In honor of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week . . .

here's a wonderful short video to raise awareness and most of all hope. Because, as NEDA says, everybody knows somebody.

I wish you peace, hope, and recovery from whatever you struggle with.

Honor National Eating Disorders Awareness Week with Project BodyTalk

The last week of February is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, a week-long way to raise awareness of eating disorders, the devastation they cause, and hope for the future.

This year's theme is "It's Time to Talk About It," a notion I love because I'm all about talking about it, whatever "it" may be. Secrecy perpetuates bad feelings--let's get all the "its" out in the open. So I'm excited to be partnering with the National Eating Disorders Association to use that week to raise awareness and get people thinking in new ways--not just about eating disorders but about all of the crazy, disordered attitudes toward food and our bodies we hold in this country. This year I'm doing my part through Project BodyTalk, a web-based audio project I started two years ago to give people a place to talk about their relationships with food, eating, and their bodies.


If you're anywhere near the Syracuse, New York, area the last week of February, you can come to one of our open recording sessions. We'll put you in a private studio and let you record a commentary. You can choose to be anonymous, use a first name, or use your whole name. You can talk about something you love about your body, something you've struggled with, something you want other people to know about eating disorders--it's up to you. I'll be posting details on the sessions soon, but I expect they'll be held on campus at the Newhouse School, 3-8 p.m. every day that week. (Contact me for more info as the time gets closer.)

If, like most people, you don't live anywhere near Syracuse, or you can't make it to one of our sessions, you can still do your part by recording a commentary and sending it my way. Listen to some of the incredibly powerful and moving commentaries on the site for inspiration, and then make your own MP3 or MP4 file, or use a CD, and send it in through this handy web submission form. You can also hear an NPR program on Project BodyTalk here.

I hope you'll join me and Project BodyTalk this week for National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Because you know what? It's really freaking time to talk about it.

A little exercise for National Eeating Disorders Awareness Week

As I was reading this article on the "global obesity epidemic," I couldn't help thinking that it was in fact a blueprint for creating an eating disorder.

Let's take a closer look.

Wherever we read the words weight gain let's substitute the words weight loss. Wherever we read the word obesity, let's substitute the word anorexia. Instead of weight maintenance, let's go with weight loss. For prevent we'll say cause. For less, more.

Now let's look at the section of the article that talks about strategies for weight maintenance--I mean weight loss.

[The researcher] will argue that small daily changes, say using the stairs, are enough to cause incremental weight loss that can lead to anorexia. [The researcher], however, will make the case that much larger life-style changes - say exercising 60 to 90 minutes a day - are needed to cause weight loss.

"Our data from the National Weight Control Registry suggests strategies associated with successful weight loss include high levels of physical activity and conscious control of eating habits," said [the researcher]. "Dieters who remain diligent about diet and exercise are much more likely to gain weight back."

Examples of conscious control include frequent weighing, following a consistent dietary regimen across the weekdays and weekends, and taking fast action if small weight gains are observed. . . .



Actually you don't even have to change a lot of the language here, because the basic idea in maintaining weight loss is the same in inspiring weight loss. You've got to make changes in your life--in other words, you've got to behave in eating-disordered ways--in order to lose weight.

Frequent weighing, rigid eating behaviors, obsessive attention to dietary details. Yup. Sounds like an eating disorder to me.

And since this is, after all, a week when we are supposed to become more aware of eating disorders, I encourage you to go out and eat something and then not write it down. Have a second helping. Don't weigh yourself. Eat what you feel like. Stop when you're done.

In other words, eat normally--if we can even remember what that means.

National Eating Disorders Awareness Week

Today marks the start of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, and our family marked the day by taking part in the Virtual Family Dinner sponsored by Maudsley Parents. We sat down to dinner at a friend's house and ate chicken curry, salad, and homemade pumpkin chocolate chip muffins.

The food was delicious. Even more delicious was the fact that we all ate, together, and ED was not at our table. Not tonight, anyway, and hardly at all for the last nine months.

Two years ago we were still ignorant about our daughter's anorexia. A year ago we were in the midst of Maudsley treatment. Tonight we ate with the memories of anorexia fresh but beginning to fade, and the hope that next year we will be that much further away from the nightmare.

My deepest wish for all of you, all of us, is that in the years to come we banish ED from all of our dinner tables. That we learn to feed ourselves and one another with joy and love and appreciation for what tastes good as well as for our selves, body and soul and mind and heart.