Noa was 9 when a doctor’s comment about her weight crushed her; years later, after bullying, secrecy, vomiting and a desperate letter to her mother, she was diagnosed with anorexia and began the long path to recoveryMaya Benita|Noa was 9 when she walked into a health clinic with her mother. They had come for an ordinary routine checkup, and the doctor asked the girl to step on the scale.The doctor looked at the screen, compared it with a previous measurement and then said out loud: “Wow, what’s this? Noa gained 10 kilos over the past year. She needs to see a dietitian.”5 View gallery Parents may miss the warning signs when a teenager is sliding into anorexia (Photo: Shutterstock)That sentence, which Noa heard clearly, became one of the moments that helped push her toward an eating disorder.“She will never forget it, and I will never forget it either,” says Tamar, a pseudonym used to protect the family’s privacy. “It wasn’t the only comment she received over the years about her weight, but it was one of the moments that was burned into her.”Noa, also a pseudonym, is now a teenage girl entering 11th grade. Over the past few years, she struggled with an eating disorder and was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. She recently completed about six months of treatment through a home hospitalization model.From the outside, Tamar says, it was very difficult to understand how serious the situation had become. Noa still went to Scouts, met friends, went out and argued like an ordinary adolescent. But beneath that routine was a whole world of hunger, concealment, fear and shame.“Noa was always a chubby child,” Tamar says. “She loved to eat. She had cheeks, she had a small belly. But at home we never commented on her weight. Never. We are not a family that talks that way. We didn’t tell her she was fat, we didn’t talk about diets, and I didn’t walk around the house saying I needed to lose weight. That was very far from us.”So where did the comments come from?