Sarah Thompson, founder of Resilient Fat Goddess, writes about body positivity, body liberation, and fat liberation at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and eating disorders.
Let’s talk about Intuitive Eating. How do you navigate honoring your hunger or respecting your fullness, when you can’t afford to buy enough food? How do you enjoy the pleasure of eating, when you can’t buy food that sounds good to you? How do you enjoy the pleasure of eating, when you are worried about if you will be evicted from your home?
Read MoreIn my graduate school classes, sizeism is mentioned once in the entire five years I’m a graduate student. Every single class is required to talk about marginalized identities and how whatever topic the class is focused on impacts those who are more marginalized or oppressed. Fat people are never mentioned except in the one class one time. I know from my lived experience that fat people are oppressed and I began studying feminism and learning about the history of size oppression in college. Eating disorders are covered one day in my “abnormal psychology” class and never mentioned again. Even in my “psychology of women” class eating disorders were never mentioned and diet culture wasn’t talked about.
Read MoreIt was easy to know in high school when I was starving myself, using laxatives not as prescribed, and making myself throw up that I most likely had an eating disorder. This was the way I saw them represented in after school specials, and documentaries in health class. Though when I started seeing a therapist at 16, I was never told I had an eating disorder. I was never offered eating disorder treatment.
Read MoreEating disorders are not addictions. While this statement is supported by many in the eating disorder (ED) community, it seems like a fairly fringe idea to assert for those outside the ED community. In this essay, I will provide a critique of research commonly used to equate eating disorders with addictions, particularly food and/or sugar addiction. What many people who research food addiction and those who support the food addiction model actually are referring to is the effect of semi-starvation and starvation on the body, not food addiction.
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