#disordered eating m

[hetheyshe-remade]

I come to front. My stomach hurts. "You haven't eaten yet". I remember how much I hate eating.

[royalreef]

In the wake of yesterday, Bellanda surveys the damage.

Miranda is still asleep, curled up around herself with the blankets all fussed. Last night, too, was rough, and despite the need to maintain schedules, even now, she lets Miranda sleep. She had tossed, she had turned, she had woken up to begin screaming in Bellanda's ear and kicking her sides, and she had been unable to sleep for very long until she had to awake and scream again. The fact that she's been asleep the past few hours is a small miracle, and not one that Bellanda is passing up anytime soon.

This means she takes care as she pulls back the covers. Just a little, not a lot, just seeing how bad it was. The first thing she sees, thanking her good luck that they make the silly things bright and glowing blue, is the claw caps. They're still on, so she's worrying far less about open wounds, disregarding Miranda's own teeth and her habit of biting at herself. Good. There's something there, a dull awareness that Miranda could have pulled them off again, that she didn't — but Bellanda doesn't know what to do with this other than feel grateful about it. Should she reward Miranda, somehow? That feels inappropriate, wrong, like tossing scraps to the worrier sharks after a hunt.

Still, claws or no claws, Miranda's fins have begun bruising, and they bruise dark and purple and green and yellow. It flushes against the pale skin like a body pressed up against a window, all detail and no mystery, revealing every turn and twist that had been taken. One looks bent wrong, and the thought that she should set it again occurs to Bellanda. It would make it easier, if it healed correctly the first time, and it probably wouldn't cause Miranda as much distress when they fixed it anyways — but, again, they would fix it anyways, and doing something about it now would mean additional pain, additional worry.

She tilted her head, looked over Miranda's arms. No visible wounds, none that she could see, so that was good. She'd have to do a full check-over later, but if Miranda hadn't bitten herself, then that meant that any other damage she had to worry about would all be internal. Something which was likely, considering the amount of screaming yesterday, and clawing at herself, and...

Bellanda was taking her victories where she could get them. Isn't that something she was supposed to pay heed to, being Chief Warlord? If she didn't value what she did take, when she managed to take it, then she wouldn't be able to utilize it, wouldn't be able to turn those into victories of their own. Losses already were lost, already had been paid for, and she had to keep moving, keep thinking ahead, change her plans as needed but be as fluid as the sea. Stewing in them was only going to make her fall behind.

Her sister hadn't eaten yesterday, too. Bellanda hadn't either, because she was busy worrying about Miranda, but she could remedy that now. Something gentle, yeah, probably something warm. Something that wouldn't strain Miranda too much to eat, and something that was easy enough to get down that it meant she wouldn't be thinking about the fact that she was eating at all.

That was pragmatic. That was easy. That was something that she could focus herself on, in lieu of continuing to worry her own bones, something that could partition out her time and distract her from the fact that she was going to have to determine if this week was enough. If something like yesterday happened so late in the week she had gotten time off for, then they weren't through the worst of it, then it might happen again, then it might happen where someone could see. But asking too much time, keeping to herself too much, avoiding their duties... That was dangerous too. That would be just as disastrous if it got out, would doom them both all over again. She had her own interests to attend to, interests which needed her to act fast as much as Miranda, and spending too much time with her would still cause her to falter on that end, still make other things come apart.

But she could think about that later. After food.

For now, she pulled the blankets back up and over Miranda's head, let her continue to sleep and to dream. She pushed back off the end of the bed, feet first, her hands hitting the ground after a slow slide where Bellanda let gravity do its work. With nowhere else for all this manic energy to go, she turned for the exit out into the central room, and set about calling the kitchens to bring up something to eat.

[librarycards]

ive been in recovery from disordered eating for some years now and would like to start observing kosher more thoroughly, but am concerned about the possibility of restrictions making it harder not to relapse. as a vegan, do you have any advice on maintaining a loving relationship with eating while still finding value in having rules around food?

thank you so much for this question! i think for me it's key to think about food and eating less as a set of discrete "behaviors" toward certain "safe"/"unsafe" foods (as it were) but rather as a holistic part of our lives intimately entangled with not only our social poitionalites but also our values.

for me, a vegan practice doesn't begin or end with food, and what i do or do not eat is not important bc of what certain foods "are", but instead the means by which they got to me, and the conditions under which they are / are not commodified/scraped of their connection to actual living things & systems of oppression. it's honestly hard to live a life with an actual vegan ethical framework while in what might be considered an "active" eating disorder - i know because i am trying to maintain this balance while also Not Getting Better right now. a fixation on the artificial stuff like calories, macros, and "health"-based moral measures is antithetical to an approach that considers the "how" and "why" of food, rather than the what.

i think that this has many parallels and overlaps with kashrut, which doesn't exist in a food-related vacuum, but instead among a constellation of halachic practices that help you feel more connected to gd, to your community/tradition, and more, and will help you materially live a life that will aid you in a more collective practice of tikkun olam. this isn't a set of restrictions designed to make you "perfect," after all. it isn't designed to remove you from community with others in favor of self-fixation. instead, it's a nonnormative way of thinking with what we eat, and imbuing food with a newfound connection to our broader practices of healing and liberation!

now, this is well and good, but what about practical matters? when on-the-ground shopping or ordering, it can be really helpful to go to aisles, spaces where everything fits a given guideline by default - that way, it's easy to catch yourself straying from checking to see if it's vegan/kosher and checking to see if it's "safe." same with spending time with loved ones who already make and incorporate these foods; there are tons of opportunities to eat spontaneously in ways that your brain might try to stop you from doing. i think particularly in the case of keeping kosher, if you pray, it's really important and nice to keep an open connection w/ gd in regard to the relationship between kashrut, harm, and healing. this is what i do each time a big fast day comes around, and inevitably come to the conclusion that the picuach nefesh mandate outweighs any excuse i can make for why i "should" fast. you will likely notice this if you find yourself using keeping kosher more as an excuse for restriction rather than a meaningful practice of connection.

what's important to remember is that so-called "dietary restrictions" are only restrictions due to an inaccess to alternatives, whether via inaccess to community/support or physical inaccess to the food you need. all communities that work, work based on shared rules/values/care practices -- so surround yourself with people for whom kosher is an act of care, not punishment. i think this is really the key: i don't view being vegan as a punishment, but an opportunity. for my comrades who also enjoy vegan food, it's also an opportunity to eat lots of food - including food that has challenged me in ed- ways. even though i am by no means a model recovering/recovered person (faaar from it) i find so much value and joy and liberation in the unrestrained, generous, and delicious meals we get to enjoy, whose excellence is only amplified by a grounding in intentionality and hope.

[materialisnt]

they ate a couple tablespoons of cottage cheese and a couple teaspoons of turkey baby food. still groaning and panting off and on. gonna blend some rice into a mush to see if they like it, then can mix it with those other proteins

[genderkoolaid]

7 in 10 transgender people age 18-24 experience an eating disorder. These disorders are so pervasive in the LGBTQ community that the Biden administration earlier this month awarded a multi-million dollar grant to psychologists pioneering identity-affirming eating disorder treatment for LGBTQ people. Trans men experience even higher rates of eating disorders than their female counterparts and the highest rates of any demographic group, according to a 2023 study from the National Library of Medicine. Experts say trans people disproportionately struggle with eating disorders because they face body dysphoria, societal stigma, and a deep desire for control amidst a world that often feels hostile and invalidating. [...] “Most people assume those impacted are young, white, thin, and female. [But] only 6% of people who struggle with eating disorders are clinically underweight. When somebody who is not that model then has to navigate recovery in the real world, they're also having to navigate this landscape that doesn't see them as a person who is impacted.” Cisgender, white women are the most likely to be asked about eating disorders by their doctors and receive treatment. Men have reported struggling to feel understood by therapists, feeling unwanted in the treatment environment and that their concerns are not taken into account. This means a lot of men—and especially trans men—are left untreated. [...] Cyan found it easier to be open about his eating disorder when he was feminine presenting, but since he transitioned, he gets nervous talking about it. “I feel like it’s taken less seriously because I look like a man, and it’s more embarrassing to have to deal with it as a man. When I was considering my gender, I always thought men don't have to care about what they look like. But that was not the case.” Cyan says men are held to standards of fitness and “pressure to be strong in a certain way.” “There's a sense of fitness that is still expected when it comes to peak masculinity. It’s to be muscular and strong and I thought that’s what I needed to be.” [...] When trans men receive gender-affirming care, studies point to a reduction in eating disorder behaviors. Another 2019 study found that when gender is affirmed and gender dysphoria is reduced, eating disorder symptoms decrease.

I want to note that even though the study mentioned here is a meta-analysis, that doesn't mean it's perfect. A lot of the data it's drawing from had fairly small sample sizes. I don't think the takeaway here should be "trans men have it WORSE than trans women" because ultimately, what DOES seem pretty solid is that all trans people have higher rates of ED than cisgender men or women. And all trans people are vulnerable to the influence of misogyny in developing eating disorders. The takeaway is that transgender men are especially vulnerable to disordered eating, that should be discussed a lot more, and transmascs need ED recovery resources that take anti-transmasculinity into account and take it seriously. And also, free transitions for everybody forever.

[strvinganglll]

I will reach my goal by July

I will reach my goal by July

I will reach my goal by July

I will reach my goal by July

I will reach my goal by July

I will reach my goal by July

[roman-roy-apologist]

maybe you don’t think this fictional character has an eating disorder. but i know better

[dennisboobs]

ah

[neonbodyache]

ᯓ★dreaming of a better body and i will make it so★

[xseffort45]

never not obsessed with M!nnie's collarb0ne

[dreamings-free]

James Vincent McMorrow: ‘I’ve been building back a version of me that made me happy rather than crying every night’

The Dubliner isn’t the first name that comes to mind as a songwriter for a boy-band megastar. But working with Louis Tomlinson was just what he needed after his record-label disappoinment

The Irish Times | Sat Nov 30 2024 by Ed Power

During the pandemic the songwriter and producer James Vincent McMorrow would rise early, go for a run and write songs for Louis Tomlinson, of One Direction.

“I actually made half of a record for him,” he says. Tomlinson’s team “had a lot of songs but maybe not a lot that he was as into as he wanted to be. I think they were maybe looking for a weirdo. So they reached out to me. I love him. He’s a fascinating human being. I absolutely loved making that album,” adds McMorrow, who is about to start a tour of Ireland.

When it comes to potential collaborators with a boy band megastar, McMorrow’s name is not the first that springs to mind. He’s an indie songwriter whose open-veined, falsetto-driven pop has been compared to that of folkies such as Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens. But Tomlinson was a fan of the Dubliner’s beautifully wrought music. He wasn’t alone: Drake famously sampled McMorrow on his 2016 track Hype.

One of the tracks they wrote together, The Greatest, would serve as the opener to Tomlinson’s second LP, Faith in the Future. As is often the way with the music industry, the rest are in a vault somewhere. Still, for McMorrow the opportunity to work with a pop star was about more than simply putting his craft in front of a wider audience. The call from Tomlinson’s team had come at a low point for the Irishman, who had become mired in confusion and doubt after signing to a major label for the first time in his career.

Executives at Columbia Records had recognised potential in McMorrow as an artist who bridged the divide between folk and pop. The fruits of that get-together would see daylight in September 2021 as the excellent Grapefruit Season LP, on which McMorrow teamed up with Paul Epworth, who has also produced Adele and Florence Welch.

The album was a beautifully gauzy rumination on the birth of his daughter and the muggy roller coaster of first-time parenthood. It went top 10 in Ireland and breached the top 100 in the UK. Yet the experience of working within the major-label system was strange for McMorrow, who at that point had been performing and recording for more than a decade. He didn’t hate it. But he knew he didn’t ever want to do it again.

“It was a weird time. I stopped touring in 2017. My daughter was born in 2018. I signed with Columbia Records at the same time and made a record that … There were moments within it I was proud of. But fundamentally, I think if I was being very honest, I would say that I definitely got lost in the weeds of what the music industry wanted for me rather than what I wanted for myself.”

Finding his way out of the weeds involved putting out The Less I Knew, a mixtape of tracks, in 2022, and, in June 2024, Wide Open, Horses, the official follow-up to Grapefruit Season. It’s a fantastic reboot from an artist who has found his way into the light once again. The album showcases McMorrow’s propulsive voice – imagine a goth Bee Gees – and his ability to turn a diaristic observation about a tough day into musical quicksilver, as he does on White Out, a blistering ballad that draws on his experience of suffering a panic attack while out at the shops (“white out on the city street … pain comes from strangest places”).

He workshopped the project with two concerts at the National Concert Hall in Dublin in March 2023, performing the as-yet-unfinished record all the way through. The risk of something going amiss was significant – which was why he did it in the first place.

“Those shows, that process was me very much back on my bullshit,” he says, meaning that, having tried to fit into a corporate structure, he was embracing his old idiosyncratic methods once again.

“I’m the worst sort of career musician in a lot of ways. I do the weird thing. I like doing things that make me interested selfishly. ‘I’m engaged with this process.’ ‘The stress of this is making me feel the way that I want to feel.’ And I’d lost that. Doing those two shows was me doing something where I was, like, ‘There’s stakes to this’ ... ‘If I f**k this up, people are going to see it.’ That brings out the best in me.”

McMorrow grew up in Malahide, the well-to-do town in north Co Dublin; as a secondary-school student he suffered debilitating shyness. In 2021 he revealed that he had struggled with an eating disorder at school, ending up in hospital (“Anorexia that progressed into bulimia”). He was naturally retiring, not the sort to crave the spotlight. But he was drawn to music. “It was definitely a difficult journey,” he says. He wasn’t alone in that. “The musicians that tend to cut through and make it ... A lot of my friends, musicians that are successful, they’re not desperate for the stage.”

The Tomlinson collaboration was part of his strange relationship with the mainstream music industry. It went back to McMorrow’s third LP, Rising Water, from 2016. A move away from his earlier folk-pop, the project had featured engineering from Ben Ash, aka Two Inch Punch, a producer who had worked with chart artists such as Jessie Ware, Sia and Wiz Khalifa.

That was followed by the Drake sample in 2016 and by McMorrow writing the song Gone, which was at one point set to be recorded by a huge pop star whom he’d rather not identify.

“Gone is the red herring of red herrings in my entire career. I wrote that song for other people. I didn’t write it for myself. The whole reason I signed to Columbia Records and I had all these deals was because of Gone. I was very happy tipping away in my weird little world. And then I wrote that song, and a lot of bigger artists came in to try to take it,” he says.

“I won’t name names. There were recordings of it done. It got very close to being a single for someone else. I would go in these meetings with all these labels, and I would play it for them – just to play. Not with any sense of ‘This is my song.’ And they were, like, ‘You’re out of your mind if you don’t take this song. This is the song that will make you the thing that is the thing.’ And I was, like, ‘You’re wrong.’ For a year I basically was, like, ‘I disagree.’ And if you go in a room with enough people enough times and they tell you that you’re crazy ... I loved the song, but I did not love it for me. I never felt I fit. There was a little part of me that wanted to believe.”

As he had predicted, Gone wasn’t a hit. He received a lot of other strange advice, including that he cash in on the mercifully short-lived craze for NFTs by putting out an LP as a watermarked internet file. All of that was swirling in his brain when Tomlinson got in touch. To be able to step outside his own career was exactly what McMorrow needed.

“With Louis it was like boot camp. I had a very limited time with him. I had to wake up every morning, go for a run, write a song in my head, go to the studio. We made songs all day long. It lit a fire in my head again. I loved the process. I like sitting and talking to someone like Louis, who’s had this unbelievably fascinating lifestyle – so much tragedy in his life,” he says. Tomlinson’s mother and sister died within three years of each other, and his 1D bandmate Liam Payne died in October. “So many things have happened to him. I chatted to him and then write constantly. That was a lovely process.”

Because life is strange and full of contrasts McMorrow ended up working with Tomlinson around the same time that he was producing the Dublin postpunk “folk-metal” band The Scratch, on their LP Mind Yourself. “Totally different animals,” he says. “The Scratch album was an intense period in the studio of that real old-school nature of making music. A lot of fights. A lot of pushing back against ideas. A lot of different opinions. And you have to respect everybody’s opinions and find the route through.”

During his brief time on a major label, McMorrow was reminded of the music industry’s weakness for short-term thinking. In 2019, the business was obsessed with streaming numbers and hot-wiring the Spotify algorithm so that your music posted the highest possible number of plays.

“Everyone was driven by stats. ‘This song has 200 million streams.’ ‘That song has 400 million streams.’ I went into my meetings with Columbia Records ... the day I had my first big marketing meeting was the day my catalogue passed a billion streams, which, for someone like me, who started where I started, was a day where I should be popping champagne corks. Instead they immediately started talking about how they have artists that have one song that has two billion streams. So by their rule of thumb I was half as successful as one song by one artist on their label.”

Five years later he believes things have changed. He points to Lankum, a group who will never set Spotify alight yet who have carved a career by doing their own thing and not chasing the short-term goal of a place on the playlist. They are an example to other musicians, McMorrow says.

“I was in Brooklyn, doing two nights, a week and a half ago. In the venue across the road from where we were, pretty much, Lankum were doing two nights and had [the Dublin folk artist] John Francis Flynn opening for them. Those are two artists that, if you were to look at their stats, you wouldn’t be, like, ‘These are world-beating musicians.’ You start aggregating to this stat-based norm and you miss bands like Lankum, bands like The Mary Wallopers, people like John Francis Flynn.”

McMorrow is looking forward to his forthcoming Irish tour, which he sees as another leg of his journey to be his best possible self.

“The last two, three years have been a process of building it back to a version of me that actually made me happy rather than making me cry at night-time – a version that was making music because I liked it. Within this industry there’s so much outside noise. It’s quite overwhelming. I was overwhelmed. It’s been nice to reset the clock.”

James Vincent McMorrow’s new single is Glu. He plays Vicar Street, in Dublin, on Monday, December 2nd, and Tuesday, December 3rd; Black Box, Galway, on Thursday, December 5th; and Set Theatre, Kilkenny, on Saturday, December 7th

This article was amended on December 2nd, 2024, to correct the name of Louis Tomlinson’s second album

[librarycards]

When people look at me and say YOU??? Acting like a cishet girl??? Wearing a dress??? Whoa man that’s crazy and like YEAH IT WAS. IT WAS. i tried to kill myself over and over and stopped eating and hit myself until i bruised and got so addicted to schoolwork that I couldn’t tolerate more than 30 minutes of waking non-productivity per day! All the things ppl do in order to punish themselves into submission! I did! And the person you see now is only tangentially related to the person who did that, not because I am sane or healthy now but because that person was not a person at all, they were a vessel for every available depravity!

reading people’s tags on the trans in high school post and like. I cannot even fully conceptualize the person I was — in deep cishet girl cosplay — bc that person was so utterly dissociated from literally everything that makes me who I am. Like it is incomprehensible that I even survived that. I mean, I tried really hard not to

[materialisnt]

they arent eating. theyre drinking water still. we see the vet today but might need to go directly to emergency vet.

[sctir]

"i love my ocs" <- guy who gave them all eating disorders

[strvinganglll]

P/urg!ng tips plsss I’m literally so desperate I’ll literally suck your toes pllsssss

[warlock-enthusiast]

When a coworker approaches you - out of love - and asks if you have considered losing weight, because I currently have a bit of backpain like every other fucking office person ever.

Bitch I have been on a diet for most of my life and suffered through eight years of bulimia and starving myself. I got bullied so bad that I wanted to off myself at the age of 10.

Fuck all the way off.

Ofc I was not savage or smart and simply teared up.

Out of love, my ass.