Recently, my therapist started leading a group that I’m in. Most people who’ve done any kind of intense treatment (inpatient, residential, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, etc), have probably had this experience (myself included) but it’s pretty rare that my therapist now either facilitates or…

I had a dietitian call me this once… and I’m sure she didn’t create the label just for me. By “dishonest” she meant that I wasn’t a vegetarian for moral reasons, but for ED reasons.
If you’ve ever been residential, you know that there is a much higher incidence of vegetarianism in eating disorder patients than in the general population (similar to how there are so many more runners (even marathoners!) with EDs… but I’ll save that thought for another day). Coincidence? Probably not.
Converting to vegetarianism is often …

Well, I am officially the last one to jump on the “New Psychotherapy Has Potential to Treat Majority Of Cases Of Eating Disorders” article. I’ll admit, this journalist did a great job with his headline — not only did I read the article, but I went on to read up on CBT-E.
To quickly define CBT, Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Eating Disorders explains:
The strategy underpinning CBT-E is to construct a ‘formulation’ (or set of hypotheses) of the processes that are maintaining the patient’s psychopathology and use it to identify …

Around one third of patients [with anorexia] recovery fully; another third improve significantly and the last third do not recover.
–Eating Disorders Factfile

I had a therapist explain this statistic to me once…
Group 1: Full recovery – The individual either recovers on her own or with treatment. The duration of the illness doesn’t really matter… what’s important is that the she goes on to live a relatively symptom-free life.
Group 2: Significant improvement – This could mean two things: Either the individual improves to a point where she can have a life …

From an Episode of House, MD: Episode 3-12, One Day, One Room

In case you haven’t seen it, a girl has been raped and refuses to talk about the trauma. These are the last lines of the episode.
CUDDY: She’s gonna be okay.
HOUSE: Yeah, it’s that simple.
CUDDY: She’s talking about what happened. That’s huge. You did good.
HOUSE: Everyone will tell you… that that’s what we gotta make her do. We have to help her, right? Except we can’t. We drag out her story. Tell each other that it’ll help her heal. …

This is not going to be an insightful or even remotely academically-based post — nope, just something that’s on my mind today: Positive Self Talk (PST).  I have to know… does this actually help anyone?  If you are having a lousy body image day and stand in the mirror and tell yourself that you are a beautiful person… do you feel better?  Because on these days when I am truly depressed over weight or self-image or the like, there is NO self-love coming out of my mouth.  These are days …

“I’m not going to rearrange the furniture on the deck of the Titanic.” — Rogers Morton
I think that during recovery, a lot of people get stuck rearranging deck chairs. While you’re spending all this time working on some trivial issue, your overall recovery progress is stagnant (at best).
Examples from my own history:
* Dozens of Dermatologist appointments during the height of my eating disorder (I’m sure my acne was caused mostly by nutrition issues). When asking my Dermatologist about the depression side-effect of Accutane (since I was already …