This piece was inspired by an article about Frieda Curtis and her struggle with bulimia nervosa, published in the Nov. 15 issue of the Wisconsin State Journal.

When I met Frieda as a young girl, I never would have guessed that she would be the person who would show me just how serious an eating disorder can be.

As young girls, Frieda and I were neighbors, and after she moved, we attended school together until she graduated in 2006. Although we were never close friends, we were classmates. At school and in life, she was a remarkable young woman: vibrant, thoughtful, kind, intelligent -- someone many of us admired.

But Frieda also had a dangerous secret -- one that I did not know about until she went to college. When she looked in the mirror, she saw an inadequate, fat, ugly person.

She idolized too-thin celebrities like Calista Flockhart and wrote of her attempts to throw up even on days when her food intake had been minimal at best. Even though she knew her medical situation was serious, Frieda was determined to believe she could control it. She couldn't. Frieda's battle began at the end of middle school, and it ended last year when she died of heart complications caused by the disease.

Once a person has fallen into a pattern of disordered eating, moving in the direction of healthy body image and nutritious food intake becomes harder and harder.

In some cases, like Frieda's, recovery is impossible. Her death may have been unusual, but her fight to find an impossible body to love is shared by countless other girls and young women.

Although treating eating disorders is essential to help those who have already fallen victim, we also need preventive measures to reduce the number of girls and young women who believe their bodies are hopelessly flawed.

American culture is obsessed with beauty. Advertisements printed in magazines, plastered on billboards, and endlessly repeated on television all show how much "beautiful" is embodied in slender female figures.

Dieting, bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, and other eating disorders are among the ways females respond to cultural messages that thin is beautiful. To fight this cultural epidemic, we need to challenge dangerous ideals of beauty while potential victims are still young:

Elementary and middle schools should provide health classes that encourage healthy eating and body images. Images of "beautiful" are forced on young girls when they are very young, so fighting those body images must be done at an equally early age.

Middle and high schools need to encourage peer support groups so young women (and men too) can work together to encourage healthier ideals of beauty. Authority figures can only do so much. Positive peer reinforcement may ultimately prove more effective.

Companies that target girls and young women in advertisements should feature women with healthy bodies and healthy lifestyles.

Might such measures have saved Frieda Curtis's life? We'll never know, but maybe they can prevent other young women from making the same tragic mistake.

Frieda was a wonderful, motivated, beautiful person who struggled with a terrible, life-threatening disease. Her death serves as a devastating reminder of just how serious eating disorders can be.

The feelings of dismay and imperfection that Frieda described in her diary are not surprising given her illness, but they are disheartening when one considers how much her perception of herself was shaped by an unrealistic ideal.

Promising young women like Frieda should not be dying believing they can never be whole unless they are thin. Any notion of beauty that can kill so lovely a person is ugly indeed.

Cronon, a 2007 graduate of Madison West High School, is a sophomore at Yale University.