NEDAwareness Week: Dieting and Eating Disorders
Statistics show that it’s actually a very small amount of people that develop eating disorders — 4% of people are diagnosed with bulimia in their lifetime, and somewhere between 4.2 and just 1% of people are diagnosed with anorexia. So why all the eating disorder awareness fuss? Because this week is about much more than just the eating disorders that make it to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It’s about addressing an entire culture of dieting and disordered eating. In the United States there are more than 108 million people who are on a diet. The weight-loss industry —...
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 MoreAUDIO: The Online Evolution of Pro-Ana
“This is the story of one lonely young girl who used the Internet to get better at starving herself behind her family’s back, and the online moment that changed her course to recovery.” About a month ago, I posted about the “pro-ana” phenomenon (which, along with “pro-mia” refers to anything promotes eating disorders). Pro-ana groups are online communities that insist eating disorders are lifestyle choices, not deadly mental illnesses. Pro-ana moderators host discussion forums in which members openly discuss their eating disorder behaviors,...
Read MoreIt’s Not (Just) About Weight
If you know even just slightly more about eating disorders than which celebrities have been stricken by one, then you probably know that eating disorders have a myriad of causes. Society, however, tends to zero in on the obsession with weight loss, which gives the impression that eating disorders, at their core, are exclusively about the pursuit of a “thin ideal.” This assumption might come in part from a general cultural allegiance to that ideal, an allegiance that manifests in fad diets, a preponderance of film stars and models who glamorize thinness, and the overuse of Photoshop to mold...
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