#disordered eating //

[thelightfluxtastic]

I have a research background in weight stigma and I currently work in mental health, often with LGBTQ+ clients.

I've met nonbinary people who struggle with disordered eating because they only ever see androgyny depicted as featureless thinness.

I've met trans women who struggle with disordered eating because they've internalized the idea that girls are meant to be thin, dainty, and delicate.

I've men trans men who struggle with disordered eating, because they feel women are allowed to be soft/curvy but men need to be muscular or thin and flat.

So many trans people are convinced that weight loss is the key to appearing as their desired gender, even when they want radically different gender presentations.

The societal idealization of thinness and fatphobia falsely invades and derails people's idea of what their "ideal body" should look like.

[teaboot]

Kind of a random hill to die on rn but "You'd eat this thing you hate if you got hungry enough" does not set a reasonable expectation of what "hungry enough" means for people with food problems.

Like, are we talking "stomach grumbling" hungry enough, or "can't stand up" hungry enough? Cause personally, I can make myself eat a bit of a pork chop if I'm barfy and shaking and can't see straight anymore, but if it's down to "black out for three days and wake up angry and confused" or "willingly swallow prosciutto", I'm having sleep for dinner. And I know this from experience.

People without food problems don't seem to understand this and it drives me insane. "Hungry enough" is for shit like chewing drywall because the alternative is death or cannibalism.

If I say I can't eat something, It means I can't eat it. It Is Not Edible To Me. It's not even appetizing. It literally does not register as food. You might as well hand me a rubber duck.

And it's frustrating!! Trust me, I wish I wasn't like this, too!! This isn't a choice!! I know it can be rude!! It's embarassing!! It's complicated and annoying and irrational!! That doesn't fix the problem!!

I just wish people didn't treat this sort of thing as "being picky" or lacking willpower or basic manners or something. I can't make myself eat certain foods the way you probably couldn't cut your own fingers off. Does that make sense? It's not just food. Fuck

[porcelains-sk1nny]

hungry? look at your thighs and say no.

[un-monstre]

Something that I wished we talked more about is that some people who recover from eating disorders will become fat. Some people’s bodies will just naturally be a bit bigger, especially after the stress of a lifetime of disordered eating. Weight gain is value neutral and often a part of recovery, and you cannot be fatphobic without directly advocating against people recovering.

[tangledinink]

whining. pouting. sulking, even. he better not use my NICE body wash...

✩ the gemini ✩ [ start ] [ prev ] [ next ]

[canonkiller]

abjectly refuse to romanticize weight loss and malnutrition. that shit kills you. to starve yourself is crippling¹ even in the ""bearable"" "well I'm just hungry less" / "other people have it worse" / "it's only a few skipped meals" / etc ways. you have this fucking life and that's it so please if you do nothing else allow yourself to actually be alive in it. do you hear me? take your supplements and multivitamins and eat breads and meats and vegetables and fats and sugars and shit that just fucking tastes good okay? thank you

[skinnylight1day]

I hope ana can accept me, i promise ill be good.

[recoveryposting]

a little while ago i was talking to a friend about my ed and i dont remember the context but she said to me "I LOVE CARBOHYDRATES!!!!! I LOVE CALORIES!!!!!!" and i stopped and stared at my phone because i had genuinely never heard anyone say they love calories. like, even implicitly theres this messaging that lower calorie = better and that we should enjoy of food despite the calories it contains. and i was just floored that this was the first time i had ever heard anything like that and it made me feel so comforted. anyway appreciate your friends they are some of the most important people in the world

[waiting-to-bloom-again]

301 cal breakfast

Today I've planned to eat 515 cals but with house work some dancing and yoga I'll definitely be in the negative anyway

[goldyke]

LAP Bands should be illegal

This post is going to deal with medical fatphobia, weight loss surgery, coercion, emetophobia, food issues, disordered eating, and just all around bad shit. But it’s important.

Shortly after I reached adulthood, I was coerced into weight loss surgery. I weighed about 250 pounds and was considered morbidly obese.

The Lap Band is a disgrace to the medical profession and is just another example of how the medical profession does not care about the lives of fat people.

To preface this: the surgery works. I lost 70 pounds and people treated me differently and I hated them all for it.

The Lap Band made my life miserable. When it was filled, I could not eat until noon without getting stuck. Even then, getting stuck was always a risk. There was a strict diet to follow and you were supposed to be safe from that if you followed it. On top of that, there were rules for how you ate. One standard I saw was not to eat in bites larger than your fingernail. Can you see yourself doing that for a week, let alone years and years?

Getting stuck is a horror you can't imagine. The food lodges in the top of your stomach, blocking off your system. You continue to produce saliva and swallow it down. Slowly, the mucous in your saliva builds up. It feels like you're drowning. Eventually, you have to essentially throw it all up. A disgusting experience (and a mortifying one if you're in public.) The saliva is thick and ropy. This experience is often called "sliming" on the forums.

I became frightened of eating in public. In a way, I became frightened of food altogether. I knew something had to give the day I reacted to someone biting a hamburger in a tv show the way a regular person would react to a killer jumping out in a horror movie. I developed the disgusting and unhealthy habit of chewing and spitting out food. I completely lost my enjoyment of many foods I had previously enjoyed because of how problematic they were (I can no longer enjoy a chicken thigh for example.) I stopped eating meals and began grazing. I developed eating habits worse than the ones that "made me fat"

After 3 years, I had the band emptied of fluid, which significantly decreased, but did not stop, these problems. I regained the weight, and found it didn't bother me. (Along the way I discovered that my discomfort with my body had never been weight related)

I had my band removed after 6.5 years earlier this year. I am in a support group on facebook for victims of this malpractice. There are 5.6 thousand members, each with their own horror stories. Some of them cannot get the band removed because insurance will not cover the procedure, though they happily covered the band's placement. Some have tried to go through with removal but have had surgeons try to coerce them into getting a different weight-loss surgery instead of just removing it. Many have long-term damage from the band eroding the walls of their stomach or esophagus, or from the band adhering to multiple organs. Many of them had the band for 12-14 years, before removal because none of our doctors told us it needs to be removed within 10.

Many practices no longer perform Lap Band surgery and now believe it is unethical. The surgeon who removed my band still performs this surgery regularly.

A study performed in 2011 with 151 lap band patients, found that 22% of patients experienced minor complications and 39% experienced major complications. The person who coerced me into surgery actually experienced major complications and needed an emergency removal.

I experienced no serious complications. Everything I described above is considered normal. And It still drastically lowered my quality of life.

I don't know why I'm sharing this or who I'm sharing it for, but here I am. If you know anyone considering the lap band surgery, don't let them go through with it without knowing the truth. And please be kinder to your body than the medical profession wants you to be.

[signanothername]

*she wants to stop by and say hi*

Awwww hi hi

Have a lil treat <33333

[libraford]

I dunno, I'm thinking darkly about how some things are socially acceptable self harm. Like punishing yourself by skipping meals (diets), burnout cycle (the grind), overexercise (gains) and that injuries and pain from these kinds of activities are somewhat celebrated in a society that seems to demonize rest. These kinds of things can become addictive, and it can be hard to stop. It just feels like they're similar, but I don't hear about that being talked about often.

[porcelains-sk1nny]

sacrifice food today, wear pride tomorrow

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Longtime reader and fan (thank you for existing and sharing your writing!) first time asker, prompted by watching the movie The Martian: what if the team went on a mission out in space, during the war or after, and accidentally left someone behind on a planet? I can't decide who it would be worse for it to happen to, and whether being able to morph would really be helpful. Maybe it's a funny no-big when you have alien space travel, I suppose

Ooh, I think it all depends on who got left behind.

Ax: We know from canon that he can get by while stranded on an alien planet without either dying or losing his mind. That said, Ax also desperately needs company and doesn't do well alone. When he's stuck in the Dome ship, he gets to the point of hallucinations and memory problems from the isolation (MM4). So Ax would probably figure out how to get a potato farm or other food supply going — he's very good at cobbling together solutions from limited technology — and he would be able to fix things that went wrong for a time.

But Ax better find that Rover and get it talking to an Earth satellite as fast as he can, if he's the one stranded. And he hopefully wouldn't make a mistake that results in it frying. If he does, then Ax would have the greatest risk of just losing the plot. That could mean falling into a depression so bad he stops maintaining his food supply, becoming so anxious he can't do EVAs anymore, developing psychosis and losing track of reality, or any number of other ways that his brain could start eating itself. But if he does end up with any kind of major overwhelming stressor, then he's probably screwed. It's not like there's a way to do therapy through a 2-message-an-hour Rover running on Morse code, and I doubt(?) NASA would've sent antidepressants in their limited weight supply.

Jake: Would go the same way as Ax, but a lot faster. He wouldn't consider himself worth risking others' lives to rescue, he wouldn't have the necessary mental flexibility to engineer himself a long-term survival solution, and he wouldn't be able to remain sane with no one to talk to. I don't think he'd actually die by suicide. I think he'd just curl up in bed and eat 3x a day until he ran out of MREs, and then gradually slip away.

Marco: Easily the best equipped to survive over a year alone on Mars. Name puns aside, he's the most Mark Watney-ish of the Animorphs. He can laugh as he's crying, he can entertain himself, he can think through problems quickly, and he can charm the media of planet Earth enough to convince NASA to mount a rescue expedition.

Marco would start talking to himself the moment he wakes up alone, and he wouldn't stop talking until he was finally back on the spaceship. He'd try so hard to be cool and tough in the logs, insisting on not really being scared, not really being hungry or in pain, until you could almost believe him. If something breaks, Marco will take it apart and fix it. If he risks dying in the process of fixing the broken water purifier or oxygen system, then he's going to run straight at it with manic determination to make his death at least entertaining for the folks at home.

Of course, Marco might also be the most upsetting one for the other Animorphs to realize they've left behind. Rather than trying to make the others feel better about having made an honest mistake in the process of trying to save their own lives, he'd be making jokes about how he was five minutes late for the school bus and yet they still left him on the field trip, or he knew that Jake found him annoying but never realized he was that annoying. Which would only make the whole team feel way worse about the fact that they left him for dead and nearly let him die for real.

Cassie: Would do all the science she could, with the opportunity she'd been given. She would carefully log the rock samples she found, take extensive notes on her processes, and use up every single sample container and scrap of disc space she had left on her observations. Then she'd go out somewhere beautiful, eat one last MRE and watch one last Earthrise, and take off her helmet.

Tobias: Probably second-best equipped psychologically to spend all that time in survival mode. Like Ax, Tobias is prone to mental illness and so risks not being able to keep going through all the relentless misery and stress, but Tobias is also a solitary creature at heart. And Tobias isn't afraid to do what it takes to survive, as long as he's not hurting anyone else in the process. So he wouldn't make contacting Earth a priority (except to make it clear that he needs rescue) and he would be okay with a tiny trickle of communication with his fellow humans that eventually gets cut off.

However, Tobias is also a lot more... rigid in planning, I guess? He doesn't have Ax's or Marco's "try anything" attitude. He makes rules for himself, and then he follows them, even to the point of risking death. He tends to obsess over taking the right course of action no matter what, and spends a ton of time considering what right would be in any given situation. Like, he's got more functional fixedness than Marco or Cassie, which could be bad if his only option for survival is to make a sock and a paperback book cover into a makeshift CO2 filter. So I think Tobias would handle the isolation best of anyone on the team, but risks not handling the 40,000 random engineering problems that come from using a tent meant for 6 people over 2 weeks as a home for 18 months.

Tobias would also be extremely upsetting for the other Animorphs to have left behind. His role on the team is classic break the cutie, where anything bad happening to him is utterly devastating for all his friends in a way it wouldn't be to have Rachel or Jake suffer a similar fate. If there's anyone that the team would risk cannibalism and death to return to Mars for, it's him.

Rachel: It's hard to say if impulsivity is more of a bonus or a drawback here. Rachel has never taken anything lying down in her life, ever, and she'd be offended by the idea of some stupid dusty planet getting the better of her. She would fight with every iota of her being to survive, fighting airlock failure and potato rot and oxygen leaks and water system clogs.

But. Impulsivity. If that means she tries anything, tries everything, until a solution works, then excellent. If that means she gets fed up with the process of survival, less good. If that means she says screw it and eats when she's hungry, doubleplusungood.

[tangledinink]

hey, it's that rat and his daughter again!

✩ the gemini ✩ [ start ] [ prev ] [ next ]

[kcodii1]

Imagine, being able to sit down and hunch over whilst still maintaining a completely flat or sunken in stomach. Not having to feel hideous when you see how big your arms look when they're flat to your side. Being able to see your bones instead of layers of fat each time you look in the mirror. You dont have to imagine it, you can have it. Just dont lose control and practice discipline and you WILL get there.