ED Bites

Search for “eating disorders” on Google News, and I guarantee you that over half of the coverage will be about celebrities with EDs. Some of that is our culture’s serious addiction to celebrities that does no one any good. But some of this coverage has to do with celebrities sharing their stories of EDs or [...]

I’ve written volumes about eating disorders over the years–beginning before I was even diagnosed. Most of the writings were personal, private- scribbled by dim desk light as my roommate (any of them) snoozed in the bunk a few feet away. I didn’t create them as stories. They were more the semi-deranged ravings of someone who [...]

Spend time in an eating disorder treatment center, and you will see some pretty strange stuff go down. Mealtimes, due to the stress-inducing nature of the situation and the presence of food, can bring out some of the most bizarre. We all probably have some amount of unusual food habits, most of which fall into [...]

In March, I attended the London International Eating Disorders Conference. This past weekend, I finally organized the last of my papers from the conference (After the conference, I was on vacation and then at a journalism fellowship, so I wasn’t home to do any organizing, hence the long delay) and found some notes I took [...]

As a child of the 80s, I remember the “Just Say No” drug campaigns well. I remember being a freshly minted 9-year-old, helping a friend campaign on the elementary school playground to bring DARE (aka, Drug Abuse Resistance Education) to our school. I thought I was doing the right thing, being an upstanding citizen, and [...]

No one knew what to do for me. The array of psychologists, dietitians, psychiatrists, physicians, and others that had been seeing me had essentially thrown up their hands. I needed to choose recovery, they said, and it was something I clearly wasn’t doing. Until I did so, there wasn’t anything they could do. I would [...]

Let me introduce you to two hypothetical teens: Teen A and Teen B. Both teens go on diets. It could mean they want to lose a few pounds, it could be they are trying to “eat healthy” or be better at their sport. Regardless of why, they start cutting back on the amount and variety [...]

Loving your body is seen as the Holy Grail of eating disorder recovery. It’s taught and preached from every street corner in the ED world. Loving your body and your appearance is seen as both the key to preventing EDs and recovering from them. I’m going to let you in on a secret: I’m in [...]

So ED Bites is kind of my blog (yes, I’m a bit possessive about it), but it’s also your blog. If people didn’t read, I probably wouldn’t write. Or at least, I’d gush my existential angst in a private journal or password-protected blog. I have plenty of ideas to blog about, but I’m not always [...]

Asking for help for an eating disorder, whether it’s for yourself or a loved one, often requires you so screw your courage to the sticking place. For one, there’s stigma. For another, there’s the fear of stopping ED behaviors and of what treatment will bring. Not to mention the other worries associated with discussing some [...]