Support group for parents: Madison, Wisconsin

The next meeting of the Madison, Wisconsin, parent support group will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 7:30 p.m. at Starbucks, 3515 University Avenue. This group is parent run and offers support, practical advice, encouragement, and hope for parents whose children are struggling with eating disorders, with a special emphasis on Family-Based Treatment (also known as the Maudsley approach).

For more information, contact Denise Reimer, reimer1@charter.net.

And if you'd like me to post a parent support group in your area, please email me off the blog at hnbrown at tee dee ess dot net.

Walt Kaye, M.D., believes in families

Dr. Kaye, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Eating Disorders Program at University of California-San Diego, is leading a team in one of the largest studies on eating disorders ever done. The study will include seven sites around the world and will compare two kinds of family therapy to explore the question of which kind of family therapy is best for which families.

Note to eating disorders therapists and programs: The question in this study isn't whether families should be part of e.d. recovery. It's how.

Patients will be assigned to one of two treatment types: systemic family therapy, which looks to improve relationships within the family as a means to recovery, and family-based treatment, also known as the Maudsley approach, which empowers the family to help the child recover.

One of the biggest perceived obstacles to Maudsley treatment is the notion that families have to be "perfect" in order to implement it. Well, that and the traditional notion that families cause eating disorders in the first place, and so cannot possibly be part of the solution.

The trouble is, traditional treatments stink. They condemn sufferers to years of semi-starvation, partial recovery, and inevitable relapse. So far, the Maudsley approach is the single most effective treatment for teens, with five-year recovery rates between 80 and 90 percent.

If a better treatment came along, I'd be the first to do the happy dance. What I can't stand is people who shoot down the notion of families being involved in treatment on general principle, or because it's always been done that way, or because they've always done it differently and can't make the leap to a new paradigm.

Children deserve the best treatment out there. Research shows that if someone with anorexia is ill for less than three years and then recovers, her chances of a lifetime free of this devastating illness are excellent. But those who've been chronically ill for 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, are much less likely to ever really recover.

And that's simply wrong. Especially when there are tools that can help--like the family.

Anyone who's interested in being part of the UC-San Diego trial can call 858-366-2525 or e-mail edresearch@ucsd.edu.

Support group meeting tonight

Sorry for the late notice--the Madison, Wisconsin support group of parents of children with eating disorders is meeting tonight. This is a loose, informal group that i've convened. We share resources and support, especially around family-based treatment (the Maudsley approach). Please stop by if you're in the area. The meeting is at Barriques on Monroe Street at 7:30.

Hitting a nerve

Back in October I posted about some of the marketing brochures I collected at the NEDA conference. I singled out one from Rogers Memorial Hospital, partly because it was so egregious and partly because Rogers is the closest residential treatment center to my town, and it's the place my daughter likely would have gone had we chosen in-patient treatment for her.

I've been meaning to post the follow-up to that thread, which was that I got a letter from the COO of Rogers Memorial himself. Here for your edification are some quotes from the letter, along with my commentary.

Quote: Your comments and suggestions for improving our brochure have already been received by our marketing department and will weigh in our minds when we revise our eating disorder materials in the future.

Commentary: The point wasn't a critique of the brochure; I was discussing the program. Big difference. Revising the marketing materials isn't going to change your outcomes for the real live people who go to Rogers. Point well and truly missed.

Quote: We would appreciate the consideration of sending us such criticism directly, rather than taking your complaints immediately and directly to a public forum like your website.

Commentary: I'm sure you would. And I'm sure, had I called you with my "complaints," you would have taken them very seriously indeed.

Quote: Advocates for mental health must work together to achieve greater awareness and to break down the stigma that our society attaches to mental health disorders.

Commentary: I'm with you on that one . . . though I think my notion of advocacy is probably not the same as yours. To me, advocacy means empowering patients and their families with accurate and true information, true choices, and effective treatments.

Quote: Schedule a visit to our campus and really get to know our medical staff and administrators who have trained and practice Maudsley approaches and techniques when they are applicable.

Commentary: It's those last four little words that give it away: when they are applicable. Family-based treatment is the standard of care for adolescents. It should be the norm rather than the exception.

I know there are caring staff at Rogers Memorial. I challenge them to take a hard look at their treatment protocols for teens and evaluate them in the light of evidence-based research--then come up with a new vision. You have the potential to do a lot of good. I'd love to see you doing it.

See a video on Maudsley

Here at NBC Chicago. Try not to pay attention to the misleading title, and you will have to watch a short ad before the video loads, and of course there are the usual caveats at the end of the piece. But it seems like a good look at an ordinary family who are helping their daughter through family-based treatment Features Dan Le Grange. I think it's worth a watch.

I just don't get it

It is just shocking to me that so many people misperceive and fear family-based treatment.

I'm no dummy: I know even FBT is no panacea. It won't cure everyone. But it cures a damn sight more folks than anything else we've got. And a lot quicker, too.

So what's the problem? We don't advise against penicillin because some people are allergic to it, do we? We don't dismiss Prozac because hey, it doesn't work for everyone.

So why are people so dismissive of Maudsley? I'm talking about people who haven't worked with it, who are going only by what others say about it.

Maybe it's like a generic medication--there's no big money to be made on it, so there's no incentive to fall in love with it.

But as Daniel Le Grange said to me recently, "We're not doing very well by our children." FBT helps children and adolescents, no question about it. The statistics are very good--80 to 90 percent of those treated with it are still recovered after five years.

FBT doesn't get into cause. It doesn't have an opinion, so to speak, on psychodynamic issues. It rather neatly sidesteps them, at least for phase 1 of treatment--weight restoration.

Is there anyone out there who can truly argue with the need for someone who is severely malnourished to gain weight?

I just don't get it.

6 lessons I learned at NEDA

1. There are lots and lots of well-meaning but ineffectual folks working in the eating disorders field.
2. There is lots and lots of Big Money at stake in the eating disorders field, mostly in the form of residential treatment centers.
3. There are lots and lots of politics in the eating disorders field.
4. Family-based treatment, which the scientific literature recognizes right now as the only evidence-based treatment with an 80 to 90 percent long-term success rate in adolescents, is perceived as controversial in the eating disorders field, even by some of those who profess to support and use it.
5. The most commonly heard comment about FBT at the conference: "Don't you have to be a very special family to make it work?"
6. The intensive outpatient family therapy for eating disorders program at University of California-San Diego, headed by Dr. Walter Kaye, looks absolutely wonderful.

I'm sure there are more, and I'm sure I'll be posting about them too.

Sunday morning at NEDA

The NEDA conference is officially over, but I've still got a bag full of brochures and other stuff I collected here (and I'm not going home until tomorrow morning), so I thought I'd offer another deconstruction of e.d. programs and what they offer to parents.

The reason I'm doing this, by the way, is not just to make enemies (though I'm sure I am) but to try to offer one parent's view of what's on offer. I think it's especially important given a snippet of conversation I had yesterday with one of the long-time NEDA folks, whose comment about Maudsley was, "But you have to be a very, very special family to make that work, don't you?" This is, of course, the mainstream view, and of course it's completely erroneous. It's part of the disempowerment of parents within the eating disorders field that just burns my boat.

So. Within that context, it's not surprising to find brochures like the one I picked up from the Women's Center at Pine Grove, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a treatment facility that treats e.d.s, addictions, and both. Here are some of the phrases that jumped out at me from this 12-page glossy brochure: "Components of the treatment experience include understanding the disease process and the camouflaged self, helping women reclaim and celebrate their feminine spirit, empowering women to come to their own assistance. . . . " There's a family week--sounds good, right?--described as "40 hours of intensive therapy where the healing process between family members begins." OK, this center is for women strugglng with addiction as well as e.d.s, and does not seem geared toward adolescents. There are photos of lovely flower arrangements and wooden staircases. Under Amenities, the brochure says, "We offer gender-responsive treatment in a quiet, peaceful, and secluded environment." I'm not sure what gender-responsive treatment means. The next paragraph goes on: "We encourage our patients to take advantage of the nearby YMCA . . . a facility that includes weights, cardiovascular equipment, indoor track and pool, indoor racquetball and basketball course."

Hello? For women in the throes of anorexia?

Nowhere in this brochure is there any mention of food or eating. Nowhere. There is one line under "Components of Treatment" that says "Nutritional counseling." It's about halfway down a list that includes items like "Boundaries & Relationships," "Exercise & Fitness," and "Psychodrama."

I don't think so.

Saturday morning at NEDA

This morning's program featured two parents and a husband, all of whom had family members who had anorexia, all of whom had the same therapist. I have tremendous respect for all three of these people, who obviously went through tremendous suffering. I'm happy to say that all three of their family members recovered and are now doing well--but only after many years of being ill. One spouse was ill for 10 years; one of the children was sick for 6 or 7 years, and the other for 10 years.

One of the parents made a comment that for me crystallized everything that's wrong with the way eating disorders have been traditionally treated. He said, speaking of his then-11-year-old daughter, "My wife and I quickly had to accept the fact that this thing was bigger than we were, bigger than our family. There was no way we could help her. We had to turn to the professionals."

His child's recovery followed a fairly typical trajectory: years of very slow progress and relapse, until, as he put it, "She *decided to join us in the fight against her illness."

I got tears in my eyes at that moment, tears of rage for the clinicians who disempowered this family and made them believe there was *no way* they could help their daughter, who taught them that their daughter had to "choose" to get well. For all the families who have accepted that over the years, who have sat at dinner tables watching their children starve and felt there was nothing they could do. Who, frankly, wasted years of their own and their child's life in useless and even counterproductive treatment.

I am so grateful for family-based treatment, for having my role as a parent validated and for being able to help my daughter. Another of the parents said, "I wanted to just march in there and get this thing fixed! But we had to embrace the illness and accept that it would be with us for a long, long time."

If only she'd been told about FBT, how might her life and the life of her daughter have been different?

More from NEDA

One of the heartening things about the conference so far has been that the amount and kind of discussion around family-based (Maudsley) treatment for anorexia and bulimia. There's been a lot! And all of it's been positive, at least that I've heard. In fact I would say that Maudsley has become something of a buzzword. Some of the people using it seem to have only a hazy idea of what it means, but I guess that's part of the process of this kind of social change.

The general session speakers have been a real mixed bag. This morning's speaker spent more time telling anecdotes about her cats, her children, and herself than anything else, and when she did finally get down to brass tacks, she mostly talked about body image. I'm all for discussions of body image, and how to improve it, but what got to me was her automatic assumptions that disturbances of body image = eating disorders. There was a lot of talk about things like guided visualizations, talking "to" problem body parts, and so on, none of which interests me but hey, I can see that it might be of interest to some people.

The thing that got me, though, was when she tried to connect these kinds of problems and solutions to anorexia. I asked her, if body image disturbance causes e.d.s, why don't we have way more prevalence of anorexia and bulimia? She had no answer. Later, someone else suggested to me that while AN and BN are relatively low incidence, there are a lot of eating disorder not specified cases that don't show up in the statistics. Maybe. What bugs me is the thought of people with anorexia and bulimia who are valiantly trying to recover through these kinds of treatment techniques. There is no evidence to suggest that they're effective. Common sense, and having gone through anorexia with my daughter, tells me they can be worse than useless--they can destructive because they take focus off the things that really matter, like refeeding. So I'm not thrilled with what I heard there.

This afternoon's speaker, Michael Strober, did a very good job of discussion some of the neurobiology of comorbidities. He made one interesting point (well, he made more, but this one was of most interest to me): he said that while most depression that you see in patients with anorexia comes as a result of the starvation, and shows up after and as a byproduct of malnutrition, the heightened anxiety you see almost always precedes the dieting and weight loss behaviors. This was certainly the case in our family: my first inkling that anything was wrong with my daughter was her anxiety level skyrocketed, and she'd never been an anxious kid. No one understands the mechanism, but it was a very interesting observation.

That's it for now--gotta go get in the hot tub! (LOL)

More from San Diego later.

Anorexia on NPR

A friend called over the weekend to say that she'd been listening to this interview with the author of Peony in Love when she heard interviewer Liane Hansen make a comment about anorexia that made her blood boil. The author was describing lovesick young girls in 17th-century China. Hansen's comment, which comes about 4.15 minutes into the interview:

"It is interesting, the lovesick young ladies that are affected by the opera, what happens to them in their lovesickness is they starve themselves. And that's so much like anorexia, where you have young women today, and young men, starving themselves because that is the only way that they have some control over their own body."

Dear Liane Hansen, you may be an expert on so many things, as your NPR bio indicates, but anorexia is not one of them. Your throwaway comment about anorexia was made out of ignorance rather than malice, I'm sure. But ignorant it was.

Most researchers today believe that anorexia is a biologically based brain disorder. It's not "about" control. It's not "about" bad parenting, any more than autism or schizophrenia are. In fact, it's not "about" anything at all except having the bad luck to be genetically predisposed and to live in a culture full of triggers.

You have a lot of influence, Liane Hansen. I hope you will take this opportunity to educate yourself about anorexia. This website and this website would be great places to start. Then give me a call--I'd love to talk.

One more reason why I'm a fan of family-based treatment

There are very few follow-up studies (or heck, any studies at all) of anorexia treatment, so I was glad to see this one, done in Norway a couple of years ago. I wasn't so glad of its outcomes.

The study was a one-year followup of adult anorexics who'd been treated on an inpatient unit. Of the 24 patients they followed up with, 10 (42%) had improved one year later, while 14 (58%) had "poor outcomes."

I'm grateful that they did the study, frankly, because most of the numbers on inpatient anorexia treatment come straight from the clinics and units, which often stand to make a tidy sum on treatment. Their followups are usually done at discharge, so they don't take into account what almost always happens after that: relapse and rehospitalization.

So bravo to the researchers in Vikersund. And chalk up another reason why family-based (Maudsley) treatment is an excellent option for anorexia.

Shame on you, Dear Abby

I'll cop to reading Dear Abby, despite the often off-the-mark advice she doles out. But today's column went beyond off-the-mark and into just-plain-dangerous-and-wrong territory.

Here's the letter in question: "I'm an attractive, single, successful, 27-year-old woman who has struggled with anorexia ever since I was 12. I have learned to live with it and feel no need to advertise it to the world. However, I find that many strangers, including a large number of people I associate with at work, feel a compulsion to comment on my weight (105 pounds and 5 foot 9), the size of the clothes I wear, or what I eat. It's as uncomfortable a subject for me as I imagine it is for people who are overweight, and I have no 'pat' answer for them." --Annoyed at 105

Here's Abby's response:
Dear Annoyed: Clearly, your weight issues are more obvious to those around you than you chose to believe. However, you are under no obligation to answer these intrusive questions if it makes you uncomfortable. When confronted, reply, "That's a very personal question (or subject) and I'd prefer not to discuss it." Then change the subject.


Argh! Please write to her and set her straight about anorexia: It's not a "lifestyle choice" but a lethal mental illness. Ask her why she would sanction this writer's settling for a life distorted by anorexia. Invite her to list resources that might be helpful to "Annoyed" and her family, including maudsleyparents.org, NEDA, eatingwithyouranorexic.com, and others.

This is a teachable moment on a national scale. Go for it!

There is no way to prevent anorexia

As I wrote the title of this post, I felt a wave of despair. Until a couple of days ago, I had never put this thought into words, never articulated it to myself. But it's true.

Two years ago I would have said of course you can prevent anorexia. I certainly never believed my daughter would develop it.

She was smart. She was funny. She was self-aware. She was eminently rational, and had been since toddlerhood. She watched no commercial TV. Her videos were carefully screened. She was a feminist before she started kindergarten.

Every kid in her sixth-grade class had to do a research paper on a subject of interest. She did hers on eating disorders. Looking back, I understand that that right there was a clue. At the time, I thought it made her safer because she had knowledge, she understood, and she was warned.

I thought that years of modeling a healthy attitude toward my own body would protect her. (I was fooling myself there, too, but I tried hard.)

But here's the thing: Nothing that she did or I did protected her from anorexia. Because there is no way to prevent an eating disorder.

If anorexia could be prevented, we wouldn't need to be talking about treatment. We wouldn't need to watch children suffer or families unravel.

I know from my own daughter's experience that knowledge does not prevent anorexia. She knew more about anorexia in sixth grade than many doctors do. She understood the dangers. More, she knew she was--as a gymnast and perfectionist--at risk. But it didn't help.

I'm all for the studies now being done on treatments for anorexia. They're long overdue. But where are the studies on prevention? Why is no one even asking the question of how to prevent anorexia and bulimia? Cynthia Bulik has looked at anorexia and twins--this would seem to be a perfect area of research for her.

We know that genetic predisposition plays a huge role in eating disorders. We know that environment can be a catalyst. How does the famous saying go? Genes load the gun and environment pulls the trigger. What we don't know is how to put the safety back on the gun. We'll never know until we start the scientific process of figuring it out: coming up with hypotheses, testing them, recording the results, making connections.

I've watched half a dozen young women I know--all of them bright, funny, well-read, engaging--fall prey to anorexia. I can look around at the young teenagers I know and predict, now, who's at risk. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

Treatment is crucial. God knows we need better treatments for anorexia. Maudsley treatment is the best we've got so far, and it saved my daughter's life. I'm grateful. But it's not enough. Enough is when we can keep kids from becoming anorexic in the first place.

I don't have the answers. Maybe it's a combination of things: a vaccine, education, behavior modification in those at risk. I don't know. But I do know that until we start asking the question, we'll never find an answer.

Anorexia and control

How many times have you read it or heard it: Anorexia is all about control. And its corollaries: People with anorexia have to choose to eat. Parents who try to make them eat have control issues.

Those of us who have used the Maudsley approach to help our children heal from eating disorders don't buy this. But the rest of the world still does.

I know a family that's had both kinds of treatment for their anorexic child. The mom put her finger on how each felt to her: "Anything less than Maudsley gets into really icky murky games. Maudsley is brutally hard but man it is all above board: parents want kids to eat. Period. What we've been doing instead is no less psychologically tense or painful."

That's exactly what I appreciate about the Maudsley approach: It's all right there out in the open. No hidden agendas, no submerged power struggles. Parents want their child to eat. They require it. They support it. Not out of a need to control, or boundary-crossing, or a wish to keep their child small, or any of the other accusations leveled at parents of anorexics.

We require our children to eat because we love them and want them to get better.

What could be wrong with that?

Book review: Take Charge of Your Child's Eating Disorder

I really wanted to like Take Charge of Your Child’s Eating Disorder, co-written by Pamela Carlton, M.D., who directs Stanford University’s Adolescent Eating Disorder Parent Education and Support Program. I’m a huge fan of the work being done at Stanford by James Lock and nearby at UC San Diego by Walt Kaye. But after reading this, I want to ask them both, “How could you have let this happen?”

Families with anorexic or bulimic children need all the information and help they can get. But for the most part, they’re not going to get it here.

If I’d read Carlton’s book when my daughter was newly diagnosed with anorexia, I would have wanted to shoot myself, mostly because of statements like this: “Full recovery from anorexia is not easy, and many people struggle with ongoing body image disturbances and disordered eating behaviors throughout their lives. Fortunately, with early treatment, your child’s chance for full recovery is likely to be increased.” (p. 9) This leads parents to believe that their child will be dealing with an eating disorder for the rest of her life—which in many cases is simply not true.

In reality, there’s lots of hope for full recovery, especially among adolescents who are treated early with family-based treatment, also known as Maudsley treatment. Nowhere does Carlton mention this as one of the treatment modalities for eating disorders. Instead, she recommends that parents put together a treatment team—a good idea, in and of itself—and says, “The most important thing to remember is you cannot do this alone.”

Actually, you can do this alone, and sometimes you should. A treatment team is great, so long as everyone is on the same page. My husband and I assembled a terrific treatment team, but there were times, inevitably, when they contradicted one another or said just the wrong thing to our daughter. It’s certainly better to have no therapist than a bad one—and the vast majority of eating disorders specialists out there are bad, make no mistake about it. A third of them have or had eating disorders themselves, which tells you something right there.

Throughout the book, Carlton pays lip service to the idea that parents should be involved in their child’s treatment. But she doesn’t actually seem to believe it. Take this example she offers about a 15-year-old, Jinny, in treatment for anorexia. She writes that because Jinny was fixated on her weight, she did not give the girl her weekly weight updates. Fair enough. Then she writes, “But after each appointment, her mother would follow me out of the room with her notebook, ready to write down a weight, promising, ‘It’s okay, I won’t tell Jinny.’ I finally told her this was not healthy for Jinny and her actions were undermining my efforts to help her stop focusing on her weight. We came up with a solution: since she really needed to know her weight progress, I would meet with her once a month to review her progress. Yes, I would share her weight with her, but she had to accept that it would only happen once a month and not at her daughter’s appointment.” (pp. 84-85)

Of course any parent who has watched their child starve themselves nearly to death is going to be fixated on weight. Each pound gained represents another step away from the awful abyss their child has fallen into. The notion that such interest is unhealthy or somehow undermining treatment is both wrong-headed and deeply offensive. I hope this mom fired Carlton and found a smarter, more compassionate therapist who would actually empower the family to help Jinny recover.

Carlton insists that families need to find experienced eating disorders therapists and specialists to make up the treatment team for their child. In my family's experience, the “specialists” were frequently so heavily invested in their own particular take on eating disorders—-and often this was an outmoded and ineffective one—-that they were not able to give my daughter what she needed. A good therapist can be helpful. A bad therapist can do a lot of damage. And you don’t need collateral damage when you’re dealing with an eating disorder.

Finally, Carlton seems to subscribe to the notion that eating disorders are caused at least in part by psychology: “Without appropriate psychiatric help and treatment, eating disorders can become lifelong illnesses. To regain a healthy relationship with her body and with food, your daughter may require long-term treatment, which may continue long after her body is considered medically healed. The average length of psychological treatment is two to three years.” (p. 88)

Actually studies on family-based treatment (the Maudsley approach) show that teens often recover without this kind of intensive psychological or psychiatric treatment, and the recovery "takes": 90 percent are still recovered five years later. Carlton’s perspective gives families the wrong message: that only the doctor can “take charge” of their child’s eating disorder and bring about recovery.

In my experience, and in the experiences of many families I know, the reverse is true: recovery happened when parents were empowered to "take charge" of their child's recovery, often with backing from a truly supportive team.

The best part of this book is the insurance section. Too bad Carlton didn't publish just that. Except for that one chapter, you’re better off reading Help Your Teenager Beat an Eating Disorder by James Lock and Daniel Le Grange or Eating With Your Anorexic by Laura Collins.

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.

Why do we settle for treatment that doesn't work?

This morning I'm feeling so grateful for the Maudsley approach of treating anorexia, which I am sure saved my daughter's life. While there may be a better treatment out there yet to be discovered someday, for now Maudsley is so much better for teens than traditional treatment that it's hard for me to understand how and why professionals could recommend anything else.

Especially pediatricians. They're the ones on the front lines. They're the ones who presumably know a child, watch his or her growth from infancy on. Who have a chance to see the growth curve and know when a child is "just thin" or "too thin." When thinness becomes pathological.

Often pediatricians wait far too long to flag a problem--very likely because they're watching for the opposite problem, overweight in teens. Our society has such a strong fat phobia that all of us, myself included, have to struggle to take off our "thin-is-always-good" glasses and see reality sometimes.

Some pediatricians will notice a drop in weight or off the child's growth curve, but then stall when it comes to treatment, letting months or even years go by while a child starves and anorexia becomes more entrenched. Why? Could it be that many pediatricians--especially women--have eating or body or weight issues themselves?

If your intuition tells you that your child might have a problem, get another opinion. Follow your gut. The treatment you pursue might save your child's life. And you don't have to settle for treatment that doesn't work. There is hope for anorexia. The vast majority of teens treated with the Maudsley approach are weight restored, fully recovered, and back to normal life--and stay that way five years down the line.

Don't settle for anything less than your child's best life.

Have dinner with your family on Feb. 25!

Just in case you needed a reason to make family dinners more of a priority, here are some fascinating statistics:

* Kids whose families eat dinner together more often eat better and show less eating-disordered behavior than kids whose families eat together less often

* Kids whose families eat dinner together three times a week or less are twice as likely to try marijuana and cigarettes and 1-1/2 times likelier to try alcohol than those whose families eat together 5-7 times a week

* A 2001 University of Michigan study found that family meals trumped most other predictive factors in kids’ lives, including amount of time spent in school, studying, church, playing sports, and in art activities. When the results were statistically controlled for gender, race, family structure and employment, income, social class, parents’ education and age, and family size, family meals were still the single strongest predictor of better achievement scores and fewer behavioral problems
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And what better way to honor National Eating Disorders Week this February than to schedule a family dinner?

To celebrate the role of family support in recovery from eating disorders, the Maudsley Parents group (of which I am proud to be a founding member) will sponsor a worldwide Family Dinner on February 25. Sign up to share a meal with your family that day, and you'll receive a Gold Fork pin and NEDAW materials on request.

My family's in--how about yours?

Listen to the MPR show with Katharine Loeb

The host of the show did a fantastic job--one of the best interviews I've heard or participated in on the subject.

Here's a link to the show.