More Than Weight Had Been Lost: One Year Post-Residential
I sat in the waiting area clutching the hospital gown I had been given, waiting for one of the nurses to call my name. A shoeless girl shuffled by wheeling a pole with an IV bag dangling from the top. A long tube protruded from the IV bag, snaked down the pole, and disappeared into her nose. What am I doing here? One year ago today I was admitted into a residential treatment center in Philadelphia. Emotionally, I was already drained from battling just to get to the facility. I had been told more than two weeks earlier that I wasn’t making enough progress in the day treatment program and...
Read MoreDoes This Mannequin Make Me Look Fat?
In terms of self-serving tactics from the fashion industry, I thought we’d seen it all, what with rampant photoshopping and the culture of eating disorders among its spokeswomen (a.k.a., models). Then, last week, we on the Proud2BMe Media Response Team were alerted by our editor Emma to the latest trend among retailers — visibly underweight mannequins. Really? REALLY? Must we go to such ridiculous lengths to make people feel badly about what real human bodies look like? Apparently, yes. As I researched this bizarre trend for my post for Proud2BMe, I found out that the store that Emma...
Read MoreI Am So, So Tired of Recovery
Once again, while I’d prefer to be that ray of sunshine beaming down onto the dark and messy world of recovery, I wouldn’t be accurately portraying the middle ground if I did. Sometimes, this recovery thing really sucks. Fortunately, I’ve been in recovery long enough now that my new behaviors are starting to feel natural. I’m more taken aback to hear my eating disorder pipe up than I am to find myself doing something instinctively recovery-oriented. But still, there are times that I get really, really tired of all of this. Tired of spending five days a week in therapy. Tired of...
Read MoreWhy Your Diet Won’t Work (via Mirror-Mirror)
We’ve all heard about the fads: the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, cleanses, juicing, de-toxing, veganism (other than an ethically-motivated choice), gluten-free diets (that is, those that aren’t due to celiac’s or gluten sensitivities), raw food diets, liquid diets… The list goes on. Fad diets are marketed so cleverly and pictured so alluringly on Pinterest that it becomes quite easy to get caught up with the crowd. But the fact is that dieting doesn’t work, plain and simple. Recently, I had the opportunity to write an article for the eating disorder...
Read MoreWalk Unafraid: An Ode to 2015
I’ve never been a resolution-maker. It’s not that I’m against resolutions. I think my reluctance is simply because I know my attention span is unlikely to hold out for 365 days of focus. (As a side note, it’s hard to say whether my deadline-driven writing job I have in my “real life” is because of this characteristic, or in spite of it.) However, given the journey I’ve been on for the entirety of 2014 (and part of 2013), it seems appropriate to reflect on at least a few goals for 2015. And I acknowledge (to myself, mostly) that no goal I set will be...
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I'm a writer, a mental health activist, and a 20-something in recovery from an eating disorder. This blog chronicles my journey through the middle ground toward full recovery.
