Sara* can't remember a time in her life when she wasn’t on a diet. In fact, growing up in her Orthodox Jewish community, trying to lose weight was as routine as any other ritual. “The same way we had Shabbos [the Jewish sabbath] every week, we had dieting every day,” she tells SELF. “It was always a part of my life.”

While Sara, now 25, says pressure to diet and lose weight came from various family members, the emphasis on being thin seemed to stem from a deeper, core obligation in the Orthodox community: getting married.

“It's a very cultural thing to need to be thin for dating. Even if you're not thinking about dating when you're a five year old, there's an immense amount of pressure to think about your size for [future] dating,” she says. “[They think] if you're chubby when you're five, it will be hard to grow out of it, and you're going to be a fat 18 year old.”

According to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of Orthodox Jews and 75 percent of Haredi (the most traditionally observant) Jews in America marry at the age of 24 or younger, compared to 33 percent of the overall population of Jewish Americans.

Though research on the subject is limited, it seems that disordered eating and body image struggles have become prevalent—yet not fully acknowledged—parts of growing up as an Orthodox Jewish woman.

Data on eating disorders within the Jewish community, and especially the Orthodox community, is nearly impossible to find. A 2011 New York Times report cited an unpublished 1996 study of an Orthodox high school in Brooklyn, where eating disorders among girls in the school were reported to be about 50 percent higher than the national rate at the time. The Times also pointed to a 2008 study of 868 students in Toronto, which found 25 percent of Jewish Canadian girls aged 13 to 20 suffered from clinically diagnosable eating disorders, compared to 18 percent of non-Jewish Canadian girls in the study sample.

But much of what we know about disordered eating in the Orthodox community comes from anecdotal evidence. Sarah Bateman, a licensed social worker who is the liaison to the Jewish community for the Renfrew Center, one of the oldest eating disorder treatment institutions in the country, tells SELF that her professional interests stemmed from what she witnessed at her own Orthodox school. “I was in high school and noticed so many of my friends were suffering,” she says. “What struck me was that everyone seemed to know about it and no one was talking about it.”

“Whether or not they are textbook eating disorders, there's a lot of unhealthy eating habits happening,” Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, the executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, tells SELF. “I can't think of anyone who doesn't know numerous people [that suffer from disordered eating].”

That statement can certainly hold true in secular societies, too; but it's possible that the increased emphasis on marriage and the specific dating culture may exacerbate disordered eating among Orthodox women.

While Orthodox men are not immune to suffering from eating disorders (just as they aren't in the secular world), the pressure to woo the opposite sex often falls on women because of what's known within the Orthodox community as the “shidduch (matchmaking) crisis,” or the perceived courtship imbalance caused by an excess of available single women. Based on a widespread belief that there are too many single women (whether that's true or not) single men are treated as the high-demand prize.