Hi everyone. I'm Maggie McGrath editor of Forbes Women. The 10th annual list of

the Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startups is out now and on this list is a health care company aiming to help

patients with eating disorders. That company is called equip and we are joined

by their two co-founders today,

Christina Safran and Dr. Aaron Parks.

Thank you both so much for being here.

Thanks for having us.

Now, there's a study from Harvard that indicates that eating disorders and the unpaid

caregiving, the loss productivity and the treatments add up to a $65 billion economic cost every year. But Christina, your experience with

eating disorders and the eating disorder industry, if I may, is very personal. You've

joked that you've been in eating disorders all your life. Can you kind of explain what that means and how you got to this role?

Yeah. So I was diagnosed with anorexia at 10 years old which is young but unfortunately not that rare we treat five year olds here at a clip.

I talk about the fact that I had a whole lot of

privilege, good insurance, family that could afford to pay the lots of money out of pocket and

perhaps most notably I fit that stereotype of what we think eating disorders look like.

They actually don't have a look, they don't discriminate,

they affect everybody.

But even with all that privilege,

I had a pretty horrific treatment experience,

which is really the norm for folks with eating disorders.

So I spent my entire freshman year of high school,

not in high school, in and out of four different hospitals

...