Laura from “Eating With Your Anorexic” posted something the other day, that I just HAD to comment on:
Something new is happening in eating disorders. The voice of eating disorder patients is less stereotyped, more empowered, and less victimized. Why? I attribute the changes to two separate but interacting elements: the cross-pollination of the Internet, and the shifting narratives of the treatment community.
Before the Internet, our exposure to literature about eating disorders was limited to the few books that happened to be on the bookstore shelves that year and the occasional …

There are lots of reasons to NOT seek treatment, and many of them are valid. However, reasonable or not, they are still excuses and they help keep you sick.

Note: While there is REAL research on barriers to treatment, this post only contains my opinion. Maybe I’ll blog about the factual stuff later…

The line, “You are a human being, not a human being,” would be on my “top 10 overused phrases in therapy” list (were such a list to exist). However, this concept was the first thing to come to mind when I was reading the article, The Reward of Doing “Something”:
People have this inclination to do more, even if what they do is trivial.
Experiments have shown that the desire for activity is quite strong; people will go to a lot of trouble to maintain their desired level of activity, which can …

Sometimes I think that blankets should be banned in group therapy. Now really, how much are you getting out of group if your head is under the blanket?

{fade to the vultures sitting on a dead tree}
Buzzy: Hey, Flaps, what we gonna do?
Flaps: I don’t know. What you wanna do?
Ziggy: I got it! Let’s flap over to the east side of the jungle! They’ve always got a bit of action, a bit of a swinging scene.  All right?
Buzzy: Ah, come off it! Things are right dead all over.
Ziggy: You mean you wish they were! [laughs]
Dizzy: Very funny.
Buzzy: Okay, so what we gonna do?
Flaps: I don’t know, what you wanna do?
Buzzy: Look, Flaps, …

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…

It has occurred to me lately how often I say “I don’t know” in my appointments (possibly even more often than I say “I know” !). My therapist has come to totally disregard the phrase, which for me, has become very versatile:

Type 1: the how-did-you-feel-in-that-situation “I don’t know”

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 …