I recently watched the Netflix documentary on Homo naledi, Cave of Bones. The most intriguing thing to me was the “X marks the spot,” or hash marks as they called them, in the cave. Daniel Friedman: Flickr.com On the one hand, it seems unremarkable…what symbol would any of us be prone to carve in a rock? Hardly a circle or polygon. But on the other hand, why not simply two or three either vertical or horizontal parallel lines, or an “N” rather than an “X”? And why did the Blombus cave have these marks made by early Homo sapiens and so too did the caves in Gibraltar made by Neanderthals? Is th ..read more

 by Kerrie Baldwin Back in 2012, I had been managing my eating disorder for a full decade. Restriction had enslaved me for ten very long years, and I could no longer deny that my body and mind were crumbling, that this mode was not sustainable. As I desperately searched the Internet for an escape hatch, I discovered Gwyneth’s first website. (continue reading below) Available on Amazon now I devoured the information there and, with the encouragement offered by this community, I soon dove into the thrilling promise of re-feeding and repairing my body. I expected that my boundless eating an ..read more

I often get asked this question from those embarking on applying the Homeodynamic Recovery Method (HDRM). Presumably it gets asked because we’ve designed the entire eating disorder treatment system as a get-in/get-out medical stabilization process and surrogates for “recovered” status are limited to a body weight and acceptable biomarker readings (resting heart rate, blood work and the like). If everything you’ve experienced to date has framed your process of recovery as something you do rather than something you are, it’s understandable you ask: “When will I be done?” Caroline: Flickr.com HD ..read more

This post has a bit more of me in it than is usual, but I think my own experience may be of value to others who regularly read posts at the Eating Disorder Institute. Jam Zhang: Flickr.com I’ve often reinforced the fact that genes are not destiny, and that’s because it’s the truth. There’s an entire lineage on my maternal side with the genes that are linked to celiac disease but few of us have the condition. Genes are like literary tools in a mystery book: they might suggest foreshadowing, but then again it could be the reader is going to be thrown entirely off track by their presence, or per ..read more

That seems like a fitting title for what I want to discuss today. More important things are happening in the world now. Discussing eating disorders at all seems elitist, superficial and ultimately discordant to many at the moment. Sophie Charlotte: Flickr.com Nonetheless, there’s an important reason in my mind why eating disorders matter more now and not less. And no, it’s not actually because Trump is president; it’s because we live on a finite planet of dwindling resources with too many of us here (and aging) at one time. We are sliding into a bickering rating system for how much more impor ..read more

“He made me sit and listen to him for hours and hours while he was going on about how unattractive he thought fat was, how he could barely stand the loss of my skinny body, how he thought I had tricked him into believing I could be thin. He made constant remarks about my weight, my intake and my lack of exercise, made me look at pictures of myself as underweight so I could see for myself how beautiful I looked.” Deviant Art: alicexz The above quote is from someone navigating her recovery process from an eating disorder. What follows is an edited version of the response I provided on the disc ..read more

The services provided on this site are five years old as of October 31, 2016. There have been two name changes and three distinct online identities in that time frame as I have developed my own patient advocacy practice within the eating disorder treatment space. Each shift reflects, hopefully, improvements in our service offering and our ability to provide well-researched and conflict-of-interest-free information on how adults with eating disorders might navigate the condition into complete remission. Nick Lee: Flickr.com This latest change from Your Eatopia to The Eating Disorder Institute ..read more

Unless we suffer significant levels of chronic depression, we all tend to believe in our own exceptionalism, or illusory superiority. 1 Fully 80% of us believe ourselves to be above-average drivers and that’s a statistical impossibility given that the majority of us must be average drivers at best. 2 Given illusory superiority is the norm in human experience, it probably has some good evolutionary value. Getting to a stable level of practicing remission from an active eating disorder takes a very long time and is usually measured in multiple years, not months. It’s tempting to assume that it’s ..read more

Imagine you are definitely (BMI) 30++. You have had an active eating disorder for years. You restrict your food intake every. single. day. You have a host of mounting health problems and the number on the scale tells you and everyone else that you are “obese” and your health problems are all about your weight and nothing but your weight. Sharon Brogan: Flickr.com You stumble onto this website. You realize that there’s a very strong likelihood that the source of all your health problems is the fact that you under eat severely. You are shocked. You e-mail me as this site’s owner (and everyone w ..read more

Melissa Fabello recently asked her followers on Twitter what kind of book is lacking in the literature on body image that we might want to see written and published. My response is too long to fit in 140 characters, and so I will identify here what is I think is needed. Binary Koala: Flickr.com First up would be what we need to stop doing when we talk body image: No more just swapping out the “ism’s”: Big strong fit healthy girls just swaps out fattism with ableism and healthism. Body positivity and body love are terms that cannot be defined: if several centuries’ worth of poets, scholars an ..read more