I read this post on Dads and Daughters With Eating Disorders: Eating Disorders – Weights & Scales
To summarize:
Because her health is directly related to her weight.  Measured by scales.
Her recovery is directly related to her weight.  Measured by scales.
Her life is directly related to her weight.  Measured by scales.
Weight matters.
And scales matter because they measure weight.
I posted a comment on this post, which hasn’t been approved yet, but I decided that I wanted to discuss the issue on Grey Thinking anyway.
Yes, weight is inexorably tied to health and to recovery.  …

Last night I watched all of the “In Treatment” Sophie episodes.  I am just engrossed in this show.  I feel so connected to the patients and to Paul.  I think that they discuss such intimate details that I feel like I am part of some deep relationship.  I can relate to a lot of what the patients say, so Paul’s responses are meaningful to me.  It’s also funny that I don’t feel comfortable ending therapy at the end of each season.  In episode nine of Sophie I was thinking, “No!  …

Everyone should go and read the discussion about this post — so many interesting things have been said from people with very different beliefs about the cause and treatment of eating disorders.  One question stood out to me, though:
Who would you go to if your child was ill?
I’m going to change the question a little bit:  What would you do if your child were ill?
I’ve thought about this a lot since “discovering” the Maudsley Method (I had never heard of it until a couple of years ago).  Maudsley contradicts many …

I know a lot of patients (and professionals) who refer to their eating disorder as “Ed” (E.D.).  I’ve always been a little wary of this… it feels weird to name a disorder that I’m struggling with.  It makes me feel like I have schizophrenia or DID or something.  However, in some ways it helps to thing of the eating disorder as a separate voice.  It helps me to separate what I want from what the eating disorder wants.
My dietitian once told me “don’t bring Ed to dinner – leave him …

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 …