hooooooooly shit
this just popped into my email
um, considering that many EDs and DEHs are partially caused by control issues, is it really prudent to frame temporarily* getting over an ED/DEHs as “how I ganed control over my disordered eating habits”???
*I use temporarily here because ED/DEHs are a life-long struggle. just because you get over them once doesn’t mean they won’t pop back up again in the future. and I am saying this as someone who struggles with ED/DEHs, fyi.
More men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders, but are struggling to receive help:
As recently as a decade ago, clinicians believed that only 5 percent of anorexics were male. Current estimates suggest it’s closer to 20 percent and rising fast: More men are getting ill, and more are being diagnosed. (One well-regarded Canadian study puts the number at 30 percent.) It’s unclear why, but certainly twenty years of lean, muscular male physiques in advertising, movies, sports, and of course, magazines like GQ—from Marky Mark to Brad Pitt to David Beckham—have changed the way both men and women regard the male body. And thanks to the web, those images are easy to seek out and collect. For American men, the chiseled six-pack has become the fetishized equivalent of bigger breasts. Like all fetish objects, it stands for something deeply desired: social acceptance, the love of a parent or partner, happiness.
But many afflicted men feel too stigmatized to go to a doctor—and many doctors don’t recognize the early, ambiguous symptoms. ‘It is not what a primary-care physician will consider at first glance,’ says Mark Warren, founder of the Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders. ‘Often it won’t be what they consider at fourth or fifth glance.’
Diagnosis is hard. Finding treatment is even harder. Many residential centers don’t admit men, out of a belief that treatment should be sex-specific.
(via longreads)
Came across this article yesterday in the NY Times by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers. Here’s an excerpt.
I’d long assumed that wild animals stayed effortlessly lean and healthy. I’d always thought that wild animals ate until they were full and then prudently stopped. But in fact, given the chance, many wild fish, reptiles, birds and mammals overindulge. Sometimes spectacularly so. Abundance plus access — the twin downfalls of many a human dieter — can challenge wild animals, too.
Although we may think of food in the wild as hard to come by, at certain times of the year and under certain conditions, the supply may be unlimited. Many gorge, stopping only when their digestive tracts literally cannot take any more. Tamarin monkeys have been seen to eat so many berries in one sitting that their intestines are overwhelmed and they soon excrete the same whole fruits they recently gobbled down.
Mark Edwards, an animal nutrition expert, told me, “We’re all hard-wired to consume resources in excess of daily requirements. I can’t think of a species that doesn’t.” Wild animals can get fat with unfettered access to food.
Of course, animals also fatten normally — and healthily — in response to seasonal and life cycles. Remarkably, it is the landscape around an animal that determines whether its weight stays steady or rises.
And nature imposes its own “weight-maintenance plan” on wild animals. Cyclical periods of food scarcity are typical. Threats from predators limit access to food. Weight goes up, but it also comes down. If you want to lose weight the wild animal way, decrease the abundance of food around yourself and interrupt your access to it. And expend lots of energy in the daily hunt for food. In other words: change your environment.
I’ve said it before, but I believe a huge part of my eating disorder recovery is that I’ve accepted my true nature - I AM A BINGER. In the last 4 years, there are still many times when I’ll consume what may be considered “too much” food - but it’s no longer secretive, or full of guilt/shame. I found that when I stopped giving power to “food rules,” and the binges themselves, I was able to live in peace and maintain a steady weight.
I’ll probably always overeat, so I’ll continue balancing out the days around that. Eating half a melon is perfect for when the “binge brain” is quiet.
Today is my blog’s third birthday. I’m honoring my relationship with food as I do every single day: don’t worry about right/wrong. Just listen to my body/mind and eat what I want.
- Lynn
I just realized that on Facebook, you can now post about “New Eating Habits” or “Weight Loss,” with photographic evidence, to boot. What the hell? Don’t enough people already have disordered eating or eating disorders???
Top
