ED Bites

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

You can’t avoid the magazines. You can try, but the images are everywhere: the grocery store check-out aisle, the book store, the corner newsstand. And almost every single one–especially those magazines that are household names or otherwise extremely popular–has a digitally altered celebrity or model on the front. I don’t have an objection to mild [...]

It’s very rare that I do guest posts here at ED Bites, but occasionally I do make an exception, and this is one of them. The post stemmed from a discussion at the ED Bites Facebook page, and after reading Holly’s eloquent thoughts and views on the subject, I asked her to explain them in [...]

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 [...]

A Swedish clothing store creates more realistic mannequins and the Internet collectively loses its shit. The photo (right) was shared earlier this week on Facebook by Women’s Rights News and gathered more than 2800 comments, 16,000 shares, and 50,000 likes. As Yahoo! Shine writer Elise Sole noted, “That’s a lot of attention for a hunk of fiber glass and [...]

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 [...]

Last month, I was asked to contribute an essay to the magazine Emirates Woman about whether the media causes EDs. They were having a debate–a 2-page spread–between two different people about the relative importance of EDs and the media. My editor emailed me the final copy today, and I’m excited to share it with you. [...]