For more than 30 years food has been Gabrielle’s best friend, and worst enemy.

She ate to celebrate, she ate to cope. And when it all started to pile up, the 43-year-old bulimic would go on exercise binges.

In the last year, things became even more critical. She became obsessed with running, sometimes doing back-to-back half marathons. It all came to a head when she decided to run a 24-hour, 188-mile relay with friends.

The grueling race forced Gabrielle into the hospital. She was dehydrated, starving. She even attempted to escape the ER several times because she thought she still had to finish the race.

“That was sort of the last straw, and my body wouldn’t let me abuse it anymore,” she said.

Gabrielle checked herself in to the Moore Center Clinic in Bellevue, the state’s longest-established eating disorder clinic, to help overcome her bouts of bulimia, an illness that began at the age of seven or eight, likely tied to incidents of sexual abuse. Episodes could be triggered by any number of stressors.

Gabrielle (who didn’t want her last named used) is just one of as many as 10 million women nationwide who battle eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia. At the Moore Center, trained dietitians and therapists helped her come to terms with her problems and set about rebuilding her relationship with food. Gone untreated, eating disorders can lead to any number of emotional and physical problems, and in some cases can be fatal.

The Moore Center has been helping men and women of all ages and sizes with eating problems since it was founded in 1991. Once a small office, the clinic has expanded in size to a 15,000-square foot complex complete with a spacious yoga room, and two sizable kitchens where patients can store, and even cook their own meals. The 45-person staff has treated more than 5,000 patients in the center’s existence.

Patients come to the center for a variety of reasons, but in almost every case they decide to look for treatment when their disorder affects their everyday life.

Treatment options focus as much on confidence and comfort in one’s own skin as they do diet.

“A lot of our patients are really disconnected between the head and rest of body, and they tend to live in their head, and it allows them to get reconnected with themselves,” said Liz Dill, marketing director for the Moore Center.

Many eating disorder cases are motivated by some form of stress, said Dr. Mehri Moore, founder of the center. Whether it’s the pressure to live up to the media image of a beautiful woman, or the tortured memory of a past trauma, these triggers combined with genetic predisposition can lead people down the path to illness.

To get back on the right road, patients can receive intensive all-day treatments where every meal is monitored. Also, they spend most of their time with other patients. The center provides less-intense outpatient programs with three rounds of group therapy each week plus weekly individual sessions with therapists and nutritionists.

The focus of treatments is to create a support system for patients. Family members participate in therapy, and patients do restaurant outings to learn how to control food intake when they can’t control content or portion size. The walls are lined with breathtaking pieces of art done by patients, and a line of rocks, decorated with chalk words like hope, knowledge and confidence, are strewn throughout outdoor walkways and outside windows.

“We focus on creating a community for the patients,” Moore said.

Gabrielle is the middle of the second phase of the step-down program, which helps patients apply the concepts they learned in therapy to their everyday lives. She is down to one group therapy session per week, along with an individual therapy and nutrition session. In the final program, she will only come in for one group session per week to help others, more than herself.

“I’ve made progress to the point where I have the tools to deal with the stresses that cause the eating disorder, but I still need the support and accountability to keep me on the straight and narrow,” she said.

RECOGNIZING THE SIGNS

In some cases, those with eating disorders can show signs to close friends and family. According to Dr. Moore, there are a number of cues, both social and physical that people should look out for.

• Rapid change in weight

• Excessive exercise, specifically at strange times of the day

• Sudden changes in behavior, in terms of activities the person is involved in

• Increased focus on food, as in playing with food, talking about it more than usual

• Avoiding going out to eat and other social activities that involve food.