Some interesting thoughts on truth vs. lies from two of my favorite philosophers — Mark Twain and Gregory House.
“If you tell the truth, you don’t need to remember anything.”
– Mark Twain
“I don’t ask why patients lie, I just assume they all do.”
“It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what.”
“I’ve found that when you want to know the truth about someone that someone is probably the last person you should ask.”
– Gregory House

So, while everyone lies sometimes, people struggling with an eating …

Many months ago, there was an awesome cartoon on Therapy Tales that I have been dying to expand upon. It starts like this:
I’ve often thought about what my therapist would say were I to tell her about my blog. I bet she’d be thinking something like the following (note: I am NOT the artist that Therapy Tales is!):

Yeah, I don’t think we’ll be having this conversation any time soon…

I’ve been in an outpatient eating disorders group for awhile now.  There’s nothing special about it — it’s just a weekly / bi-weekly group at a treatment center, with women of all ages and ED diagnoses Everyone either has to be in outpatient therapy at the center or have done some kind of intense treatment there.   The latter is definitely the norm — most patients have stepped done from day treatment or IOP.
What’s weird right now is the make-up of the group: 5 restricting-anorexics and 2 binge eaters.  I …

Over the weekend, I had my first experience with Panera’s new calorie-labelled menus.  Honestly, I order the same couple of things every time, so the menus may have been there for a couple of weeks and I just haven’t noticed.  Regardless, I was a little shocked to see them.
I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that bothers me about having them there.  I’ve looked up the nutrition facts a hundred times, so it’s not like I’m seeing the calorie count for the first time.  Plus, I still ordered …

Several weeks ago I wrote a post — that I never published — titled, “I need an iPad for recovery.” There has been a lot of negative press about eating disorders and technology, so in contrast I’m going to explain how I’ve used my iPhone / iPad to aid my recovery…

There have been 100 (or so it seems) articles published in the last week about pro-eating disorder websites. It’s not a new phenomenon. I think it was in 2001 that Yahoo removed “pro-anorexia” sites hosted on their servers? More recently, it’s been an ongoing battle on facebook (searching out and removing unhealthy ED pages/groups). What has sparked the flurry of posts about it this week, though, is a new study in the American Journal of Public Health: “e-Ana and e-Mia: A Content Analysis of Pro–Eating Disorder Web Sites.”
I haven’t read …

It was really weird for me to look at anxiety as some positive indicator of change rather than some big red “stop! uncomfortableness ahead!” sign. If I were waiting for recovery to be comfortable, it was never going to happen. Challenging the eating disorder was never going to feel good (at least not while still in the thick of it).

When I saw an ED study with “All Better?” in the title, I of course had to read it.  Often when a friend or my husband asks me how an appointment was, I say “I’m cured!”  Maybe I’ll switch it up with “All better” in the future.  Anyway, this was a great article — one that I could write many posts on (and maybe will?). It’s really interesting to hear how patients define recovery and make treatment decisions. It’s also kind of amazing how similar thoughts/behaviors can be …

In Agile development, the focus factor (or productivity factor) is used for planning to help determine how many “real hours” you have to work on something. It’s the difference between “real hours” and “ideal hours.” I was thinking about how the eating disorder would affect my focus factor, and tried to break down the components into a pie chart…

As someone who’s struggled with an eating disorder for longer than I would like to admit, I’ve definitely had periods of falling into the “I suck at recovery” trap. It connects directly to the “I am wasting everyone’s time and don’t deserve help” trap as well as the “I’m actually fine and asking for too much because I’m attention-seeking like that” trap. And let’s not forget…