Another Anorexia Death

Another Anorexia death

Even someone who is specialised in working with eating disorders can succumb to this awful illness.

You might want to read about it here. The trouble is that being older no one can force her to get help. Anorexia. It is like a possession.

Gay & LGBTQ Eating Disorders – More Help Needed Please

NEW BBC DOCUMENTARY SERIES 

 

The BBC are researching a new documentary series about LGBTQ+ life in the UK. One of the episodes will look into Body image, Eating disorders and Body Dysmorphia within the gay community.

 

Are you a gay or bisexual male, based in the UK and aged 18-30?
Does the way you look affect your everyday life and relationships?

Have you been diagnosed with an eating disorder or BDD? Are you looking for answers?
Are you a friend, partner or relative who’s desperately worried about your loved one’s self-image?
If so, the BBC is looking to make a sensitive documentary film and would like to speak to you.

If you would like to know more – without any obligation to take part – please email Pete.Grant@bbc.co.uk

Supporting Young People In Recovery Project

WE NEED YOUR HELP

 Elizabeth and team at Nottingham Trent University are investigating social identity, social networks and eating disorder recovery amongst young people aged 16-25.

The study involves an email interview with questions, to explore the experiences of young people who seek out support for their eating disorder online. The questions will be emailed to you in advance with a consent form. You will have a few days to answer. After you reply with your answers the next lot of questions will be emailed to you. This should take an hour of your time

Who can take part?

You will be aged between 16 and 25 and you will have experience of using online groups to help support you with an eating disorder.

If you would like to take part in an email interview, and help people like yourself, please email the study’s research assistant, Elizabeth on elizabethmair.ntu@gmail.com

Body Image In The LGBTQ Community

An assistant producer from the BBC has recently got in touch with me as they are currently making a series about LGBTQ+ life in the UK. He is currently researching into Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Body image for the series and asked that I reach out to all our readers to find out whether anyone might be interested in sharing their experiences with him. All conversations would be completely confidential and would be to help him develop the series and ensure that it includes the most pertinent issues.

If it is something you think you might be interested in then please drop him an e-mail at Pete.Grant@bbc.co.uk or you can give him a call on 07914 131222.

Thanks for reading. I hope you can help.

Healthy Eating Advice To Preschool Kids

NCFED Childhood Eating Disorders and ObesityBBC Southern Counties interviews me yesterday over a planned initiative to give healthy eating advice to pre school children. Will it work?
I’m not sure you can solve the problem of child and adult obesity through the mind of a 5 year old child. Many know what healthy eating is (many do not) but children want to enjoy what they eat more than anything else and they have high levels of neo-phobia, dislike of new tastes. Adults care less and adults will happily knock back a kale smoothie that tastes disgusting for the sake of their health.

Childhood and adult obesity begins with maternal diet, in pregnancy and even post natal if mum is breast feeding. The taste of veggies come through in the milk and make it easier for children later on to accept their greens. So the solution lies with parents in the first place and the environment in the second place. We have to teach nurseries and schools to adopt a healthy no sugar policy for meals and snacks. Totally!

Teaching healthy eating to children means demonising certain foods and many ignorant teachers will teach them that fat is bad and sugar is bad so if you eat those foods you are bad. This may create eating anxiety among vulnerable children and could lead to eating disorders among the kids who are most sensitive.

We live in a society where it is hard to get the balance right. When mum turns up for the school run with a bunch of carrot sticks she is trying to keep her child healthy but the child may rebel down the line when they find their own spending power. I see this struggle at home as my own children try to be good parents and teach their kids how to live a healthy lifestyle. So they become good at finding out where to get their treats.

As for spending £1 million on this new initiative. Better to put the money into Sure start and pre natal teaching. What do you think?

Can Raising Awareness Ever Be Detrimental?

I contributed a piece to Ziggy’s Wish an online service asking if it can ever be a bad thing to raise awareness of eating disorders. I have said I think it can be harmful because we only see the horror stories and the skeletal bodies and unhappy faces of eating disorders. We do not really see the heroic faces of recovery nor do we learn the real facts and causes of eating disorders nor do we really think about what kind of treatment works best. It’s the wrong kind of publicity we are getting.

The kind of publicity we get only increases stigma for eating disorder patients. I think that we can do better. Some of you might say oh it will help to prevent eating disorders or it will help people to access help. Are you sure? Prevent – no.   Getting help – maybe.

Here is the link to the article

Need Your Help For Research Project

Elizabeth Mair and colleagues at Nottingham Trent University need help for there research project entitled “Supporting eating disorder recovery in adolescents” . We would like to know more about the places and groups, (both online and ‘offline’) that adolescents turn to for help with any eating habits that they are worried about. We hope to collect data using an online survey and also by conducting email interviews with young people aged between 16 and 25 years. Participants would be able to complete either a 15 minute survey, an interview or both, depending on their preference. The survey should take approximately 15 minutes to complete online. The interview schedule would be emailed to participants for them to complete in their own time, over the course of a few days, although writing the responses should take a total time of approximately one hour. Adolescents aged 16-25 years old who have experience of connecting with support groups for individuals living with an eating disorders are eligible to participate. Data collection will end in July. Your contribution will help them and us to make provision of help for eating disorders even better. If you would like to help, please contact Elizabeth at elizabeth.mair@ntu.ac.uk

Eating Disorder 9 Truths

I have my own eating disorder truths but here are some published on World Eating Disorder Awareness Day

truthTruth #1: Many people with eating disorders look healthy, yet may be extremely ill.

Truth #2: Families are not to blame, and can be the patients’ and providers’ best allies in treatment.

Truth #3: An eating disorder diagnosis is a health crisis that disrupts personal and family functioning.

Truth #4: Eating disorders are not choices, but serious biologically influenced illnesses.

Truth #5: Eating disorders affect people of all genders, ages, races, ethnicities, body shapes and weights, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic statuses.

Truth #6: Eating disorders carry an increased risk for both suicide and medical complications.

Truth #7: Genes and environment play important roles in the development of eating disorders. Truth #8: Genes alone do not predict who will develop eating disorders.

Truth #9: Full recovery from an eating disorder is possible. Early detection and intervention are important.

 

A Letter To A Parent About Anorexia And Anorexic-Like Illnesses

National Centre For Eating Disorders Orthorexia HelpI wrote this recently to a parent who was worried about their child. Let’s call these “The “anorexias.”

Anorexia is not just an illness suffered by someone who is skeletal. There are several variants of anorexia nervosa which is wrongly named the “slimmer’s disease” Anorexia is not just caused by the wish to be thin. There is classical anorexia where people exist in a skeletal and lonely wasteland. There are people who function better and are not so thin. A doctor may not be unduly worried; but you know that eating rules their very life. It would be dangerous not to have a proper assessment and ongoing monitoring in case things take a sudden turn for the worse, which often happens. Once identified as restricting past the point of a normal diet, something serious is taking place.

Let me try to get you into the heart and mind of someone with one of the “anorexias.”

Anorexia is about a fear of all is food which akin to a phobia, or fear of foods deemed fattening or unclean. It is also a wish to be “thinner” as a bizarre sense of being “in control” and ideas about weight and shape dominate every aspect of self worth.

The fear of food can begin as a simple desire to lose some weight, which is triggered by almost anything. A friend who is dieting, exam stress, or stress with friends. This fear becomes progressive, and justified by thoughts such as being allergic to certain foods, or needing to avoid certain types of food like fats or carbohydrates or meat, which come to be considered wrong or unsafe. Or impure.

The ideas about these foods are irrational but are justified by things people learn from others or read about in the media. A person only feels safe and “clean” by foregoing those foods and the more certain foods are avoided, the more they grow a fear of eating them.

Although a sufferer might be dimly aware that no harm will come from having a small bit of butter, their thoughts have emotional conviction and when a forbidden food is eaten or considered they feel catastrophic emotions. Anorexic people work very hard to avoid exposure to dangerous foods,. They do this by by eating on their own, by refusing to go out and have fun with other people; by exercising a great deal, sometimes by using alcohol or drugs and sometimes by purging to ensure that everything “gets out”.

Once this phobia is in place, it is very much self-reinforcing and resistant to any form of common sense or appeal to basic wisdom. Horrible physical feelings can rise up when someone eats. This is often just a side effect of starving but it convinces the sufferer that food is as dangerous as they believe it is. Sufferers usually hear a voice outside them, exhorting them to eat less, while also calling them fat and disgusting if they do eat. This voice led us once to think of anorexia as a form of schizophrenia but there are now many different explanations of what the “anorexias” really are about.

These explanations are too complex to discuss in a short letter, but all experts agree that what begins as an attempt just to “feel better” by looking more “attractive” or being more “healthy” becomes “useful”. Restricting food becomes a way of managing emotions, a way to deal with life by paring it down to a simple set of rules, a way of avoiding conflict with others, and a way to avoid sexual feelings and experiences.

What is common in people with the “anorexias” is that BEFORE the illness kicks in, they sense they have some personal deficiencies that make them feel inferior to other people, even if to the outsider they are doing very well. These personal deficits are most keenly felt at the point in life where a person most needs them, usually in adolescence where we are trying to develop an identity of our own, free from the rules and protections of our younger self. It isn’t correct to ask if anorexia is just a way of getting attention. They certainly get attention yet they don’t want it. They are emotionally fragile inside, but they appear strong in their resolution not to eat. They are sick but they say they are well. This is an illness full of contradictions, and the needs of anorexics are not met by getting together who try to prove that they are making a lifestyle choice. What they need is a therapist who understands how to convince them that the real problem isn’t food, it is how they THINK about food and who can help them to love themselves better so that they could not abuse themselves in this way.

And this will mean a great deal of strengthening and personal growth.

There is no single cause of anorexia. Some experts think that anorexia is there from birth, waiting to come out if triggered by events at the wrong time, when someone isn’t coping very well. It is a mental illness emerging in people who are sensitive, with impossibly high expectations of themselves and who have very low self esteem. Keeping away from certain foods (for all the wrong reasons) is one thing that they feel or proud about good at, and it confers on them a sense of being special and unique in the only way possible. For all these reasons, and despite all the pain it causes them, people with the “anorexias” are fiercely resistant to change.

It does us no good therefore to point to how ill they look or how weak and cold they are or even to the damage they are doing to their bodies. The more anxious we become, the more convinced they are that no harm will come to them. Anorexia is a very unique kind of mental illness where there emerges an irrational self which suppresses the real thinking and common sense self; the one which allows us all to make reasonably responsible decisions for our own self care.

Most parents quail at the mention of a mental illness in someone who is getting on with other things in life. It is the last thing we want to hear about a child who is lovely and possibly doing so well in other things. None the less, self starvation in whatever way it is done is a dangerous and sometimes life-threatening compulsion. How dangerous it is depends on the things they do to themselves to keep their weight down (like purging) or running marathons on empty. The “anorexias” have a high mortality rate, more often by suicide rather than starvation. On the other hand, 80% of sufferers usually get well but not without some scars.

The average lifespan of the illness is about 7 years during which there may be effects on education, physical health and great family suffering. Treatment involves the family who have a crucial role to play plus medical, nutritional and expert psychological help. To get well, someone with one of the “anorexias” will need to reach a “turning point’ in which they become fully aware of what is happening to them and they are able to make a conscious decision to fight the voices in their head. Until they get to the turning point they will resist, cheat, lie and hide to get people off their back. They may lose precious time like the ability to continue with their studies for a while. This is because they are petrified of change.

To get to this turning point therefore you need one kind of help which can take time. You need to know that sometimes intervention will make things worse in the short term but this would have happened anyway. Then we will need to keep your loved one safe in any way we can.

And I have to say this, if there is bulimia in any shape or form treatment is all the more urgent because this can become a secondary addiction which is even more sinister to health and wellbeing.

You cannot PERSUADE someone to eat more; they have to agree to take it on before the fear is gone so that they confront those fears on their own. At times, and in serious cases, we have to make feeding non-negotiable so that there is a degree of physical improvement which will confront food fears directly and help someone to think more clearly. After all, a starving brain cannot think rationally.

Sometimes this can be done at home with proper parental training, and sometimes it can only be done in a hospital or clinic or even with a feeding tube. Fortunately, this is rare. The nature of this illness as desired makes older people all the less willing to accept help but you will need to find a way to make this non negotiable in any way you can. Nutritional help on its own help will not be sustained unless there is intensive psychological strengthening as well.

This turning point, it can happen after one year, or two or seven or decades. Clearly we want to try and bring it forward so we have a willing participant in therapy rather than a hostile opponent. People on the road to recovery from the “anorexias” do welcome guidance from someone who really understands anorexia completely and who can help them to feel deserving of having food. We have to work on perfectionism and give these people a whole new vocabulary of emotions to communicate to people around them. Relapses are to be expected now and then.

All people who start restricting food, or certain nutrients need a thorough assessment and a referral to whatever is in their best interests now. You as parents will need to learn what is helpful as a way of confronting this illness and what is not. There is no quick fix, but please have hope but please have hope, this is nasty but there is a strong chance of recovery and the more quickly this gets addressed, the faster it can be.

The Clean Eating Debate

Last week the media was buzzing about what is clean eating, is it low fat high complex carbs or higher natural fats and lower carbs. The National Obesity Forum RIGHTLY said that the low fat messages just aren’t working for real people and that counting calories hasn’t worked. Then researchers in Israel discovered that we cannot count on the effect of any food in our diet, even sweeteners can make some people fatter due to interactions between our genes, our gut bacteria and the chemicals in food.

Katie Glass then weighed in with a fascinating article on clean eating being the acceptable face of anorexia. in the Sunday Times. I have posted it and had a backlash from someone who has recovered by turning vegan. Horses for courses as they say.

Please look on our Facebook page  to see the full range of the raging debates about what is healthy eating. At the end of the day, eat real food;  its not just the food that matters; it is also mind-set and obsessions about it.