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Living With Food: The Science Supporting Eating Disorder Treatment

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Healthline's Top Apps for Eating Disorders

Posted by Sarah Emerman on Wed, Sep 26, 2012 @ 03:26 PM
  
  
  
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By Mark Warren

Healthline, the online medical resource has recently pub their list of top apps for people with eating disorders. Although we cannot vouch for every app on this list we find it in general to have many useful applications. In particular that we recommend Recovery Record and iCounselor: Eating Disorder. Both of them seem very helpful. Recovery Record uses nutrition record keeping to help you and your therapist work more closely to monitor eating patterns and issues as they arise. It has an app and an online feature that lets you communicate to your therapist in real time. iCounselor: Eating Disorder  is an app that uses both cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapies to help diminish eating disorder thoughts and feelings. There is also an app called Body Beautiful that is more geared towards body image than eating disorders. However it is still very pertinent for many of the clients we work with. As you read through the list please be forewarned that some of the apps listed relate to dieting. These are not apps that we recommend for people with eating disorders, although we understand they may be useful for others. So please take a look at the list, ignore the diet apps, pay attention to the others, and hopefully modern technology can be another piece of helping those with eating disorders find recovery more easily.

Take a look: Top 12 Apps for Eating Disorder Patients 2012

Should you have any questions or comments regarding this post please email blog@eatingdisorderscleveland.org.

Contributions by Sarah Emerman

How do I tolerate how terrible it is to have an eating disorder?

Posted by Sarah Emerman on Wed, Jul 11, 2012 @ 10:44 AM
  
  
  
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By, Mark Warren

In our conversations about eating disorders we sometimes forget to state the obvious, which is that it’s horrible to have an eating disorder. It is always horrible for the person that has it and the pain of the disorder often extends far past the individual to their family, friends and community. Eating disorders affect everything about us. They affect the way we think, the way we feel, our self image, our experience in our bodies, our minds, and who we are in the world. They destroy our health, our hearts, our brains, and ultimately can take our lives. Eating disorders affect our relationships, school, work, and ability to have the lives we want to have. They are illnesses in the truest sense of the word. They disable us and take our health and well being. Part of the awfulness of having these disorders is that they are not well understood or appreciated for how terrible they are and the pain they cause. Layered into all of this is that the treatment for the disorder often causes more pain. Trying to refeed, stop behaviors, change self image, and work on body image can take us to places that are both painful and frightening. Yet there is no other choice. So what do we do? We find strength from each other, find ways to feed ourselves and make our bodies healthy, and find a community that is healing. We need to believe in and seek out the evidence based care that can help us and trustworthy providers, family, and friends who will be there with us. In Marsha Linehan’s writings she talks about the pain of living in hell and how the only way out of hell is to get on our hands and knees and crawl through the fire until we reach the sunshine. So we acknowledge the pain and acknowledge how awful these disorders can be, but also know that if we keep moving forward we can find the light that will give us our lives back and let us escape the disorder.

Should you have any questions or comments regarding this post please email blog@eatingdisorderscleveland.org.

Contributions by Sarah Emerman

The Dangers of an Unspecified Eating Disorder

Posted by Mark Warren on Fri, Apr 23, 2010 @ 11:29 AM
  
  
  
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In the DSM IV there are three eating disorder diagnoses: Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, and Eating Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS). The use of the term “EDNOS” somehow makes people who fall into this category seems less ill than people who have one of the classic eating disorder diagnoses. This assumption, however, has recently been show to be quite untrue. In fact, we now know that people with EDNOS have as high a risk of illness, hospitalization, and death as people with anorexia or bulimia. This finding is critically important since somewhere from 60-70% of people with an eating disorder fall into the category of EDNOS.
 
The reasons for this are complicated but worth exploring. Both anorexia and bulimia are diagnostic categories that were defined for research purposes. As a result, the categories are exclusive rather than inclusive. That is, these categories were drawn as tightly as possible so that research can be done on a group of similar people rather than focusing on the largest group that requires treatment. Unfortunately, it turns out that many people with life threatening eating disorders fall into the excluded categories.
 
Commonly, people who fall into the category of an unspecified eating disorder include:
  • Someone with significant weight loss who may not be markedly underweight but may have all the other criteria for anorexia.
  • Someone who purges and/or restricts but may not binge, or someone who binges but does not purge or restrict.
  • Someone who uses dangerous behaviors to lose weight, but not at a frequency recognized by the DSM IV.
  • Someone who once met criteria for anorexia, has had some increase in weight, but continues to have all the life threatening behaviors they once had.
  • Someone who meets all criteria for a diagnosis aside from amenorrhea, which has been shown to be irrelevant in the diagnosis.
A recent study by Dr. Rebecka Peebles highlights these issues. Her study demonstrates that the diagnosis of EDNOS does not present a less serious eating disorder than anorexia or bulimia. In fact, mortality may be higher. But even if mortality rates are only the same, one should never think that “NOS” means that the diagnosis isn’t as serious as traditional anorexia or bulimia. Eating disorders come in many forms, they all represent life threatening illnesses for which we now know there is effective treatment.
 
Contributions by Sarah Emerman 

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