From dress shopping to weight-loss pressures, nuptials can open a Pandora’s box of body-image issues. Experts share advice on reducing the risk of new or worsening symptoms Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email It’s often expected to be the “happiest day of your life”, but the preparation for Brianna Woodward’s wedding had her crumpled on the kitchen floor, sobbing. The 36-year-old has struggled with body image and eating disorder symptoms since her early teens, but only received targeted psychological treatment briefly several years ago, after a dentist noticed the enamel of her teeth ..read more

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic suggests that the singer’s desire for a baby was the main source of her suffering. It’s a gendered simplification that exonerates the forces that killed her • This article contains spoilers for Back to Black Anyone who saw Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy is well aware of the injustices faced by Amy Winehouse during her 27 years of life. She endured addiction to alcohol and drugs, as well as bulimia, depression and self-harm. In Blake Fielder-Civil, she married a fame-hungry leech who has said he got her into crack and heroin. (“Of course I regret it,” he later s ..read more

Having reached the summit of cross-country skiing (again), the former Olympic champion opens up about a relapse that nearly thwarted her season Cross-country skiing at the elite level feels closer to survivalism than sport, a staredown with existential resistance that requires a tolerance for suffering bordering on inhumane and an appetite for pushing past the outer limits of what the body and mind believe is possible. Jessie Diggins calls it the “pain cave”, the place that endurance athletes enter when they’ve willed themselves beyond their breaking point and every muscle group is gripped wit ..read more

Garrick theatre, LondonChandran is brilliantly bratty in Rosie Day’s one-woman story of vulnerability masked by sarcasm and bravado Rosie Day’s one-woman play takes teen pain seriously. In a blank bedroom washed in lilac, this coming-of-age story deals not just in rite-of-passage angst but also in a roll call of traumas: grief, eating disorders, self-harm, sexual assault. This is not so much the klutzy call-to-arms it’s advertised as but a story of vulnerability covered by sarcasm and bravado. Day, who performed the play at Southwark Playhouse in 2022, was compelled to write it after reading t ..read more

Comments about our differences used to wound me. But then I was forced to confront my decades-long resentment “Why are you fat, and why is she thin,” a puzzled middle-aged man asked, as my identical twin Katy and I strolled into a restaurant in central Mumbai for a post-yoga samosa. It wasn’t the first time we had been asked this question – but each time it hurt just as much, and stoked a decades-long resentment towards my sister, who was always being told she was better looking than me. As children, we had relished in our identicalness and were joined at the hip. Physically, the only way peop ..read more

Beat chief says NHS bosses must end postcode lottery in care for people with avoidant restrictive food intake disorder The number of people in the UK who have a previously little-known eating disorder, in which those afflicted avoid many foods, has risen sevenfold in five years, figures show. The eating disorders charity Beat received 295 calls about avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (Arfid) in 2018 – comprising 2% of its 20,535 inquiries that year. However, it received 2,054 calls last year, which accounted for one in 10 of its 20,535 requests for help. Many were from children and you ..read more

Patients I’ve spoken to in the east of England were desperate for help, with dangerously low BMIs. On what possible grounds were they discharged? Last week, I had a long conversation with a woman who is trying desperately to loosen the awful grip of an eating disorder. She wanted to remain anonymous; for the sake of this article, I’ll call her Jane. She is in her 30s and lives in Norfolk. Her illness, first diagnosed when she was a teenager, is known as the restricting type of anorexia, meaning that she has a long history of drastically limiting her food intake to the point of self-starvation ..read more

Exclusive: Esther Ghey says she believes social media use left her daughter vulnerable, while killers were able to access violent content online ‘I want to make things better’: Esther Ghey on her hopes for online reform The mother of Brianna Ghey has called for her murder to be a “tipping point” in how society views “the mess” of the internet, warning that a generation of anxious young people will grow up lacking resilience. Esther Ghey said technology companies had a “moral responsibility” to restrict access to harmful online content. She supports a total ban on social media access for unde ..read more

Research on UPFs should be a wake-up call – but if people miss out on nutrients in a quest to avoid them, is it really helping? If you consumed a lot of news last year, you’d be forgiven for thinking that strawberry yoghurt wants to murder you. Since last spring, a new obsession has spread across Britain: have you heard? Don’t you know? UPF is our new food enemy. What is UPF? It is ultra-processed food. What is ultra-processed food? It can include cereal and sausages and fruit-flavoured yoghurts and instant soup. How exactly can I determine if something is ultra-murderous? Anecdotally, my frie ..read more

From chalk to rubbers and clay, there are a variety of reasons why those with pica syndrome yearn to eat non-foodstuffs. But is this dangerous? Mary (not her real name), a 20-year-old from Ireland, has just kicked her habit – of eating firelighters. “I got through a box of individually wrapped ones every six months for most of my adolescence,” she says, “but during exam season I would go through a box every three weeks. I would allow the firelighters to dry out in the box after opening them, as that was how I preferred them.” Mary has pica (pronounced pike-a) syndrome, often classified as an e ..read more