Showing posts tagged eating disorders
whatssleftofme: A eating disorder is not always a ‘thin person’ and a thin person does not always have a eating disorder. Educate yourself.

whatssleftofme:

A eating disorder is not always a ‘thin person’ and a thin person does not always have a eating disorder. Educate yourself.

(Reblogged from edawareness)

Promoting Anorexia: An Interview With Kenneth Tong. This Was No Hoax

donewiththisshit:

atchka:

Remember this asshole?

Yeah, he got reamed. Check it out.

This guy is getting way too much attention for actively ignoring medical and psychological understandings of health in favor of his personal standards of beauty and worth. 

I couldn’t even get through that whole thing - he makes me want to vomit. I didn’t agree with everything the author said, either (mainly the “objective mental illness” part, because medicalization isn’t exactly “objective” - mental illnesses are very much socially constructed, though that’s not to undermine what she’s saying about the seriousness of anorexia), but it’s nice to see someone take him down a notch.

(Source: atchka)

(Reblogged from entre-deux-femmes)

Tong is wrong, but so is #NoSizeZero

(Clearly all of my posts today are going to be about what’s trending on Twitter…)

Like I’ve said before (here, here, and here), one of my biggest problems with the body acceptance / body image awareness movement, aside from its tendency towards racism and heterosexism, is its obvious hypocrisy in terms of preference for a particular type of body. Dove’s campaign for “real beauty,” which basically only depicts women of the same general size, is a perfect example of this, as is the #NoSizeZero hashtag on Twitter, which seems to be trending in response to Kenneth Tong’s Twitter. Tong promotes anorexia as a lifestyle and regularly tweets misogynistic, fat-phobic posts about women’s bodies and the importance of being a perfect size zero. 

His posts make me angry enough to vomit, but I’m upset that once again, the idea of body acceptance is translating into anti-anorexic and anti-skinny responses to this man. The #TongIsWrong trend I understand, but why does no one thing to tweet #YesAllSizes rather than #NoSizeZero? Why respond to the negativity with more negativity when the idea is to accept everyone’s body, regardless of its size? Let’s not forget that some people are naturally thin and that people of all sizes suffer from eating disorders — adding one more negative voice to a culture obsessed with criticizing “imperfect” bodies doesn’t really help counter Tong’s message.

treeswithoutleaves:

treeswithoutleaves:

(Source: letsmakethissimple)

(Reblogged from bauhaus77)
“
Fat people are often supported in hating their bodies, in starving themselves, in engaging in unsafe exercise and in seeking out weight loss by any means necessary. A thin person who does these things is considered mentally ill. A fat person who does these things is redeemed by them. This is why our culture has no concept of a fat person who also has an eating disorder. If you’re fat, it’s not an ED — it’s a lifestyle change.

Lesley Kinzel (via heyfatchick)

It kills me every time I see someone winning one of those ridiculous weight loss shows for losing xxx lbs. and getting to the same weight I’ve seen others hospitalized for, just like it kills me every time I watch TV and see another ridiculous diet commercial following an advertisement for fast food. We live in a society that can’t stop eating, can’t stop dieting, and where you’re hated for being too fat but criticized for being too thin. Then we look at the obesity epidemic and the fact that eating disorders are also on the rise and wonder how that could be possible. Really? Everything about our culture and food is severely fucked up…

(Source: serafinalongarina)

(Reblogged from anarchofeminist)
thebadromancer: RIP.  Isabelle Caro. <3 What a wonderfully inspiring woman.  T_T “Isabelle Caro died on 17 November 2010 in Tokyo, Japan, after spending about two weeks in hospital with acute respiratory disease although nobody knows the cause of her death. Her family only reported Isabelle’s death to the media on December 29, 2010.”  View high resolution

thebadromancer:

RIP. 

Isabelle Caro. <3

What a wonderfully inspiring woman. 

T_T

“Isabelle Caro died on 17 November 2010 in Tokyo, Japan, after spending about two weeks in hospital with acute respiratory disease although nobody knows the cause of her death. Her family only reported Isabelle’s death to the media on December 29, 2010.” 

(Reblogged from thebadromancer)

: Help me?

Okay below is my first draft for the appeal I’m filing. It hurts me too much to read it over and correct/improve it myself, and it really, really, really, really, really sucks. So if you have the time, please be brutal:


xxx ———— Street
city, state xxxxx


June 24, 2010


Address block
…

I wish you the best of luck with this — I’m keeping my fingers crossed! Now, a few grammatical things:

Last line of the first paragraph should read “I am writing to appeal for a restoration of this scholarship.”

In the fourth paragraph, you already mention your father having to pay for your books, so the “in addition” transition is unnecessary. To make it less wordy: “The combination of my father’s sudden unemployment and the cost of having to pay for my scholastic needs was a serious blow to their financial standing.”

Small proofreading error in the next paragraph: “His teachers noticed that although very bright, he was lagging behind his peers in terms of maturity.” You wrote both “falling” and “lagging” (probably while editing) and forgot to take out the extra word. In that same paragraph, you wrote: “The process was, and still is expensive. The average test to determine my brother’s mental state ran my parents $1,000 minimum; as he needed MRIs and naturalistic observation screenings almost weekly before a solid diagnosis could be made. After several months of testing, it has been concluded that my younger brother has Aspergers’s Syndrome.” The comma in the first sentence isn’t needed, but since “and still is” is a mild interjection, you can either make that a parenthetical comment or use two commas (one before and one after the interjection). It might read better that way. Also, the second clause in the next sentence doesn’t stand on it’s own, so you should replace the semi-colon with a comma: “The process was and still is expensive. The average test to determine my brother’s mental state ran my parents $1,000 minimum, as he needed MRIs and naturalistic observation screenings almost weekly before a solid diagnosis could be made. After several months of testing, my younger brother has been diagnosed with Aspergers’s Syndrome.” The change in the last sentence isn’t necessary, it’s just less wordy without the “has been concluded.”

In the eighth paragraph, you wrote: “Being faced with setback after setback caused my school performance began to drop dramatically.” Eliminate one of those words. (Example: “After being faced with setback after setback, my school performance began to drop dramatically.”) After that, you wrote: “Although the stipulations of maintaining the scholarship are easily seen, it is clear that I was faced with random and unusual circumstances that I could not prepare for.” Awkward syntax — I’d suggest this: “Although I understood the requirements needed to maintain my scholarship, I was faced with severe and unpredictable circumstances that I was not prepared to handle.”

Taking off my English major hat, I just have one suggestion from the ED side of things. In the second paragraph, I would be a little bit more explicit with the cognitive effects of bulimia. Assume they know absolutely nothing about eating disorders. My suggestion (bolded my additions and re-wording/suggestions): “I am writing this appeal because of a failure to take into account my adverse circumstances and medical condition. At the age of 10, I developed an eating disorder. I was bulimic for eight years before being formally diagnosed shortly after my 18th birthday. In the medical community, eating disorders are not considered prevalent enough to qualify as a disability, despite their devastating physical, emotional, and cognitive effects. In addition to the physical ailments and stress bulimia causes, it severely disrupts an individual’s thought processes and memory functioning, which directly affects performance in school.  Furthermore, health insurance companies do not provide the adequate benefits with which to undergo the qualification examinations unless the patient is at risk of imminent death. I.e.; the patient must be hospitalized for an extended period of time, or on life support before the insurance company intervenes. These are extreme and rare cases—a loophole of responsibility insurance companies. This is why I could not file for educational benefits.”

I basically just added some information in there about the cognitive effects of an eating disorder, because it seems most relevant. I don’t know a whole lot about appeals, but I assume this will be seen by some sort of committee, in which case you want to do everything you can to make sure someone in that room sympathizes with you. Depending on how many people see it, my bet is that at least one person will have had experiences with eating disorders or have a person in their lives they care about with an eating disorder. You want to make sure that person has the most convincing information possible to help advocate for you.

Like I said, I’m an English major, so my writing experience is in writing essays, and everything else, I’m getting from my thoughts on the ED side of things. I’m not an expert on the appeal process at all, so aside from the grammatical things, these are just my personal suggestions. Hopefully it will help nonetheless. Again, good luck! I’m rooting for you!

Gender differences in conceptualizing food

Ever notice how often women call themselves “bad” for eating in a certain way? “Oh, I’m being so bad right now!” or “I can be bad, just this once…” or “I was bad today, I shouldn’t eat this.” I do this to, as much as it bothers me. If I was “good” today (read: ate under x calories, burned x calories at the gym, etc.), that means I can eat dessert and not feel like a terrible person because of it (but I will, anyway).

A lot of us will probably justify this by attributing these feelings to not wanting to be greedy (reasonable), or attempting to be health-conscious (also reasonable), but it’s interesting that you rarely hear men talk like this. I’m sure part of it is about greed and gluttony, but only in the sense that women are brought up to believe that their desires are somehow wrong or that they should feel guilty for having any desires in the first place. Men don’t necessarily have a particularly healthy relationship with food in our culture, either, but they’re less likely to feel like they don’t deserve to “indulge” or take what they want. We women, on the other hand, seem to believe there’s something intrinsically wrong with food, that there’s also something wrong with us for wanting it, and that taking what we want will result in an immediate and obvious weight gain that will show the world how awful and undisciplined we are. We’re basically taught to be ashamed for taking up space.

That’s not to say this craze about being “healthy” in a fast food nation is unreasonable, but it certainly manifests differently according to gender. Men don’t just want to be healthy; they want to bulk up, be more muscular, take up more space. Women don’t just want to be healthy, either; we want to be slim, toned, and often, even invisible.

(Note: Men are not immune to disordered eating, but women are much more likely to actually develop eating disorders… and I’m willing to bet that even the types of eating disorders they tend to develop show more gender distinctions. It would be an interesting topic to do more research on, but I just wanted to point out that I’m not saying men can’t or never do develop eating disorders.)

For some reason, all my classes start with the most uncomfortable topics ever. Suicide? Eating disorders? On the first day? WHY?