ED Bites

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Unlike picky eating in children, the literature on picky eating in adults is much more sparse. As in, I found one paper on adult picky eating. Part of the problem is that adult picky eating has been an invisible disorder. Just as people assumed that eating disorders were strictly a “teen” thing, researchers thought that [...]

“Try it–you’ll like it!” It’s something children and toddlers hear a lot. Most kids go through phases of picky eating, sometimes even fairly extreme. Mostly, this is part of normal development. From an evolutionary standpoint, where not all foods were safe to eat (especially combined with a young child’s desire to put everything they can [...]

Being imprisoned means being deprived of your personal freedoms. In an environment when almost every minutiae of your life is strictly controlled, and where a majority of inmates have some type of pre-existing psychiatric problem, all types of maladaptive behaviors can crop up. You yell, you fight. You’re belligerent. A large number of inmates engage [...]

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 [...]

Given that there are really no evidence-based treatments for adults with anorexia, researchers, clinicians, patients, and families are all eager to try and find something that will help this group of sufferers. One promising new therapy is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced like the word “act,” as opposed to saying it like A-C-T). [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]