look i get this type of disordered reasoning but you’re not eating a whole head of lettuce bc you’re bingeing for emotional reasons and the lettuce can somehow mitigate it, you’re bingeing bc you eat whole heads of lettuce. you will continue to binge until you start giving your body the foods it demands, on a regular basis, without attempts to trick it into restriction. your body knows the difference between water/fiber bulk and actual energy intake and if you don’t want to be so strongly compelled to eat that you’re ingesting things humans find unpalatable and frankly sickening (your poor digestive system!), then you’re gonna have to give it food w calories

So many people claim they “overeat” or are otherwise unjustified in being hungry all the time when a significant proportion of their diet is high-volume, low-density foods.

Try not even counting vegetables and fruits in your daily intake total (unless in oil or butter, breaded, fried, etc)—really, knock them off the list of things you ate today. You had a salad with dressing and seeds? It was just x ounces of dressing and seeds, which is a tiny amount of food. This isn’t an ontological claim lol it’s just a tool, and a useful one if you regularly find yourself full but not satiated, or eating consistently but hungry again right after eating.

Feeling full doesn’t mean energy balanced. Density > volume for people with eating issues. The lower the caloric density of the foods you eat, the more volume you’ll have to eat (good luck with vegetables 🥲), and the inverse is also true—higher density foods will meet energy needs with far less volume.

hi, i hope this finds you well. you have such an incredible skill for articulating the complexities of eating disorders in a way that is very compassionate and gentle but also driven by facts and research. you present these concepts in a way that's really easy to understand, too. i'm struggling with how to talk about my eating disorder with my boyfriend, but i don't want it to be a secret anymore. i want to guide him to a place of understanding, not scare him with the ugly details of my disorder. but it's so difficult to talk about. most people have a passive understanding of EDs, one that is often incomplete or just plain wrong. so in the process of telling my story, i also have to undo whatever he has come to believe about EDs. it isn't going well so far. i get frustrated or triggered or sad and just shut down because he'll try to give me advice about diet and exercise and i'm like....this isn't what i want. do you have any resources for people with EDs on how to talk to loved ones? i just don't even know where to begin. :/

Sandra Lazzarini

Okay so you’re reading one of my many posts saying that if you feel sugar or any other food item is “like a drug”, you’re not eating enough, and you think to yourself and then write it my notes “but I’ve tried eating more and that doesn’t help.” Welcome to the most frequent reaction to these claims! Not only are you not the exception, you’re giving the textbook disordered response.

These are our next steps when we’re here with disordered eaters: first, we want some 24-hour recalls of what gets eaten on average days, so we can assess where they are roughly in terms of adequacy and consistency. I can tell you that when people are tending to binge or experience what they call “food addiction”, I rarely find the 24-hr recalls to show adequacy and consistency. There’s usually an overall deficiency in calories as well as too much time between meals and snacks (breakfast is a common culprit). Restrict-binge cycling is ofc very common as well.

Another issue is that people think rectifying an energy deficit is a short-term effort, and anyone who’s recovered from an ED can tell you how laughably and cry-ably wrong this is. In the most aggressive clinical refeeding, I have never seen the process take less than several months… and that’s closely monitored high-calorie intake day in and day out with no lapses. Most people who are doing this on their own are extremely inconsistent when trying to refeed. Consistent refeeding can actually feel quite brutal when you’re used to restrictive patterns. If you’re doing it casually, you may not be doing it at all.

You’re not uniquely broken when it comes to food—that’s a lie of diet culture and eating disorders. But coming out of your inadequate, inconsistent, or cyclical eating patterns takes work and commitment. It’s hard. If you’re still in the “food is a drug” mode after you made an effort to eat more, your restriction may be too serious for you to address alone, or without educated and sustained effort at the very least.

Listen, if you’re craving sugar to the point where it feels like a “drug addiction” (and even drug addiction is complex & widely misunderstood), then you’re too hungry. You’re too hungry!

The pleasurability of sugar and the reward that sugar creates in the brain is much more pronounced in what the literature calls “restrained eaters” than it is in intuitive eaters. Sugar is usually pleasurable for most people, but in non-restrained eaters its appeal will be highest at our hungriest and decrease significantly with satiety. Restrictive eaters don’t experience satiety, because they constantly maintain an energy deficit, and that’s why sugar feels like a “drug.” Dietary sugar is fast, efficient energy for a deprived body, and our smart bodies drive us to it powerfully for that reason, to rectify the energy deficit.

Dietary sugar is great. It’s not a threat. It doesn’t cause disease. It’s not a drug. It’s a healthy part of a pleasurable diet. But if it feels to you like you’re completely out of control around it because of the intensity of its pleasurability, you need to be eating more calories, period.

What’s happening on this website that I’m having to block 20 people at a time in my notes during the twilight years of my semi retirement

Listen, if you’re craving sugar to the point where it feels like a “drug addiction” (and even drug addiction is complex & widely misunderstood), then you’re too hungry. You’re too hungry!

The pleasurability of sugar and the reward that sugar creates in the brain is much more pronounced in what the literature calls “restrained eaters” than it is in intuitive eaters. Sugar is usually pleasurable for most people, but in non-restrained eaters its appeal will be highest at our hungriest and decrease significantly with satiety. Restrictive eaters don’t experience satiety, because they constantly maintain an energy deficit, and that’s why sugar feels like a “drug.” Dietary sugar is fast, efficient energy for a deprived body, and our smart bodies drive us to it powerfully for that reason, to rectify the energy deficit.

Dietary sugar is great. It’s not a threat. It doesn’t cause disease. It’s not a drug. It’s a healthy part of a pleasurable diet. But if it feels to you like you’re completely out of control around it because of the intensity of its pleasurability, you need to be eating more calories, period.

this was a very good episode and worth listening to if you’re interested in weight science, issues around weight loss surgery, co-occurring food/body and substance use disorders, and more. 

dubreuil is a clinical social worker & fat activist and she’s sharp as hell with the science, but she also has a level of compassion and respect for other people’s paths with their own bodies that i found deeply affecting. it’s an hour that’s dense with great content.

https://christyharrison.com/foodpsych/5/the-truth-about-weight-loss-surgery-with-lisa-dubreuil

A colleague of mine wrote a great piece in this new publication, Kapwa Magazine, on fat liberation from a Filipino-American perspective. The magazine is just getting off the ground so it’s a little pricey, but they could use the support if anyone’s able to purchase!

https://kapwamagazine.com/

https://issuu.com/kapwamagazine/docs/issue_001

“But companies are engineering foods to taste really really good” lol we have SO many problems and this isn’t one of them

The only eaters who have reason to fear hyperpalatable foods (that is, foods that are so so tasty) are restrained eaters who want to maintain their dietary restraint. Eaters who regularly experience satiety and eat adequately and consistently are not overpowered by hyperpalatable foods; those foods simply have their place in the varied diet. Foods that taste really good are not a problem in themselves… please consider how absurd this claim is. All eaters seek some combination of pleasure and energy. The less energy one consumes overall the more intensely pleasurable food will feel. If that level of pleasurability scares you, increase your overall intake rather than attempting to cut dietary pleasure out of your life. Everyone who comments about retraining your taste buds to enjoy “healthy” (by which you mean lower energy) foods will be blocked lol

How can trans lives be seen and recognized as deserving of protection with the ability to live fully but without subjection to violent state intervention processes? How do we conceive of different modes of recognition and collectivity without falling into the traps of the visual, of bio- and necropolitical systems of valuation and economic extraction? What role should visibility play in the future of a critical queer and trans politics? A critical queer and trans politics can help us formulate modes of resistance and alternative collectivities beyond the racialized, classed, and gendered politics of visibility through what Tourmaline calls “nobodiness.” While a somebody is an individual who is not only recognized but given value by the market, the state, and mainstream society, a nobody is neglected, ignored, or actively exploited for value and targeted for disposal by those same entities. Nobodiness is therefore a strategic use of one’s marginalization to subvert the logics and institutions of heteronormative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. 

As Tourmaline explains in relation to her own experience with the commodification and exploitation of her recently acquired fame as an activist and filmmaker, “some of us somebodies need to remember the joy and the power of that less visible place that is actually so deeply visible to those in it and so violently hyper-visible to those that seek to destroy it.” The power and possibility of nobodiness then lies in its paradoxically invisible/hypervisible status. Even as nobodies are always subject to violent forms of surveillance, criminalization, and elimination, by engaging in everyday, local, and collective forms of care, organization, resistance, and action nobodies not only imagine, but “model … the worlds we want to actually live in.” In other words, 

We all know the damage that it can be to be called nobody and yet there is power in that word and in that world of no-bodies. It’s a power Denise Ferreira da Silva cites when she asks ‘Do we want to be somebody under the state or nobody against it?’ … do we want to be visible subjects of … inhospitable institutions earning good credit by doing actions it deems of consequence and important or do we want to go undercover, be fugitives to the institution and its morals, unruly to its attempts at incorporation and assimilation. Maybe, and this is one of the hardest lessons I’ve learned, sometimes we want or need to do both.

Thus, nobodiness does not equate to invisibility, but rather, is a tactical navigation and subversion of the constraints of visibility and the dominant institutions that exploit those constraints for profit and power.

Mia Fischer, “CODA: The Perils of Transgender Visibility” in Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State.

[emphasis added]

one thing you do NOT want as life becomes unlivable for most people on the planet and then western “civilization” collapses is enlarged pores!! :/

girls. they want to us to feel terrorized by “premature ageing” (this is such a funny nonsense phrase) while the ruling class burns our world down

anyone here heard of ageism 

it’s just wild how this society with its industries and culture so blatantly fear and abhor women who get older! and how terrified ageing women ourselves are of simply existing. the language of anti-ageing is inescapable. if i lost my career and needed one of the low-wage jobs i worked throughout my 20s and 30s, it would be nearly impossible to get hired into one. this is so obvious as a facet of misogyny, but it really hides in plain sight until you experience it yourself. (and i’m only in my early 40s! not yet discarded by this society to the extent that elderly people are.) i’m afraid this baby got thrown out with the bathwater of second wave feminism 

anyone here heard of ageism 

anyone here heard of ageism