I’m finally catching up on some of my “must read” articles. Tonight I got a chance to read an article on a new possible diagnostic system for eating disorders in the DSM-V. “Broad Categories for the Diagnosis of Eating Disorders (BCD-ED): An Alternative System for Classification.”  You could go ahead and download it – the full text is available online for free – but I can sum the whole thing up in a couple of words:
Take the DSM-IV and add water.
Basically the new system expands each eating disorder …

“Currently, we are concerned about young people using the Internet, eating too much, spending irresponsibly, and being promiscuous, and these worries are being expressed in the language of addiction. The medical terminology helps us to believe we’re avoiding moralization or blame, and popular science has given us a sound bite of pseudo-neurology to support our prejudices. For these problems, addiction is little more than a fig leaf for a realistic understanding that would address why people return to unhelpful ways of coping with isolation, stress, and depression. Instead, we prefer …

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 …