like hell,” Laraneta said late in the season. “But she’s only back to about half of what she was on the soccer field.”

Jensen seems an unlikely candidate to lose control. She is confident and driven and has an active social life and a supportive family.

But Cynthia Eddings, who works with Jensen as a counselor with Eating Disorders Center of California, said girls and women who tend to be perfectionists are at risk for eating disorders.

According to the Mental Health Assn. in Montgomery, Ala., nationally about one out of every 100 Caucasian women and girls ages 12-20 suffer from the eating disorders anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa.

Barbara Kopans, associate director of the National Eating Disorders Screening Program in Wellesley Hills, Mass., estimates that about 1,000 U.S. women die annually from anorexia.

Often the disease is linked to a traumatic event in a person’s life.

Jensen, who cannot pinpoint a specific factor, blames her own compulsive behavior.

“I’m constantly pushing myself, and with soccer I wanted to be in top physical condition,” Jensen said. “It started with cutting fat out of my diet, and then I cut down my calories further and further.

“It just got way out of control.”

Jensen, who is 5 feet 3, said she weighed between 125 and 130 pounds a year ago. By last September, she was down to 90 pounds and surviving mostly on fruit, low-calorie yogurt and vegetable soup.

“I don’t know how I didn’t just drop down on the ground,” Jensen said. “I don’t know how I got up in the morning on what I was living on.”

At first, soccer seemed the only activity where Jensen’s diet adversely affected her. Playing for a local club team, she was losing the strength and aggressiveness that made her a force on the back line.

Mike Evans, Jensen’s club coach, was concerned enough that he moved her from sweeper to midfielder or forward, positions where physical strength is not a major factor.

“She couldn’t [aggressively defend] anymore and her mind was somewhere else,” said Evans, who tried gently to persuade Jensen to seek help. “To watch a girl you care about getting sicker and sicker . . . I felt so bad for her.

“It was probably the scariest situation I’ve gone through in 14 years of coaching.”

Jensen knew her health was failing, but she couldn’t help herself.

“I saw what was happening but I just couldn’t stop how I was eating,” she said. “It totally controlled me.”

As the disease tightened its grip on her, Jensen became more and more withdrawn. Faced with everyday difficulties or prodded about her condition, she would often explode.

Last-minute changes in plans brought tears. Nancy Jensen would ask her daughter what she had eaten for lunch and a shouting match would ensue.

“I could see in her eyes the fear and disappointment that I was destroying myself,” Stacey Jensen said.

Last October, mother and daughter went shopping for a homecoming dress. At store after store they couldn’t find one small enough to fit Stacey’s shrunken frame.

“Everything fell off her, and we went down to a size one,” Nancy Jensen said. “We even looked in the preteen sections.”

Despite such glaring indications of her weight loss, Jensen did not seek help for nearly another month.

Nancy Jensen, determined to not force her daughter in any direction, waited and worried. “You see your child withering away and there’s nothing you can do because it’s all mental,” she said.

Finally, after being confronted separately by Laraneta and by a La Reina teacher whose daughter had battled anorexia, Jensen realized she needed help.

She approached her mother and soon began treatment with three professionals--a doctor, an eating disorders counselor and a nutritionist.

“People who were at the point where Stacey was, 95% of the time they cannot get out of it themselves,” said Eddings, Jensen’s counselor.

Freed from denial, Jensen resumed channeling her fierce determination in a healthy way. But there were more challenges ahead, including those from soccer teammates who didn’t understand her disease.

“We knew she had to miss practices to get better, but it was more like a distraction than us being happy for her,” said Darlene Rini, a senior fullback.

“It was like, well if you need to do all that, maybe you shouldn’t play. I don’t think I ever really considered her a part of the team.”

Lacking both the total support from her team and the stamina to play more than short periods at a time, Jensen contemplated quitting the team.

“Soccer had no longer become fun,” Jensen said. “I know my abilities and talents, and they’re just not there anymore.

Less than a year before, Jensen was a team leader and a major-college prospect.

“She’s probably back to being half of what she was a year ago,” Laraneta said. “But her mental outlook got stronger and stronger.”

Eddings said Jensen’s aggressive and enthusiastic response to treatment is “atypical.” Usually recovery from anorexia is a process of several years.

Jensen’s blood, hormone levels, bone density and heart are all monitored during monthly visits to her physician. She sees Eddings weekly.

When Jensen started to return to a more substantial diet, she consumed only half of what is considered typical for a girl her size and age. Yet her stomach, unaccustomed to normal digestion, cramped so severely that Jensen doubled over in pain for up to 20 minutes.

Jensen consumes about 1,800 calories per day, which Eddings describes as “the low end of normal daily consumption,” and her weight is up to about 100 pounds. High-calorie drinks and potatoes are staples of her diet and she looks forward to a reunion with peanut butter and bagels.

“I got a lot of support and I had a lot of people I didn’t know cared about me,” Jensen said. “But it’s tough seeing how much damage I did, not just to myself but to my parents and friends.”

In recovery, Jensen is able to identify those around her who remain in the clutches of an eating disorder. From classmates to strangers at the mall, she is quick to recognize them.

“I can pick them out by their attitude, how they walk, how they hold themselves,” Jensen said.

And what would she say if she could talk with them?

“I would tell them not to withdraw because you isolate yourself and get deeper into the disease,” Jensen said. “There are so many people who have gone through this and understand.

“There’s so much support, no matter who you are.”