ED Bites

It’s a question I get a lot: how many people out there have eating disorders? I can take some reasonable guesses, but there’s not much in the way of good, population-wide prevalence studies. But new estimates of ED incidence (the number of new cases diagnosed in a particular population in a specific time period) and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

After reading a news article about a young woman who died last year due to an eating disorder and laxative abuse, I thought that it was time I blogged on the subject. It’s not an easy subject to bring up, because it touches on several major subjects that are generally considered not polite for everyday [...]

One of the cornerstones of ED research–of pretty much all medical research, when you get right down to it–is the clinical trial. You take a group of people with a particular illness, give half of them the treatment and give the other half a placebo or no treatment at all. Then, you compare them. Did [...]

Hang on to your hats, people, because we have a new eating disorder in town. This one is called “almost anorexia.” Wait…what?!? Do we really need another pseudo-cutesy name for an eating disorder like pregorexia, drunkorexia, brideorexia, and manorexia that (in my opinion) negate the extreme suffering that accompany eating disorders? Also, in my opinion, [...]