ED Bites

Search for “eating disorders” on Google News, and I guarantee you that over half of the coverage will be about celebrities with EDs. Some of that is our culture’s serious addiction to celebrities that does no one any good. But some of this coverage has to do with celebrities sharing their stories of EDs or [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]