Advice for Parents by Doris Smeltzer

It was a phenomenal success!

Our fund raiser on Saturday, September 13th at Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts where we hosted the Napa Valley Premiere of the award-winning documentary, “America the Beautiful: Is America Obsessed with Beauty?” was precisely what we had hoped.  It achieved our goals of introducing Andrea’s Voice Foundation to our local community, it helped spread the word in a big way about the costs of our obsession with beauty as well as raising funds so that Andrea’s Voice could begin offering support through a Napa-based Eating Disorder/Body Image Issues Resource & Support center.

Television interview continued...

In my last blog entry I shared a few of my answers to the questions asked on a recent television interview. Here are the remaining questions along with my responses:

Eating disorders have the highest premature fatality rate of any mental illness...did you know this when Andrea became ill?

Not at all...although I had a strange feeling of foreboding that bulimia would kill Andrea...there was nothing that I'd ever read or heard of to that point that would have supported that intuitive feeling. Now I know that many of those who die because of an eating disorder do not have it listed on their death certificates.

Interview sound bites

Please forgive the length of time between my recent posts.  Never did I realize the amount of time and energy it takes to plan a major fund raiser! Hopefully, life will return to "normal" after September 13th!

In the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to be interviewed on numerous television and radio stations--for those of you in northern California I'll be on "View From the Bay" on Channel 7 at 3PM today--wish me luck!  One show asked a number of important questions to which I'd like to share my answers with you: