I started this day in a panic over insurance.  I hate insurance.  I know that is such a blind, ignorant statement, but at this moment (and a lot of other moments) I really do.
Unfortunately it is a holiday (well, that in itself is not unfortunate), which means that neither insurance nor my treatment provider is working.  There’s nothing I can do about it today.  I can’t resubmit my claim or beg for more days.  I don’t know if I will be going to my appointment tomorrow.
I don’t want to spend …

I am not  an auditory learner.  At all.  I’m definitely a visual learner — in college I took copious notes, but didn’t really grasp the class material until later going over and reading those notes.  There’s just something about reading/writing that I need to get it.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t serve me too well in therapy.  I can have a great session and later that night not even remember half of what we talked about.  And on the same level, when I’m in session I don’t remember half of what I planned …

There have been many blog posts written on facebook and pro-anorexia, however, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about facebook and recovery in general.
Facebook is really unique in that EVERYONE (okay, almost everyone) is on it.  If you’re an eating disorder patient, this means your professionals, the other girls/guys you’re in treatment with, past patients, your school / work friends who may not know about your eating disorder, your family members, etc.  In what other realm do all of these people connect?
For most people, “Facebook stalking” means checking out what …

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 …

There have been many studies on family dynamics and the development of eating disorders, but I think that this is the first that I’ve seen that takes the next step and makes connections with specific symptomology: The dynamic relationship of parental personality traits with the personality and psychopathology traits of anorectic and bulimic daughters
Before I go further, I want to make two disclaimers.  First, from the article:
…we cannot infer a casual relationship between the parents’ personality traits and the daughter’s personality or psychopathology.  Moreover, correlational analysis does not define a …

I have been extra tired lately.  VERY extra-tired.  I go through spells of this and am always fairly convinced that there’s something wrong with me.  It’s not normal for someone to get eight hours of sleep and need one – two naps during the day.  I end up having conversations with my fiance like this:
grey: I think that I’m anemic.
fiance: oh?
grey: I have all the symptoms — fatigue, headache, difficulty concentrating, pale skin, leg cramps…
fiance: Funny, those sound like the same symptoms of anorexia.
Then, the next month…
grey: I think I …

The National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare and AstraZeneca conducted a really interesting survey on the impact of bipolar depression on people’s lives.  There were a couple of points in the study that really caught my attention:

The greatest concerns among people living with bipolar disorder are that their symptoms will have an impact on daily life, such as family, relationships, or job (73%), and that they will have long periods of depressive episodes (63%).
Ninety percent of people living with bipolar disorder said that they have difficulty managing or completing day-to-day …

“You get to define which experiences are traumatic for you, whether or not it would impact others in the same manner.  It’s not the objective facts that determine whether an event is traumatic,  but your own emotional experience of the event.”
– Dr. Kathleen Young

This is just a quick post, but I read this on a trauma blog tonight and thought it was so well-put.  This is something that i struggle with a lot — whether or not something “counts” as significant.  Maybe I am making it up.  Maybe it was …

I can’t remember the last time I saw “economist” and “bulimia” in the same headline — I usually don’t put the two together.  However, this article (Eating-Disorders Experts Challenge Economists’ Conclusions About Bulimia) made some pretty interesting statements:

Bulimia Nervosa (BN) is an addiction rather than an eating disorder
Black females are 50% more likely to be bulimic than white females
“Bulimic behavior” is less likely among wealthier, better-educated families.

You should definitely read the article, but I have a couple of things to add to these points:
1. BN is an addiction
I always compare …

Once in awhile, my therapist assigns me homework — usually for one of several reasons:

We only had time to touch on a subject in therapy and she wants me to keep thinking about it to flesh it out.
She wants to keep better track of my symptoms and I’m not very good at bringing up bad days (not because I’m manipulative and want to hide it from her, but because I never feel it’s “bad enough” to bring to her attention).
There’s something that I’m not able to say in person, and …