...Until Eating Disorders Are No More
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An eating disorder is nothing to be ashamed of!
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Be careful what you wish for… because you might get treated like a woman.
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How to handle a drunk girl passed out on your couch.
wow perfect
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“Understanding what intersex means also helps with understanding what it doesn’t mean. Our bodies are natural and normal and healthy; while some...”
Click the title for my full write-up from Lobby Day last week!
“We hold a Congressional Briefing every time there’s a Lobby Day to offer in-depth testimonies from a variety of people who have been effected by eating disorders. This Spring, the spotlight was on diversity, because eating disorders don’t discriminate by race, gender, orientation, cultural background, or socioeconomic status.
Among the speakers was Sarah Yeung, an immigrant from Hong Kong, shared a moving testimony about developing an eating disorder after relocating to the U.S. and the challenges she faced getting treatment. Another woman named Tracy Smith spoke on behalf of her daughter, Reanna, who died while waiting for treatment to be approved. Tracy had been told by her insurance company that her daughter’s eating disorder was not “life threatening” and denied treatment. Desperate, Tracy took a new job with a better insurance plan, but Reanna died just two weeks before the plan would have come into effect.
I wish these were uncommon stories. But I hear them all the time. In a country like the United States where eating disorders have been observed, treated, and diagnosed for over half a century, it is shameful and tragic and wrong that people are dying from a treatable and preventable problem in record numbers.”
The sign I’m holding reads: ‘ I support FREED because some people still don’t believe men can get eating disorders. I was anorexic for two years.’
Given that it’s Eating Disorder Awareness Week, it seems appropriate to be talking about books like The Slender Trap by Art Psychotherapist and eating disorder specialist Lauren Lazar Stern. The Slender Trap is a workbook full of exercises to challenge the reader to think about eating habits and body image in different ways, and could serve as a good companion piece to a treatment program. However, when it comes to resources like this which are more in the “self-help” realm, I caution strongly against trying to rely on a single resource without any guidance from a qualified treatment professional (a sentiment echoed in the book’s introduction).
Going through The Slender Trap, I must say I’m impressed with how thorough it addresses the topic of body image and eating disorders. From genetics and body size, to disordered eating and the effects of dieting on the body, to exercise addiction and nutrition, it isn’t strictly a workbook in the sense that it goes a long way in educating the reader before and after the exercises.
Read the full review here!
Part 2 of the Reasons for Recovery Blog Series is here to continue the countdown to Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Today it’s my turn to take on the subject:
“The push to do all the work necessary to recover was that anorexia was turning me into the kind of person I didn’t want to be. I was hurting friendships and relationships with excuses and lies. My grades were falling. So much of my time and energy was devoted to losing weight that I didn’t have much time for anything else, and all I had to show for it was a sunken face and an aching pain in the muscles around my heart. The choice to recover was the choice to start living my life again, for me.”
Check out the full post here.
Figured since Tumblr seems to be a world in and of itself, I’d put this up here on its own. This is an interview I did in November 2011 with Nate Eaton of WRIC Channel 8 on eating disorders in men and the roughly two years I suffered from anorexia while in college. I’m now fully recovered and spend a lot of my free time and energy doing eating disorder advocacy and activist work. I’m especially fond of the dynamic in this interview created by the fact that it’s a male reporter interviewing a male survivor.
I personally want to see the greater eating disorder conversation move away from being so split over things like gender. Men are underrepresented as it is, and too often it’s treated as new information that men can and do suffer from eating disorders just the same as women. As long as men are left out, left behind, or remain in the footnotes, the field as a whole cannot advance.
