Beneath the Surface

Dan Washington of Brand with Dan, Ryan Hunt of Veteran Social, Leah Stiles and Maj. Austin Otocki of the U.S. Army at the Beneath the Surface gala. Photos throughout by Michael Parks, an Air Force veteran, of DayStar Photography.

The Last Christmas

Leah Stiles was spending Christmas in a hospital bed, living on an NG tube, when she decided to go shopping. She couldn't leave the unit, and her doctors didn't expect her to leave at all. "They had just offered palliative care and told me that I should be comfortable until the end," she said. "And I thought this is my last Christmas."

She looked around and saw patients she knew nobody was coming to see. No visitors. No gifts. "And I thought, what can I do, inpatient in the hospital, to get gifts to these people that are hurting, that are in the dark?" So, she made a list, angel tree style, one patient at a time. One loved Hello Kitty but hated pickles. Another had a thing for fuzzy socks. A man who wanted to color more kept breaking every pencil he got his hands on, so she asked for crayons. She sent the list to her former leader with no idea what would come of it. "And I didn't know what was going to happen, and lo and behold, a big box came with all that and more."

She told that story on November 7 at Beneath the Surface, the first SEA WAVES Military Eating Disorder Awareness Gala, held at The Florida Aquarium in Tampa. Service members, veterans, military families, clinicians, and people in recovery had traveled from as far as Syracuse and Virginia to be there. Stiles used the story to set up the evening's Lighthouse Leadership Award, which she said honors a leader who might not know much about eating disorders but is willing to learn. Most people don't have what she calls EDIQ, and she told guests that's okay. "You don't have to completely understand it, but you have to be curious enough to learn."

"You don't have to completely understand it, but you have to be curious enough to learn."

Then she gave the award to the woman she calls her boss lady. "I affectionately call her boss lady and SSK, and she just recently, 37 days ago, got her DD-214," Stiles said of retired Navy Capt. Sarah Self-Kyler, the same former leader who'd filled that Christmas box. Self-Kyler had road-tripped from Virginia with her mother to be there.

SUMMARY
Leah Stiles, the retired Navy Senior Chief who is the founder and CEO of SEA WAVES, the first nonprofit dedicated exclusively to eating disorders in the military, hosted the organization's first gala on November 7, 2026, at The Florida Aquarium in Tampa. The evening brought a city proclamation, awards for the people who carried her, a keynote from attorney and author Brian Cuban, and two announcements military families have been waiting on.

Content note: This story discusses suicide and eating disorders. Help is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988, and more resources are listed at the end.

From left: Leah Stiles and Capt. Sarah Self-Kyler, U.S. Navy (Ret.), recipient of the Lighthouse Leadership Award. Photo by Michael Parks, DayStar Photography.

Twenty-One Plus

The night didn't start heavy. It started with Stiles explaining the name. Before SEA WAVES, she tried to launch the work through another nonprofit, and a year in, an organization in the UK with the same name sent her a cease and desist letter. "I cried in the shower because I didn't know what my purpose was anymore," she said. When she got out of the shower, a song was playing, and it gave her the name.

Then she took roll call by branch. Air Force answered, and so did Army. "Okay, civilians, prepare for the barking," she warned before calling the Marines, and after they answered, she added, "Okay, I don't know why we bark, but we do." The Coast Guard managed a little noise. Space Force got nothing, so she promised they'd get another shot next year, when the gala moves to the Atlanta Aquarium.

The USF Color Guard stands with the colors as Amanda Mae Saucedo sings the national anthem. Photo by Michael Parks, DayStar Photography.

Then she told everyone why the date mattered. "Many of you know that I'm a fierce, fierce advocate for suicide prevention," she said. Her niece Kiana had lived with her. "She lost her battle to the dark side. And today is Kiana's birthday, and although she'll forever be 21." She finished the thought a moment later. "21 plus tonight for Kiana."

Army Maj. Austin Otocki, who's volunteered with SEA WAVES for three years, read a proclamation from Tampa Mayor Jane Castor recognizing the day in the organization's name. It put the problem in numbers. An estimated 28.8 million Americans will face a clinical eating disorder in their lives, and military data shows more active duty service members diagnosed every year. Stiles added a number of her own. Fewer than six percent of people diagnosed with an eating disorder are underweight, she said, which is why it's so hard to spot. Every piece of art on display that night was made by someone in eating disorder recovery.

Leah Stiles with the proclamation from Tampa Mayor Jane Castor. Photo by Michael Parks, DayStar Photography.

The People Who Carried Her

Stiles said it more than once: she couldn't have done the first year alone. She asked everyone who'd ever worked on the SEA WAVES team to stand, and she thanked her executive assistant, Diana, a Navy Yeoman who served on the same ship Stiles did. "She is my brain, and you know I don't have that." Wavemaker of the Year went to Brittney Marono, the woman Stiles calls the organization's Swiss Army knife, who pulled much of the gala together. They've known each other less than a year. "We met on LinkedIn because I was too scared to go up to her eating disorder conference," Marono said. In February, the two will present on eating disorders in the military at the International Eating Disorder Prevention Conference in Chicago.

From left: Brittney Marono, Wavemaker of the Year, and Leah Stiles. Photo by Michael Parks, DayStar Photography.

Then Stiles went back to the worst of it. "Honestly, they offered assisted suicide to make me comfortable," she said. As soon as she could get to a computer, she searched for an answer. "Do people with eating disorders really have it forever? Is it a terminal illness?" The search led her to Carolyn Costin, who started the first residential eating disorder treatment center. Stiles emailed her and asked if there was ever a chance of recovery. "She said there absolutely is. And I believed her."

Costin went on to write the foreword to Stiles' book. Weeks before the gala, Stiles said, Costin's family and funding team made "in the very literal final hour the decision to double their donation," and Costin donates coaching hours back to SEA WAVES so anyone in the military community can work with an eating disorder coach at no cost. The first Carolyn Costin Pathfinder Award was presented that night. Costin couldn't attend, so she sent a video. "I think it's a better honor to have an award named after you than it is to just get an award," she said, before naming the recipient, Tracy Dando, a Carolyn Costin Institute eating disorder recovery coach who also emceed the night.

From left: Tracy Dando of the Carolyn Costin Institute, recipient of the first Carolyn Costin Pathfinder Award, and Leah Stiles. Photo by Michael Parks, DayStar Photography.

The Day of the Gold Pants

The keynote came from Brian Cuban, an attorney from Texas and the author of Shattered Image and The Addicted Lawyer, who's been in recovery since 2007. His story started in Pittsburgh in 1976. He was 15, the middle of three boys, shy, and badly bullied. His brother Mark taught disco downtown and handed him a pair of shiny gold satin bell-bottoms that didn't fit. He wore them to school anyway. On the mile walk home, a group of boys ripped them off him and threw them into a busy street.

He waited for the traffic to stop, gathered up the shreds, and walked the rest of the way in his underwear, past two stoplights and cars full of people watching. "No one rolled down," he said. "No one said anything." At home, he buried the shreds in a trash can in the basement. "Thinking that would bury my shame. Think that would bury my trauma. But that's not how trauma and shame work."

From left: Keynote speaker Brian Cuban and Leah Stiles. Photo by Michael Parks, DayStar Photography.

At Penn State, he started restricting, then bingeing and purging, then running 10 and 20 miles a day. Alcohol came next, then cocaine. In his second year of law school, a buddy talked him into Marine Officer Candidate School at Quantico. "My mindset was they were going to fix me," he said. Facing a head shave and a body he couldn't look at, he faked a knee injury. A corpsman examined him, found nothing, and asked him one question. "You want to go home?" Cuban said yes. "It wasn't their job to fix me," he told the veterans in the audience. "It was my job, and I wasn't ready for that."

It took a two-and-a-half-day drug and alcohol blackout over Easter weekend 2007 to start his recovery. Even then, he hid the eating disorder from his therapist for session after session, sure he was the only man in the world who binged and purged. "Shame knows no hourly rate," he said. Today, he's been free of alcohol, drugs, and bingeing and purging for close to 20 years. His mind still counts calories on its own, and he still talks to the bullied 15-year-old he used to be. "I am still telling that little boy he is enough," he said. "Recovery doesn't look the same for everyone, but recovery is possible."

"Shame knows no hourly rate."

Same Ship, Years Later

Then came a video made entirely by sailors, active duty and veterans. Rebecca Fowler, who served in the Navy, describes food and exercise taking over her life until she couldn't work or hold a conversation with her family. "I've definitely asked for help and just received, and received no help because they didn't know what to do," she says. Her command didn't understand, and neither did her therapist outside the military. "And when I found SEA WAVES, I felt like somebody, somebody gets this."

Command Master Chief Huben Phillips speaks in the video, too. He describes a sailor aboard an aircraft carrier who needed help and whose command left her behind, and the video ties her story to Stiles' own: same ship, years later. He asks viewers to picture their mother, their father, their sibling, or their niece going through it. "You have to take the time to see underneath," he says. "You are the difference between a life lived and someone who's no longer with us." When the credits rolled, Stiles took the microphone. "So that Command Master Chief saved my life," she said.

"You are the difference between a life lived and someone who's no longer with us."

A House on the Market

Stiles wanted guests to understand what SEA WAVES does on an ordinary day, so she told them about an active duty Air Force family with a 10-year-old daughter. The girl had anorexia, a very low BMI, and heart issues, and she'd been admitted to a children's hospital. Her parents couldn't find a program that would treat a child that young with a disorder that severe and get their insurance to pay for it. Her mother decided to put the house on the market "so that they could pay to save their daughter's life."

Somebody told her to contact SEA WAVES first. Stiles called Equip, which treats patients virtually, something she says matters for families who move as often as military families do. "And they provided complete treatment for this family at no cost to them," Stiles said. "And then they called me and said that they were going to continue to do it for our military families." Equip is now a founding member of the SEA WAVES Lighthouse Network, which Stiles describes as a group of treatment centers, providers, and veteran service organizations working to connect military families with care.

What Comes Next

Stiles used the evening to announce two things she's been working toward since she founded SEA WAVES. In January, the organization will launch the MEDAL Institute, growing its Military Eating Disorder Awareness and Literacy training into ten curricula on topics like moral injury, military children, maternal health, and suicide prevention, with continuing education credits for clinicians. And in the new year, SEA WAVES will start what Stiles calls the first weekly military virtual support group for eating disorders. A $250,000 capacity campaign is meant to fund a care coordination team, more military-informed treatment, and a bigger Lighthouse Network. "Because good intentions do not build infrastructure," Dando said.

From left: Amanda Mae Saucedo of the Women Veterans Calendar, U.S. Air Force (Ret.), and Leah Stiles. Photo by Michael Parks, DayStar Photography.

How's Your Light?

Stiles closed with the line she says everywhere she goes. "Need a light; Be a light." She told guests she says it with two kinds of punctuation. With a question mark, it means this: "Be the person that you needed when you were in the dark, because we've all been in the dark." With a semicolon, it means "your story doesn't end here." Then she shared something about herself she doesn't usually lead with. "I lived in the foster care system. I lived three years in an adolescent residential facility." The following week, she said, she'd be back in Albany, New York, speaking to the kids living in that same facility.

Stiles, a member of Horizon West American Legion Post 419, asked the veterans in the audience to change the way they check on each other. Ask a buddy how they're doing, she said, and everybody says good. "I want us to ask, How's your light right now? Are you in the dark a little bit? Do you need to borrow some of mine?" Building SEA WAVES for other people ended up lighting her own way. "When I created SEA WAVES to shine a light for others that were in the dark, it actually illuminated my path and gave me my purpose."

"How's your light right now? Are you in the dark a little bit? Do you need to borrow some of mine?"

Then she had everyone say it back to her, and asked them to do it one more time. Need a light; Be a light. She thanked them, wished them safe travels, and pointed anyone who wasn't ready to go home toward karaoke at Double Deckers. "I'll be taking free hugs on the way out."

Resources

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and Veterans Crisis Line | Call or text 988; veterans and service members press 1 or text 838255 | 988lifeline.org | veteranscrisisline.net

Free, confidential crisis support 24/7, with responders trained in military culture for veterans, service members, and their families.

Crisis Text Line | Text WAVES to 741741 | crisistextline.org

Free, confidential text support 24/7; the WAVES keyword connects texters to a Crisis Counselor through SEA WAVES.

National Alliance for Eating Disorders | 866-662-1235 | allianceforeatingdisorders.com

Helpline staffed by licensed eating disorder therapists, offering free treatment referrals weekdays from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET.

ANAD | 888-375-7767 | anad.org

Free helpline, peer support groups, and recovery mentorship for individuals and families affected by eating disorders.

SEA WAVES | sea-waves.org

Leah Stiles' nonprofit providing education, advocacy, and support for service members, veterans, and military families affected by eating disorders.

Equip | equip.health

Virtual, evidence-based eating disorder treatment delivered at home by a dedicated care team.

Carolyn Costin | carolyncostin.com

Home of eating disorder clinician Carolyn Costin, whose institute trains and certifies eating disorder recovery coaches.

Military OneSource | 800-342-9647 | militaryonesource.mil

Department of Defense program providing 24/7 confidential non-medical counseling and referrals to service members, families, and survivors.