At 17, Mary Cain was already a record-breaking phenom: the fastest girl in a generation, and the youngest American track and field athlete to make a World Championships team. In 2013, she was signed by the best track team in the world, Nike’s Oregon Project, run by its star coach Alberto Salazar. Then everything collapsed. Her fall was just…
I believe that shame is the most insidious part of the diet/binge cycle. In our diet culture it’s commonplace for people to walk around with an underlying and persistent feeling that something is wrong with them, and that they are to blame. A pervasive sense of loathing seeps into the core of their being. This…
When her 5-foot-1 daughter Lisa returned home from her first year of college weighing just 68 pounds, Vivian Hanson Meehan sprang into action. This was 1974, and, even though she was a registered nurse, Ms. Meehan couldn’t find information to explain her daughter’s dangerous weight loss. Nor was it easy to find a doctor familiar…
Watch Video About Thomas Insel’s TED Talk Last year, about one in five were affected by a mental illness. Thomas Insel says we know how to give the right kind of care, but we’re not doing it. He argues the first step is to talk about it. About Thomas Insel Thomas Insel is a psychiatrist…
My name is Amy Cunningham, and I am a person affected by an eating disorder. I developed anorexia at age 16 when in my first semester of university. Looking back, the early indicators of the illness began probably a year or two prior. I clearly recall beginning a ‘diet’ reading a book that encouraged fasting. …
Whether it’s gluten-free, dairy-free, raw food, or all-organic, many people these days are committed to so-called “clean eating” — the idea that choosing only whole foods in their natural state and avoiding processed ones can improve health. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to eat this way, but sometimes these kinds of food preferences can…
ANAD lost a legend two weeks ago, and so did the entire eating disorder community. In the midst of ANAD Conference 2019 preparations, we were informed that our founder, Vivian Hanson Meehan, died on Tuesday, September 17. She had been diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma earlier this summer, and passed away in her home surrounded by…
The U.S. is in the midst of a mental health crisis. In 2017, 47,000 Americans died by suicide and 70,000 from drug overdoses. And 17.3 million adults suffered at least one major depressive episode. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, a landmark law passed more than a decade ago, requires insurers to provide comparable…
Young women in particular are constantly being confronted with pictures of beautiful female bodies online – images which have almost always been digitally enhanced. This documentary take a long and alarming look at young women whose everyday lives are dictated by the search for bodily perfection. Watch the documentary here
Dale Knuth, now 58, says that in childhood her weight was a source of anguish — largely because of how her family treated her. “I had a brother who tormented me constantly,” she says. “If I came home from school and was hungry and ate an apple, I’d be called a cow, or a pig…