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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Loving your body is seen as the Holy Grail of eating disorder recovery. It’s taught and preached from every street corner in the ED world. Loving your body and your appearance is seen as both the key to preventing EDs and recovering from them. I’m going to let you in on a secret: I’m in [...]

So ED Bites is kind of my blog (yes, I’m a bit possessive about it), but it’s also your blog. If people didn’t read, I probably wouldn’t write. Or at least, I’d gush my existential angst in a private journal or password-protected blog. I have plenty of ideas to blog about, but I’m not always [...]

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 [...]