I have a distinct memory of the oddest thing triggering some of my earliest disordered body thinking: watching Rudy with my friend in fifth grade. When the coach or someone tells Rudy “You’re five foot nothing, 100lbs nothing” my friend said “wow, I’m taller than him” and I said “wow, I weigh more him”. For some…

much of the struggle for eating disordered people is the secrecy

I grew up in Korea, in a society where all women are forced to be under 110lbs no matter what frame, where only double-lidded girls were pretty and monolids were not. Dark skin was ugly and whiter was better. I was a domestic abuse survivor who didn’t realize it was abuse until I was 20 and I grew up with severe body…

Yup, same here. At my smallest I was a size 6 and that was after 2 years of very disordered eating. After I stopped depriving myself I swung too far the other way and started bingeing. I wish people understood that disordered eating doesn’t always look like Karen Carpenter and that all overweight people weren’t just…

I remember watching Hells Kitchen and one of the contestants had to be sent to the hospital because of heart issues. He was obese. He returns to the show and, while they released him, they told him he was in danger of a heart attack due to his weight and eating habits. As he’s leaving the kitchen, he grabs a…

The Frail Broken Bony Sick Girl is much more cinematically appetizing & appealing to men than the Average-Weight Sick Girl. I’m trying to think of one TV/movie depiction of a normal/chubby bulimic, which describes most bulimics I’ve known... can’t think of one.

sad skinny people are lovely and waif-like and fat bitches are just ugly, lazy and morally reprehensible and why don’t they get their fat faces out of the pig trough, eh?. In other words: they don’t look good on TV. At least that’s what I’ve learned from our culture.

The hierarchy of EDs is one of the most depressing aspects about them. The anorexic patients are the most admired, for their willpower and thin bodies, while the bulimics are “gross,” and if you’ve got binge eating disorder, forget it.

I mean, the same can be said about drug use in movies, but nobody was accusing Requiem for a Dream of glamorizing drug use. I guess it depends on whether you show the behavior as leading to a happy ending or not.

It really is astounding. Whenever I see pictures of me at my worst it’s jarring because I look so unlike my healthy-ish self, but all I heard during that time was how healthy and fit I looked.

Even if the film is not going to step out of bounds by having the character have EDNOS, binge eating disorder, have bulimia at a normal or above weight, or be from any other demographic than white upper middle class female, it would still be nice to see the anorexic character Lilly Collins is playing be at a normal…

This isn’t a movie, but Roxane Gay’s new memoir is at least an account of someone with an ED who’s not skinny. Even though it’s brilliant, I wish it wasn’t the only one I could think of.

I lost 30 pounds about 6 years ago in a mostly healthy way (my level of obsession wasn’t healthy, but I was technically eating enough). But I’ve been obsessed with calories and have had anxiety about eating in front of people since I weighed 70 lbs. I don’t remember how old I was, but I remember that I weighed 70…

I’ve been told (to my face, by more than one person) that the upside to my chronic, incurable disease for which I now take immunosuppresant chemo drugs is that “I’ll never be heavy! That’s got to feel good!”

If I’m honest with myself, I had this attitude even while in treatment for my own eating disorder. And I was almost always a normal (“healthy”) weight during that time.

Thank you for sharing. And congrats on your recovery!

So much this. I’ve struggled with bulimia off and on for 13ish years and I don’t think I ever looked “sick” and I have mostly always been chubby.

I was borderline anorexic (I also had BED, so it was a bad back and forth) in high school and my lowest weight, on days where I had been starving myself, was still dead average or even heavier than average. No one knew I didn’t eat more than a yogurt and a handful of raisins per day, because no one could “see” it on…

I’d love to see a movie about an eating disorder affecting someone who doesn’t look like their being affected by ED. I don’t think most people understand that you can be fat and be bulimic.

I am praying for Kat Von D to not do anything stupid and publicly embrace Trump so I can keep buying her stuff. And she is kind of a horrible person who would probably do that.

I am praying for Kat Von D to not do anything stupid and publicly embrace Trump so I can keep buying her stuff. And…