PALs held its second annual walk for National Eating Disorder Awareness Month at the school on Saturday.
The event began with PALs speakers Kaitlyn Chmelka (11) and Jaclyn Rokoszewski (12) sharing their own experiences with eating disorders in the west quad.
“I think that eating disorders are one of the few mental illnesses that are not talked about heavily,” Chmelka said. “I think that they’re something that can do the most damage, but they can impact your mind and your body. I think that a lot more people struggle with it than we realize.”
Alongside speakers, various booths were stationed around the perimeter of the quad, including San Diego California Hygienist Association, Choice Juicery, University of California, San Diego Eating Disorder Center, Love on a Leash San Diego and NEDA.
“Eating disorders can affect your mouth, your teeth, just kind of your oral health in general,” dental hygiene student Elena Reynolds said. “So we’re here to kind of give some tips on how to help with that, specifically with eating disorders, how to strengthen your teeth, because acid can wear them down, and kind of how it all connects teeth to body to overall health and whatnot. We’re handing out some toothbrushes, some toothpaste and floss, because everyone needs all that.”
According to PALs president Shyla Mighdoll (12) and Chmelka, this year was an improvement from last year’s walk.
“[Last year] we didn’t have as many volunteers, like coming out,” Chmelka said. “We didn’t have the dogs last year. We didn’t have Choice Juicery or anything. But this year, we took a lot of time and effort into preparation for the whole walk. We talked to a lot of different people to see who could contribute to the walk. And we did a lot of preparation that we based it off of last year and what we wanted to improve on.”
Mighdoll began organizing the event four months ago with the help of the PALs Outreach Committee.
“One thing I learned is that we should focus on local organizations,” Mighdoll said. “They’re more willing to help and they’re more willing to revise.”
Mighdoll was responsible for the organization of both last year and this year’s Suicide Prevention and NEDA walks. According to Mighdoll, she was inspired to “shed light” on the issue due to her own “personal struggles” with eating when she first came to high school. Conceiving the idea in May of her sophomore year, Mighdoll began with the Suicide Prevention walk in September of her junior year and went on to contact and get sponsored by the NEDA Cares program.
“Like I said in my speech, there are so many different categories of an eating disorder,” Chmelka said. “There are so many different levels to it. Just because you don’t think that you have a super drastic, ‘you’re gonna go to a hospital’ eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia, does not mean that you don’t have something that you deserve help with.”
