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 [...]

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, [...]

So we’ve finally come to the last part of the Defining Recovery series, in which I want to look at what happens to women after recovery. Stopping ED behaviors is, in a sense, a means to an end, which is the creation of a healthy, meaningful life. There’s no real way to get at what [...]

In the first two blog posts of this series, I’ve looked at how researchers define recovery, and how patients do so. Now, I want to look at what factors predict recovery in eating disorders. But first, a note. When I talk about things that predict a negative outcome, it’s possible that you might recognize some [...]

Yesterday, I posted about how researchers define recovery in a variety of clinical situations. I think we have made a lot of progress in our understanding of what recovery is from a scientific perspective. Researchers are now embracing the idea that recovery involves much more than just regaining/maintaining weight and stopping ED behaviors. Certainly that’s [...]

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I’m going to be doing a series on my blog about definitions of recovery, what they are, and why they matter. For my first post, I’m going to start by discussing how researchers measure recovery. Considering that most of my readers are (judging by the email I receive [...]