ED Bites

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Body dissatisfaction and body dysmorphia are some of the most frequently discussed symptoms of EDs. In his work on the “transdiagnostic model” of EDs, Christopher Fairburn asserts that these two features not only unite all of the different ED diagnoses but also are at the heart cause of the disorder. Although I don’t agree with [...]

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 [...]

{{I’m busy this week and doing some traveling, so I probably won’t have as much time as I normally would to blog. As such, I’m pulling some posts out of the archives. I got a lot of positive feedback about this post, so I decided to dust it off and post it again. I hope [...]

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 [...]

Lots of other mental health conditions commonly co-occur with eating disorders. I’ve blogged before about the links between OCD and EDs, and I’ve tangentially talked about links to depression and other anxiety disorders. But a paper published this week in the journal Psychopathology (von Lojewski, Fisher, & Abraham, 2013) reminded me that I haven’t yet [...]