ED Bites

I was always told that if I worked hard enough, I could recover. With hard work and time, the treatment centers told me, I would get well. I am, by most measures, doing well. I’m not “fully recovered,” nor do I really understand what that term means. But I am doing well. It’s a fact […]

It wasn’t long after I returned home to Michigan that the nightmares started. They weren’t overtly frightening or threatening- no boogeymen, no one chasing me. Instead, I found myself back at the treatment facility where I had spent the previous seven months. I was returning a failure. I had relapsed somehow, although I couldn’t tell […]

One of the things that helped me the most in recovery was finding something that was as interesting and enthralling for me as the AN once was. As I started to emerge from the AN and from starvation, I needed a reason to keep going. It’s one thing to eat in treatment, but I could […]

So my treatment team talks a lot about hunger cues and when the return and what they mean. I’m not saying I never had trouble with hunger cues because I did. But hunger cues aren’t the only game in town. Fullness cues are the flip side of hunger cues, and the generally receive the short […]

I recently did a guest blog for Kantor & Kantor about insurance barriers to ED treatment. It’s something I know a little a lot about. I wrote this piece for them, and I’m re-sharing it here. Happy reading!   A few years ago, I received a postcard in the mail from my health insurance company. […]

The eating disorder community loves personal narratives (especially of celebrities). Generally, the research and advocacy community prefers narratives of people who are well–or at least on their way to wellness. Some of this preference is strategic- sturm und drang stories don’t generally achieve donations or the message of hope that family and friends are looking […]

I’ve written volumes about eating disorders over the years–beginning before I was even diagnosed. Most of the writings were personal, private- scribbled by dim desk light as my roommate (any of them) snoozed in the bunk a few feet away. I didn’t create them as stories. They were more the semi-deranged ravings of someone who […]

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 […]

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 […]

No one knew what to do for me. The array of psychologists, dietitians, psychiatrists, physicians, and others that had been seeing me had essentially thrown up their hands. I needed to choose recovery, they said, and it was something I clearly wasn’t doing. Until I did so, there wasn’t anything they could do. I would […]