What's eating London girls?

A swish restaurant launch in Piccadilly. The theme is Pacific Rim - fashionable shorthand for tiny portions. Discarded plates of steamed white asparagus and morsels of pan-fried veal pile up amid empty martini glasses and crumpled Marlboro packets.

Everyone agrees the food is completely delicious but no one appears to eat. The girls look glossy and confident in expensive strappy halter-neck tops, skintight Seven jeans, minuscule denim skirts and sculptured wedges. They are young but not particularly famous. And they are thin. Very thin. One perma-tan blonde poses for a paparazzo, her mouth hovers over a spoon of nut souffle. 'Hell will freeze over before this passes my lips', her forced smile implies.

'I've really noticed it recently,' says one diehard partygoer. 'I know fashionable girls have always wanted to be slim, that's not new. But it's the younger ones who look worryingly thin these days. And no, you never see them eat.'

There's no doubt about it. London's well-connected, wealthy girls - some of whom attend prestigious private schools by day and work the party circuit by night - are thinner, younger and under greater academic pressure to succeed than ever before. More likely to pop slimming pills than Ecstasy tablets, their looks are everything to them in a culture that glorifies skinny women. Which is why you'll see these lollipop girls, with stick-insect bodies, studiously avoiding the canapes and champagne. They prefer air and mineral water.

It will come as no surprise to discover that despite our public awareness of anorexia nervosa, the deadly eating disorder is increasing along with the population. According to the Eating Disorders Association (EDA), 1.1 million people suffer from eating disorders in the UK, of which 40 per cent suffer from anorexia nervosa and 60 per cent from bulimia nervosa. What is more alarming, however, is the extent to which our obsession with body image has filtered down from supermodels to prepubescent schoolgirls; earlier this month ChildLine reported an increase in the number of calls from children, some as young as 11, seeking help with eating disorders. Two years ago, 1,000 youngsters called the helpline, last year that figure rose to 1,300. Worse still, our preoccupation with league tables and continual examinations is adding to eating disorders among pupils unable to cope with the pressure.

Claire Milford Haven, social editor of Tatler, observes: 'The girls I see now are very young and painfully thin. It is fairly obvious just to look at them that they are permanently dieting. There are a lot of very ambitious, very sophisticated girls out there,' she says of today's teen generation. 'They read about women who've made it, whether it's models or TV presenters, and they want that success themselves. They feel their physical appearance is key to that.'

It would be wrong to suggest that all these whip-thin girls who grace the society pages of glossy magazines have eating disorders. Call it metabolism, good genes or plain good luck, many of these girls are naturally thin. Kate Moss, for example, has that type of svelte yet healthy, size-8 shape that looks effortlessly maintained, as do models and partygoers Liberty Ross and Olivia Inge. This, inevitably, makes them highly desirable as role models to a generation of young girls intent on imitating them at any cost.

Take Lady Eloise Anson, daughter of the Earl of Lichfield and niece of the Duke of Westminster. She is frequently photographed on the canape trail draped in black and looking extremely thin. She is also the muse of milliner Philip Treacy and Tatler fashion director Isabella Blow, who has described her as 'fashion's new superstar'.

The message is clear: thin gets you on the A-list. Anson is not alone. Her party playmates, from Daphne Guinness to Normandie Keith, Victoria Beckham to Lisa B, are all defined by their diminutive frames. Which may well encourage anorexic behaviour among young girls who admire them, even though the women themselves would never condone it.

'The ethos is very Wallis Simpson,' says Milford Haven. 'You know that you can't be too rich or too thin. But maybe these girls should be made aware that a lot of photographs of celebrities have been retouched, that in the flesh they've got flaws, too.' They've also got a history of eating disorders: supermodel Karen Elson, Coronation Street's Tracy Shaw and the teenage Kate Beckinsale all struggled with anorexia. Others, from Geri Halliwell to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, have suffered from bulimia.

According to eating disorders expert Dr Dee Dawson of London's Rhodes Farm (a residential clinic for treating children with eating disorders), between 0.5 and one per cent of all schoolgirls are anorexic, with the figure doubling to two per cent for public schoolgirls.

Up to five per cent of sixth-formers are likely to be bulimic. 'But,' she adds, 'what is more noticeable is that the girls we see in our clinic are younger. We are seeing more ten- or 11-year-olds than we did five years ago.'

The playground, according to Steve Blomfield of the EDA, is where the problems start. 'The biggest cause of anorexia mentioned on our helpline is bullying and teasing about weight at school.' While media images of impossibly slim women empower the bully, explains Blomfield, our competitive educational climate, especially in London's top schools, is exacerbating the problem. 'We are seeing an increase in parents pressurising their kids to do well,' says Blomfield. 'Kids who are moderately talented are pushed too hard by parents who don't realise the impact this can have on youngsters who don't want to let slip that it is not easy to get these high marks. The children then become compulsive about studying. Once a child develops a compulsive activity it spreads easily.'

The results can be life-threatening, as Ellie, a 19-year-old university student and former pupil at one of London's top private day schools, knows all too well. Ellie (not her real name) became anorexic at the age of 14. 'So much of my anorexia was bound up in being at a high-achieving academic school,' she says. 'In my year's intake only one in six applicants got through the entrance exam. Only two of us from my prep school got places and I remember feeling very proud to be one of them.

'As the public exam years drew nearer the atmosphere became intensely competitive. The pressure didn't come so much from the teachers, but from the girls themselves. We were all highly ambitious and motivated. Everybody wanted to get into a top university and many of us were already mapping out our careers. Only straight As, or better still, A*s would do. Even a B grade felt like failure. Our school usually got over 90 per cent As at A level - just 0.1 per cent could drop them down the league tables. So if anyone slipped to a B, then you would feel so responsible - you were the one who had let down the school.

'I remember one morning, on the first day of the autumn term, we were given a breakdown of the public exam results from the previous summer to take home to our parents. I remember one girl looking at them and saying, "Uh-oh! Somebody got a B in physics GCSE. How awful!"

'So much emphasis was placed on the league tables, and it put so much pressure on all of us. I can now see that my anorexia was a symptom of the underlying problems I had in that environment, which makes you strive for perfection.

'I saw my weight loss as a most satisfying achievement; to get on the scales and see the numbers go down made me feel very powerful.

'My problems with anorexia began when I was 14 and went into the Lower Fifth. All my friends and I were very conscious of the fact that we would be starting real coursework to be sent to the exam boards and marked. I decided this was going to be the perfect year - I would get straight As in everything.'

Ellie is 5ft 4in. Within six months, she had lost 30 per cent of her body weight and weighed five-and-a-half stone. She skipped meals and subsisted on occasional chocolate bars. 'I was literally starving,' she says. 'I used to read cookery books to torture myself. I even went into Selfridges Food Hall to stare at the food, then I'd make myself walk to the top of the stairs to punish myself.' Despite all this, Ellie got eight A*s and two As at GCSE and three As and a B at A level.

'I was devastated by the B,' she recalls. 'I was so ashamed. I felt I had let everyone down. I can now see how ridiculous that is, but that was the artificial, unhealthy environment in which I lived.'

The Ellern Mede Centre, a small, independent clinic that opened two years ago in Totteridge, North London, has a school within the centre to deal with the fallout from academic meltdown. 'The centre has a strong therapeutic ethos and the school focuses on building up selfesteem,' says Dr Paul Flower, who treats girls aged from ten to 17, though he points out that children start to develop symptoms from as early as eight. 'We try to open other windows for them and show them that there is more to life than just grades.'

While Dr Flower blames the increased pressures of modern life, from stresses within families to the fault lines created by SATs, for the rise in anorexia, he also has another theory. 'I just wonder whether it's an unfortunate by-product of the sexual revolution. Young people are bombarded with information encouraging and seducing them into becoming sexual objects.

'The pressure to be perfect and to perform in various ways can be terrifying. It can tip over into anorexia, which is about sexual avoidance and evasion, about putting the whole issue on hold.

'It is ironic that, in an attempt to achieve the perfect sexual image, it puts you into the realm of the asexual.' The fact that menstruation frequently stops is a grim physiological reminder of this fact. 'In the short term,' explains Dr Flower, 'anorexia can lead to a cessation or reduction in levels of reproductive hormones, of which periods are a sympton. Very prolonged starvation can lead to long-term infertility, as well as to long-term reduction in bone density.'

Girls at competitive London schools are particularly susceptible. 'There is perhaps a greater degree of social sophistication and awareness among these girls,' says Dr Flower, 'which fuels these anxieties to some extent.' This is certainly true of Ellie. 'I'm now at university and surrounded by friends who have a healthy approach to eating and for the first time I can enjoy food. I don't see the need to starve myself, because I am no longer in that intensely competitive atmosphere. I'm much happier and more relaxed in myself. I'm at my target weight, and I am determined not to slip back again. I feel so much for other girls currently going through the same thing as me, and my advice would be to leave - but I know how very difficult that would be. Just remember, the real world outside is nothing like this.'