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 [...]

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 [...]

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). [...]

In the first two blog posts of this series, I’ve looked at how researchers define recovery, and how patients do so. Now, I want to look at what factors predict recovery in eating disorders. But first, a note. When I talk about things that predict a negative outcome, it’s possible that you might recognize some [...]

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 [...]

It’s a question I’ve been asked many times: what, exactly, is a binge anyway? Is it eating too much? Eating a lot of food? What? The DSM isn’t necessarily much more helpful. Take the new criteria for Binge Eating Disorder (via Mayo Clinic, as the APA pulled down the draft criteria from their website) that [...]