ED Bites

In psychology, mindfulness is a really hot topic. It’s everywhere, and plenty of research is showing that it can be helpful in managing anxiety, depression, and many of the other woes of modern living. Not surprisingly, mindfulness has also become extremely popular in the eating disorder field. We need to learn how to “be in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In honor of the last day of eating disorders awareness week, I thought I would do a post on what we know about preventing EDs. A lot of what is discussed during the week (besides the obvious “awareness” bit) is how to prevent EDs. So for those of you that don’t have much time to [...]

It seems you can’t go anywhere without seeing “healthy eating,” anti-obesity, weight loss messages. They’re literally everywhere. Besides the magazines in the grocery store checkout lines, Pinterest boards, and mass media, children are receiving lots of these messages in school. More and more schools, it seems, are limiting sweets that can be brought in for [...]