Food rituals are pretty common among individuals with eating disorders… cutting things into tiny pieces, chewing a certain number of time, mixing weird things, eating everything separate, picking food apart, etc.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never been terribly successful in eliminating my own food rituals.  As I was miserably failing my goal to “eat a bagel normally” this morning, I was thinking about what it was that seemed so necessary about the rituals.
I don’t think that cutting food up changes the calories.  I don’t pick things …

I’ve been told more than a couple of times that negative body image is one of the last things to go in eating disorder recovery. Doesn’t that seem unfair? You want to think that you’ll feel better and be more accepting of yourself with the start of treatment, and that will motivate you to eat better and take care of yourself and move on past the disorder. And maybe at some point in treatment the nutrition kicks in and decreases the depression and anxiety that starvation heightens… …

What’s the value of mental health blogging? I stumbled upon this post on The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive, where Seaneen discusses the role that blogging has played in her struggle with bipolar disorder. At the end of the post she poses a question:
What are your views on mental health blogging? If you have a blog, why did you start writing it?
I wrote this in her comments (in case it sounds familiar), but I think that mental health blogging is valuable for several reasons:

It can provide …

This question (turned argument) was posed the other night… Often when you sit down at a restaurant your waiter will come and sit a basket of bread (or tortilla chips if you’re at a Mexican restaurant) on the table–correct? Now, maybe you are recovering from bulimia and that basket of bread is really triggering. Is it disordered to say to the waiter, “No thanks, we don’t need the bread”?
Therapists response: Yes that is disordered because you should be able to have the bread on the table. If …