Public Perception of Eating Disorders – Huffington Post Live

In case you missed it last night, I had a last-minute invitation by the Huffington Post to join a discussion on the public perception of eating disorders! Also featured in the video are Claire Glass, a blogger who recently shared a story about her grandmtother’s life-long eating disorder, and two treatment professionals, Kim Dennis and Laura Discipio.

You can watch below:

Claire’s story is particularly moving and important, since, along with people “like me” who don’t fit the stereotypical perception of who can have an eating disorder, elderly people are often underrepresented or invisible in the conversation. You can read the full write-up about her grandmother here.

Special thanks to Jenny Churchill and everyone at Huffington Post Live for handling this subject so seriously and taking the time to talk about it! Responsible journalism is incredibly important when talking about eating disorders, because it’s already such a sensitive subject that it can be easy to make sensationalist stories which have shock value but lack substance. Both for this segment and another article I was interviewed for last year, they have an excellent track record!

PS – I’m on Google+ now. I don’t quite get it yet, but don’t let that stop you from adding me to your circles or squares.

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2011 Year in Review

WordPress does this nifty thing where it sends you your summary stats. Total visitors, most commented posts, stuff like that. I thought I’d do a quick post of some of my favorite posts from 2011, in case you’re new here and missed them.

I went live in May 2011 and made about 30 posts within the year. Here are some of my favorites. Each title links to its respective post:

May 20th, 2011: Hey, Skinny!

This post is probably the reason I started …Until Eating Disorders Are No More. I wrote this before the blog existed after the odd exchange I had with a work acquaintance. Not knowing what to do with what I wrote, I decided to start a blog. This post was also my busiest day traffic-wise, so thanks to everyone who thought it was worth reading!

June 2nd, 2011: Why Eating Disorder Discussions Must Be Gender-Inclusive

The more writing and networking I did, the more I found people had an interest in my experiences due to my being a guy. I had never given it a whole lot of thought and had taken the gender disparities in stride. The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more frustrating it is, and the more I want to talk about it. This was the starting point for that conversation.

July 26th, 2011: Just What the Heck is Weight Stigma?

It’s time we all add ‘weightism’ and ‘weight stigma’ to our vocabularies, and stop engaging in weight discrimination. Friends who read this post said they’d never heard a term for it, but weightism is something we hear and see every day. Being thin does not equal being healthy. In fact, I know a lot of thin people who don’t take care of themselves, but they aren’t subjected to the same level of scrutiny as people with larger bodies.

August 3rd, 2011: The State of Male Eating Disorders

In August, I participated in an interview for the Huffington Post for a story on eating disorders in men. The article was handled with care, but then the title originally contained a dreadful word: manorexia. I emailed the reporter, and in response to my concerns her editors changed the title (one reason the internet is so handy for this type of thing!)

October 24th, 2011: Event Review: Beyond Barbie – Caught in a Fun House Mirror

Local artist Susan Singer did a series of paintings on natural beauty, doing a whole lot nude portraits of women of all shapes and sizes. There were six weeks of shows with a different theme each week, and my friend Karen Morris was featured in October to discuss body image and eating disorders. An expanded review was posted on RVANews.

November 15th, 2011: Interview: Men with Anorexia, WRIC Channel 8

I had the honor of lending my story to a news piece for the local CBS News with reporter Nate Eaton. I thought it an interesting change of pace for a male reporter to be interviewing a male survivor. Nate did a great job tackling the subject and I thank him for it. Not much else I can say about it, just go watch it!

Looking over that list, 2011 was quite a year! I hope you’ll join me in 2012 and beyond to continue writing, reading, and advocating for these issues to be taken seriously, until eating disorders are no more.

Happy New Year!

 

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Interview – Men with Anorexia, WRIC Channel 8

In early October, I did an interview with the local Richmond ABC News Channel 8. Reporter Nate Eaton read a story in USA Today about eating disorders in men, and reached out to Richmond practitioners about doing a story, which is how we got in touch. Here’s the full interview, original air date 11/15/2011:

Nate was very receptive to my concerns about not showing imagery from when I was sick or discussing things like lowest weights. Shock-value things like that can get your attention, but it does a disservice and misrepresentation of eating disorders as a whole. People who are considered overweight can have eating disorders, and images/numbers can be very triggering. Eating disorders in the media must be handled with responsibility and care, and Nate has done a great job with this story.

And yes, I had really long hair in high school. Don’t judge.

UPDATE: check out my Interview Follow-Up write-up here:

http://arenomore.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/interview-follow-up/

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The State of Male Eating Disorders

We in the eating disorder activist world have grown guarded over media coverage of eating disorders. Pictures of emaciated models, “shocking” statistics over how much weight someone lost or how much food they weren’t eating, and what are referred to as “war stories” – descriptive accounts of eating disorder behaviors at their worst. This type of coverage is problematic because it focuses on the same things that the person with the eating disorder focuses on. Idolizing thinness and obsessing over weight – that’s part of what anorexia makes you do. When news articles do that very thing, all they do is reinforce the disease and its assault on our bodies and minds.

Therefore, I’m always happy to do interviews because I see it as an opportunity to speak about eating disorders in a realistic, serious way, from a perspective of health and recovery. I know friends in the ED world who have had interviews canceled when they repeatedly wouldn’t disclose what their “lowest weight” was, including for a national morning show (much to the disbelief of the show’s producers, who couldn’t believe someone would turn down that kind of publicity).

Interview: Karen Morris – Being Your Authentic Self

I’m pleased to present the first podcast for the blog, the No More Cast! I hope to do more interviews with people involved in eating disorder activism and awareness. I hope the audio sounds OK – it wasn’t an ideal setup and we had some white noise, but I mixed most of it out. Let me know what you think, and if you’d like to see/hear more posts like this! It is the product of much time and editing, so I hope you enjoy it. You can stream it by pressing the Play button, or download it directly via the link.

Download podcast.

Full transcript is below.

I recently spoke with Karen Morris, an eating disorder survivor who now treats eating disorders with her unique approach of massage therapy.

Karen:

My name is Karen Morris, I work at A Karen Touch Therapeutic Massage and Body Work, which is a company or business I started a year and half ago, or about. Massage was a major healing modality with me overcoming my eating disorder. It was helping me get reacquainted with my body, because for over 30 years I had an eating disorder, I’m in recovery.

Massage made me become aware back into my body. It made me feel my feelings. I had been disassociated from my head and my body for so long.

Interview: “Guys Have Eating Disorders, Too”

I dug up an interview I did about 18 months ago for a podcast developed primarily for insurance subscribers for The Regence Group, but available to the public via iTunes. For some reason the segment on men with eating disorders isn’t hosted on iTunes, but I found it streaming on their site. It’s about ten minutes long, and also features Patrick Bergstrom. The interviews were conducted separately, so I’ve never met him, but I appreciate his story and perspective.

You can listen to the interview here:

The original link hosting the file stopped working, so I put it on Youtube. The host, Gretchen Kilby, had given me permission to host the episode, so special thanks to her for that.

I’m looking forward to the day when titles like ‘Guys Have Eating Disorders, Too’ aren’t necessary. There isn’t any other health condition or disease where your gender would play a significant role or influence on how someone perceives you. This unfortunate and inaccurate stereotype of eating disorders being a woman’s problem creates stigma which prevents people from seeking help sooner. When I was sick, I often questioned if I really had a problem for a myriad of reasons. While a lot of it was just the nature of the disease and disordered thinking that comes along with being malnourished and out of control, I definitely questioned if I even “could be” anorexic given that I didn’t fit any of the stereotypes. If these personal and societal biases hadn’t existed, I might have gotten help much sooner.