Katie Couric's Bulimia Battle

Katie Couric appears to be a golden girl moving from one award and success to the next, but on Monday's episode of Katie she reveals how she struggled with bulimia as a young woman. Speaking with eating disorders expert Dr. Cynthia Bulik, the news-anchor-turned-talk-show-host says, “I wrestled with bulimia all through college and for two years after that. And I know this rigidity, this feeling that if you eat one thing that’s wrong, you’re full of self-loathing and then you punish yourself, whether it’s one cookie or a stick of gum that isn’t sugarless, that I would sometimes beat myself up for that.” She adds, "How do you have a healthy relationship with food and and say, 'I can have one cookie and its OK.' That is such a huge thing for people who wrestle with this."

[Related: Demi Lovato: I Still Struggle With Cutting, Bulimia]

For Couric, getting the message out is part of a personal mission. “As the mother of two daughters, it's an incredibly important topic to Katie,” Couric’s representative, Elizabeth Wasden, tells Shine. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry estimates that as many as 10 out of 100 girls and young women suffer from an eating disorder.

[Related: Katie Couric: The Next Queen of Daytime TV?]

Most of the episode centers on singer Demi Lovato, 20, who dropped out of dropped out of the Jonas Brothers 2010 tour to enter rehab for bulimia and self-injury. Over the next two years, she became an outspoken advocate against bullying, which she says pushed her toward abusing alcohol and drugs, cutting herself and bingeing and purging to help numb the pain. "It was a way of expressing my own shame, of myself, on my own body," Lovato said in a 2011 interview with Robin Roberts on 20/20. "I was matching the inside to the outside. And there were some times where my emotions were just so built up, I didn't know what to do.”

[Related: Yahoo Health: Eating Disorders]

Lovato spent three months in strict rehab, and she says she still battles her demons every day. "People think that you go into rehab and come out fixed," she told the Huffington Post in March. "That's not it. You have to work every day, you have to fight every day. It's really important to get the message out there that if you do slip up, it's OK, because you are human. Just try, and try harder next time."

While Lovato, during her dark days, may have fit the public’s image of troubled starlet more than an icon like Couric, experts point out that high achieving young women with a perfectionist streak are especially vulnerable to developing eating disorders. Thankfully, the New York Post reports that Couric recovered through therapy and self-help research.

Click on katiecouric.com to find a local broadcast.