Eating Disorders: Seen Around The Web

Letters To My Body

Synchronized 

Today’s letter is very special to me because it was written by one of my very best Blends (Blog Friends), Jen (“a prior fat girl”). I had the opportunity to meet Jen in May at a blogger’s conference, and we became fast friends. I respect the journey that she has taken on, and she has now lost about 100 pounds through a proper diet and exercise. She chose her health above everything else, even when she was faced last year with the most tragic moment of her life. Her journey has been long, and she still fights battles along with the rest of us. To me, her letter is a great example of how to move forward and forgive yourself after years of abuse...
Read Synchronized in full here.



Laura's Soap Box

Being liked is overrated, too   

 

I hear a lot of complaining about eating disorder clinicians. I do a fair bit of complaining myself. But at least some of the time I remind myself that being disliked for doing your job isn't always a sign of doing it wrong: it is often a sign of good practice.

A doctor I admire wrote something on an ED message board this week: "You do not need to be the patient's friend, or confidant, and you shouldn't be someone she wants to bring home for dinner right now, as anyone that is doing their job with her will be working against the ED behaviors, and that is bound to make her angry"
Read Being liked in full here



The F Word Org

Celebs Come Out Of The ED Closet


In an OK! Magazine article, on September 17th, celebrities admit to their struggles with ED.  While the list leaves few surprises, as most have mentioned their past experiences with eating disorders in other magazines, it was refreshing to see a couple who have continuously denied ED rumors come clean.  One celeb I didn’t know about was Felicity Huffman.  Below are her thoughts about her eating disorder: “I was bulimic and anorexic for a while, just hating my body,” she’s said. “As an actress,...
Read ED Closet in full here. 


Happy Bodies

When I Knew Weight Didn't Matter

Even people who watched me go through it don’t really understand that I used to be anorexic.
Scene: I am a white, upper-middle-class American with a PhD mother and a successful father. Good-girl control freak, stubborn as hell—but I have never been thin.
Oh, I was not a “fat kid”. But puberty did as puberty does. Ample bust and wide hips at 5’3” meant that my doctor, with a conventional—in other words, BMI-based—concept of what a fifteen-year-old girl ought to weigh, gave me a carefully laid out speech about it, because as we all know, Fat Is Dangerous.
My mother, herself a recovered victim of a teenage eating disorder, had raised me with few food judgments, let me eat what and when and how I wanted for the most part. But she couldn’t shield...
Read When I Knew in full here.