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I’ve got lots of school stuff to catch up on, so here’s a quick round-up of related topics in the blogosphere and news.

Congratulations to Harriet Brown, who announced this week that HarperCollins has purchased the rights to her next book, Brave Girl Eating. The memoir follows the Brown family’s struggle to cope with daughter Kitty’s anorexia. You can read Kitty’s story here. A brief summation of the book:

When Brown’s daughter developed anorexia at 14, Brown refused to accept the dismal track record of traditional approaches to eating disorders; this is the story of her family’s triumph over the disease, weaving together a parent’s perspective, a journalist’s point of view and issues of neurobiology and genetics. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Brown wrote about her family’s experience in the Times Magazine in 2006.

I’m still accepting blogs to be added to the Eating Disorders Digest feed. If your blog addresses eating disorders at least in part and you want to be added to the list, leave a comment here with your blog RSS feed address. Note: I have had to delete a blog off the list that ends every post with a running count of the blogger’s current weight, calories consumed, and exercise undertaken. While this feed is not intended to be anti-reality, I also want it to be as safe a place as possible for those struggling with eating disorders to go to. Detailing your own struggles with an eating disorder is fine, but I think posting a running count of your stats and weight loss goals aren’t appropriate for this feed, either. Another note: if you’d like to be added to the feed, please embed the feed on your site first. The feed is intended to be a cross-collaborative project, for both bloggers and readers of our blogs. You can view the feed here. Also, if you haven’t already, join the Eating Disorder Studies Yahoo group.

Size-zero models form a convenient coathook upon which the media like to blame many an eating disorder. But for me and others like Naomi Hooke, the development of our eating disorders has very little to do with ultra-thin models. Hooke explores the forces that led to her development of anorexia at age 11 in the British Independent - finding it had nothing to do with size-zero models.

Anorexia has often been perceived as a quest for model-like beauty, as a teenage fad or as a diet gone wrong. It has even been described as a lifestyle choice. Seldom is anorexia acknowledged as the life-threatening medical condition that it is… Sufferers are often presumed to pour over the pages of glossy magazines and starve themselves in their aspiration to become glamorous, thinner-than-thin sex goddesses. From my own experiences and from those of numerous other eating disorder patients I have met, I can say unequivocally that nothing could be further from the truth. Beauty has very little to do with eating disorders, and the desire to be thin is merely one of many symptoms. Rarely can a single “cause” be identified.

Although the fashion industry may be rife with anorexia, the majority of eating disorder patients have not become ill through catwalk influences. And nor are they models.

And finally, go and read 18-year-old Katie Muller’s fantastic essay “F.A.T.” over at the other TheFWord site:

There is no good reason why women should be so appalled by their natural size and inherent store of fat (women naturally have a higher percentage of fat on their bodies than men) but there is a simple reason why they are. We live, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise, in a man’s world. We are still, in a million small ways and plenty of big ones, submissive, convinced of our inferiority and full of contempt for our own sex. And to fit into the small space left for us in this man’s world, we have no choice but to shrink.

Shrink to fit, we are told, and reap the glorious benefits of success, money and even love. And when that never happens, reap the benefits of dying exhausted and being buried thin.

Muller’s conclusions on why aesthetic beauty standards are more stringent for women than for men fall in line with my own research interests: Women are encouraged to change their bodies so they don’t have the time nor the effort to change the world. As Miller explains:

Self-starvation is encouraged because as long as fat is seen as the enemy and ‘beauty’ the prize at the end of the rainbow, men are safe and women are trapped. Suddenly, from this perspective, eating disorders seem like an obvious solution, a practical reaction to society’s demands. They are so perfectly suited, in fact, to the job of undermining women that it would not be unreasonable to suppose they had been invented for that very purpose.

Muller, who also struggled with anorexia, understands what so many women in similar situations have come to understand: that “thin enough” is simply a journey, never a destination reached; that one can never be “thin enough” or “pretty enough” or “good enough” because the standards constantly shift, become higher and harsher. As she explains it:

We are all bashing our heads against the same brick wall. What are we trying to do? Break down the wall? It is not working is it? Perhaps that’s because we don’t need to break down the wall at all. We just need to stop bashing our heads against it.

Sage advice, indeed.

Comments? Critiques? Leave your thoughts on the stories above in the comments below.

Remember Marya Hornbacher’s new memoir of her experiences with bipolar disorder? Now you can read a free excerpt from Madness: A Bipolar Life offered by the British Telegraph. This particular passage seems to pick up where Hornbacher’s eating disorder memoir Wasted leaves off, with Hornbacher in her early 20s and struggling to cope with life outside the warm security blanket of an eating disorder.

In this passage, Hornbacher sets the stage for describing the reality of mania in the same elegiac and beautifully crafted prose which has earned her a coveted place on the bookshelves of most people with eating disorders I know:

It seems to happen overnight: one day I am calm, and the next I am raging. It happens like you’re flipping a switch. I am having a perfectly lovely evening, and then it’s dark and I am screaming, standing in the middle of the room, turning over the glass-topped coffee table, ripping the bathroom sink out of the wall, picking up anything nearby and throwing it as hard as I can. The rages always come at night. They control my voice, my hands, I scream and throw myself against the walls.

Rage swings into a stuporous sleep, and sleep swings into the awful morning sun. My head slides off the edge of the bed, and my mood plummets from shrieking high to muffled low, my heart beating dully inside my ribs. This old, familiar ache does not feel so much like sadness as it does like death, if death is blunt and heavy and topples into you, knocking you flat.

After years of being misdiagnosed and and misunderstood, Hornbacher is finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 23, one year after starting Wasted. She describes the strange mixture of relief and anguish in finally naming the disorder:

My chest floods with a mixture of horror and relief. The relief comes first: something in me sits up and says, ‘It’s true.’ He’s right, he has to be right. This is it. All the years I’ve felt tossed and spat up by the forces of chaos, all that time I’ve felt as if I am spinning away from the real world, off in my own aimless orbit - all of it, over. Now it has a name, and if it has a name, it’s a real thing, not merely my imagination gone wild.

If it has a name, if it isn’t merely an utter failure on my part, if it’s a disease, bipolar disorder, then it has an answer. And then the horror sets in. It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless. ‘Bipolar disorder’. ‘Manic depression’. I’m sick. It’s true. It isn’t going to go away.

Hornbacher grapples with both madness and an alcohol addiction through her 30s. With her newfound mental clarity of today, she writes of the toll mental illness and addiction has taken on her life - and why she would do it all over again.

In fact, much is lost to these two years of hospitalisation. I remember very little, because madness erases memory, and so does electroshock… Memory is not all that’s lost to madness. There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future and the choices you’ll have. But there are some things gained. The years that have followed my decision to manage my mental illness have been challenging, sometimes painful, sometimes lovely.

The life I live, even the person I am, is nearly unrecognisable compared with life when madness was in control. But the constant effort to learn to live with it, and live well, has changed the way I see it, and it’s probably changed me. After the years in the hospital, I began to learn how to live the kind of life I want. These days, that life is becoming ever more real. But it took a while.

This Friday I turn 29. It is, as I jokingly tell my family and friends, the last birthday I intend to celebrate. But teetering precariously close to 30 or even turning 30 doesn’t terrify me as much as turning 50 this year seems to send my mother into a series of anxious spasms. I’ve felt old for a long time now, since even my mid-20s. Mental illness does that to a person, the brain is set on fast forward while the horrific trauma of addiction and madness steeps the mind and soul in a fountain of unimaginable experience. But like Hornbacher, I wouldn’t reset the clock and lead a sanitized life even if I could. As I turn 29 and later, enter my 30s, I realize the kind of life I want - and the kind of life I don’t want.

How about you? If you could travel back in time and change your past, would you? Why or why not?

If you missed the Diane Rehm show this morning, Marya Hornbacher was on the second hour discussing her new book, Madness: A Bipolar Life. Hornbacher, of course, is the author of the widely acclaimed eating disorder memoir Wasted and later authored a great fiction novel, too.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Hornbacher, who detailed her struggle with bulimia and anorexia in Wasted, now shares the story of her lifelong battle with mental illness, finally diagnosed as rapid cycling type 1 bipolar disorder. Even as a toddler, Hornbacher couldn’t sleep at night and jabbered endlessly, trying to talk her parents into going outside to play in the dark. Other schoolchildren called her crazy. When she was just 10, she discovered alcohol was a good mood stabilizer; by age 14, she was trading sex for pills. In her late teens, her eating disorder landed her in the hospital, followed by another body obsession, cutting. An alcoholic by this point, she was alternating between mania and depression, with frequent hospitalizations. Her doctor explained that not only did the alcohol block her medications, it was up to her to control her mental illness, which would always be with her. This truth didn’t sink in for a long, long time, but when it did, she had a chance for a life outside her local hospital’s psychiatric unit. Hornbacher ends on a cautiously optimistic note—she knows she’ll never lead a normal life, but maybe she could live with the life she does have. Although painfully self-absorbed, Hornbacher will touch a nerve with readers struggling to cope with mental illness.

The show’s website should have an audio clip of the interview available later today.

A recent article published in the New Scientist this month examines the role anti-depressants play in causing and exacerbating fatness. Article author Paula J. Caplan, an author and clinical and research psychologist at Harvard University, cites the growing popularity of psychotropic drugs - taken by around 50 million Americans - could be potentially causing a significant portion of the so-called obesity epidemic. This is, just after another study claimed that most modern drugs prescribed for depression generally do not work.

Sheana at the blog SeeWorthy has a great discussion on this, as well as Cthulhu’s Cafeteria.

Raised in front of ubiquitous drug-company advertisements, my generation, along with the elderly and many others, seems to have acquired the notion that prescription pills fix everything, and that they are less dangerous than street drugs. Now an increasing number of writers and researchers are taking Big Pharma to task, and calling them on their flawed studies and adverse health risks posed by their products. Crusader Shannon Brownlee recently published Overtreated, followed now by Melody Petersen’s Our Daily Meds - check out the book’s review in the New York Times.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, while I was on holiday hiatus, I was “roared” at by Harriet at the blog Feed Me! Many thanks, Harriet.

Roar etiquette directs me to do two things: list three things I believe are necessary for powerful writing, and then send roars out to another five of my favorite and fearless writers. So, here goes:

Rachel’s rules for powerful writing

1. Be clear, be concise. Okay, so it’s technically two rules in one, but the two often go hand-in-hand. Proper grammar and clarity are essential for not only capturing readers’ interest, but in engaging the reader through the conclusion. Omit unnecessary words. Write smart, but don’t use a $1 word when a 25-cent word will suffice.

2. Write so that the reader not only reads the story, but sees the story. Avoid clichés and over-flowery language, but write with detail, using rich language and enticing imagery. Good writing not only engages your mind throughout the read, but for a long time after. Part of this lies in good interviewing techniques; when you put people at ease, the story follows.

3. Develop your own voice. Powerful writing requires a unique voice, which can take decades to develop. And by voice I don’t mean style or tone of a story - I mean a writer’s vision, thought, and insight. If you aspire to be a newspaper writer, read as many newspapers as you can. Ditto for magazine writing or business writing or whatever form of writing to which you aspire. Practice writing every day, even if it’s a brief journal entry or blog post. Great writers aren’t born; they develop.

So, on to the second part. In no particular order, here are a few authors whom I adore:

Kathy Y. Wilson - Kathy is a no-holds-barred, piss-and-vinegar, tell-it-like-it-is kind of writer who fuses some of the absolute best creative writing I’ve ever read with very sensitive and even inflammatory topics. She formerly wrote a column for Cincinnati CityBeat called Your Negro Tour Guide in which she wrote about issues of race. She’s now moved on and is a contributor for Cincinnati Magazine. She released an anthology of her YNTG columns several years ago and has a new memoir coming out soon.

When it comes to news, veteran NPR reporter Daniel Schorr sets the bar. The senior news analyst for NPR boasts a career of more than six decades reporting national and international news and even at 91-years of age shows little signs of slowing down. In fact, he just released a new memoir this month, Come to Think of It: Notes on the Turn of the Millennium.

When I first read works by Sherrie Inness I grew excited: Finally, a historian who doesn’t write in the typical dull, dry, and boring historian mold! Then I discovered Inness to be an English professor at Miami University and it all made sense. Inness writes the books I only wish I had written. She concentrates primarily on how food intersects with race, class, and gender, but also writes on other feminist-inspired topics. Her well-researched topics are infused with interesting observations, creative writing, and clever wit.

Blog writing is entirely different than most forms of writing, and it’s one not everyone has a knack for. But Monique over at Big Fat Deal has mastered the art of writing about the portrayal of weight in popular culture with aplomb. Her writing is fun and always sure to bring a smile.

Not to be confused with Big Fat Blog, who likewise boasts interesting and engaging reads. Author Paul McAleer looks at the more weighty topics of fat discrimination and fat rights in society, and writes in such a way that you can’t help but nod your head in agreement. His writing is succinct, his verbiage adroit, and his wit is quick and sharp.

So, what are some of your own suggestions for powerful writing or who are your own favorite writers? What makes you keep reading?

And a very belated Merry Christmas to readers of The-F-Word!

The husband and I took a delicious several days off work and the world generally, hence the gap in usually routine posting madness. I hope everyone had a wonderful and stress-free holiday.

Christmas, for me, is a time to literally shower those I love with gifts, but I also got a few choice things I’ve been wanting for a while but never wanted to spend the money on, namely books. So, expect to see some upcoming reviews for such books as The Gospel of Food (in process of devouring now, Twinkie Deconstructed, Action Chicks, Appetite for Profit, The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life, and Hunger: An Unnatural History.

I have some (relatively) exciting plans for this site, including adding a library of recommended reads with reviews when possible and creating an archive of vintage food and weight-loss advertisements. I also still have our Stories of Our Bodies archive to add. Sadly, the ideas I have for this site are tempered only by a lack of time.

I hope everyone has a wonderful New Year’s celebration.

The husband and I caught the tail-end of a Book TV discussion this weekend with Shannon Brownlee, a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the newly published Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer.

I have not read Brownlee’s book, only reviews of it and the synopsis listed on Amazon, and I do not think she addresses treatment of or medical attitudes towards eating disorders or obesity specifically. But I did find her comments towards the nature of health care in the U.S. to certainly be eye-opening and expresses much of the frustration I and others have towards medical care in these two areas.

While searching for reviews, I found this recent article Brownlee wrote for The Washington Monthly. The article is adapted from her book, and in it she reiterates a lot of what she covered in the Book TV discussion. I’ve culled some of what I feel are the most important and noteworthy talking points.

On problems with current system of health care:

For starters, there is surprisingly little government oversight of medical practice. The Food and Drug Administration, which many people imagine oversees it, in fact only regulates the marketing of drugs and devices.

When it comes to medical procedures, the FDA has zero authority to make sure they actually work. If your surgeon wants to try removing your appendix through your back, that’s between you and your surgeon and the hospital.

What this means for you and your doctor:

…There is little reliable information about most things doctors do. The FDA does not require that a new drug be an improvement over other medicines that are already on the market, and the drug industry does not routinely conduct valid (translation: likely to be true) trials that compare one drug to another. When it does fund such comparative effectiveness trials, they are often so woefully biased that the results are meaningless; the drug manufactured by the funder of the study generally comes out on top. And the drug industry rarely, if ever, funds studies examining whether its products are superior to nonpharmaceutical forms of treatment— antidepressants versus therapy, for instance.

…Doctors are making a lot of decisions about how to treat their patients without the benefit of data. One day medical historians will look back at many current medical practices and see twenty-first-century equivalents of bloodletting and leeches.

Politicians like to tout that the United States has the best health care system in the world, but as Brownlee points out, we spend more than $2 trillion annually on health care, yet we devote less than one-tenth of 1 percent to researching what actually works.

Not only does health care suffer from a dearth of credible research, national policy and legislation governing health care are victims to heavy pressure from lobbyists and industry. Brownlee points to a Washington Post study from August, which reported that the Department of Health and Human Services, under heavy pressure from the infant formula industry, had buried the AHRQ’s (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) comprehensive finding that breast-feeding leads to better health in babies.

Fat rights activists have long been emphasizing the staggering influences of Big Pharma in the stigmatization and demonization of obesity. Corporations like Johnson & Johnson, who have huge and multiple stakes in the weight-loss industry, continue to fight to have obesity classified as a disease.

Why? If obesity is a disease or a mental illness, government and private insurance will be forced to cover products and treatments for the treatment thereof.

According to The Center for Consumer Freedom:

Two Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiaries are “Sponsors” of the American Obesity Association (AOA). Funded primarily by pharmaceutical companies, the mission of the Washington, DC-based AOA is to push for “reimbursement for obesity treatment and prevention.” Along the way, AOA hypes obesity fears at every opportunity. It even called for new “fat taxes” to support anti-obesity programs.

As Brownlee noted, drug companies like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Inc, Eli Lilly & Co., and Hoffman-LaRoche, Inc. – all of whom have vested financial interests in the weight-loss industry – have very little incentive to author or financially back a study that shows their products to be ineffective or unnecessary.

If you think I’m being overly Orwellian in my paranoia of Big Pharma, chew on this: The American Medical Association is actively discussing the classification of obesity as a disease, just like cancer or heart disease. The eight-billion-dollar Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded the AMA’s obesity guidelines. The foundation was named in honor of General Robert Wood Johnson, also the son of Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson.

According to The Center for Consumer Freedom:

The chairman of RWJF is the former vice president and general counsel of J&J. Of the remaining 15 board members, three more are retired executives of J&J, and one is the heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune. RWJF hyping obesity could certainly contribute to their bottom line. And since about 60 percent of RWJF’s assets are in Johnson & Johnson stock, having obesity classified as a disease would only grow the foundation’s assets.

Is it any surprise that the resulting AMA guidelines would bemoan:

“Unfortunately, most managed care and additional insurance companies do not cover expenses related to weight loss.”

Brownlee sensibly calls for an “independent agency that would fund systematic reviews of the medical literature, as well as clinical trials to test the comparative effectiveness of everything from drugs to treatments.” This agency would need to be politically insulated, so it can enact policy that is largely immune from congressional pressure.

Should we fear skewed research purporting the health hazards of obesity? Or should we be more concerned with the power of corporate interests masquerading in doctor’s smocks?

Gina Kolata is an award-winning science and medicine reporter for the New York Times and the author of many books, including, “Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead”, “The Baby Doctors: Probing the Limits of Fetal Medicine“, “Sex in America”, the best-selling “Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It” , and “Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Health and Exercise.”

Kolata’s career in journalism began when she joined Science magazine in 1971, where she selected reviewers for manuscripts. She eventually became a writer and then senior writer. She also wrote for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including Science Magazine, Smithsonian, GQ and Ms. Magazine. She earned her bachelor’s degree in microbiology and her master’s degree in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland. She studied molecular biology at M.I.T. in a Ph.D. program.

In Ultimate Fitness, you set out to discover the truth of the exercise industry and found much of fitness claims to be misleading. In your most recent work, Rethinking Thin, you blast those in the obesity industry, who promote the idea that overweight is unhealthy and diet and exercise to be effective. What prompted your interest in the study of diet, exercise and weight-loss?

I got interested in the exercise industry because I spend a lot of time exercising and at gyms and I kept hearing all sorts of things that did not seem to make a lot of scientific sense, like the “fat-burning zone.” I was interested in diet and weight loss because of my experience as a reporter. I have been writing about major research on weight and weight loss for decades, and these often involved discoveries that seemed pathbreaking. Yet the public, and the diet industry, kept on saying that all you have to do to lose weight is just eat less and exercise more.

What are some of the biggest core beliefs of dieting and weight-loss that you found to be incorrect?

The idea that anyone can be arbitrarily thin is at the top of the list. Then comes the idea that thinner people could easily be fat if they just let themselves go. Or the idea that people gain weight because they have emotional problems and are using food to fill an unmet need. Or that if you just walk for 20 minutes or so a day those unwanted pounds would melt away. Or that if you take junk foods out of the schools and re institute pe kids would not gain weight.

Is one’s weight a matter of genetics or lifestyle, or both?

It’s both. Genetics sets a weight range that is comfortable for you. But if you were living in a place where you could not get food, genetics would make no difference.

Are Americans getting fatter? Is there really an epidemic of obesity and especially, childhood obesity?

Americans on average have gotten heavier over the years, but the average increase is 5 to 7 pounds. It’s greater at the high end of the weight range. Women are no heavier today than they were in the 1990’s.

At the conclusion of Rethinking Thin, you cite that, in some societies, obesity used to be considered a sign of health. Why has fat transformed from something to be revered to something now reviled?

All anyone can do is speculate. Some social scientists think it is a social class thing - poorer people tend to be fatter. When food was expensive, the wealthy were fatter.

Numerous studies have emerged in the past several years showing health benefits of fat in findings that have now become known as the “obesity paradox.” Yet, these studies often get little to no media playtime, while alarmist studies purporting to show the health hazards of fat get top billing. Why are the former ignored or attacked, and the latter sensationalized?

The health benefit studies get a lot of publicity, but I agree that they seem to be taken less seriously by the public than the alarmist stories. You are as qualified as I am to figure out why. It probably has a lot to do with weight and social class and a sort of societal view that people who are fatter than fashion dictates are self indulgent and deserving of disdain.

It has been suggested that yo-yo dieting poses more of a health risk for dieters, than had they not lost the weight at all. Based on your research, do you agree or disagree?

I am not familiar with convincing, rigorous research that answers this question.

In Rethinking Thin, you contend that the diet industry often only succeeds in fattening the pocketbooks of a multi-billion dieting industry, while hopeful dieters lose only money. Why then do so many Americans continue to buy in to the thin American dream?

In my book, I discuss the work of psychologists who asked why people repeatedly diet when ever time they regain the weight. They concluded that there is a reward to dieting - at first, when the weight falls off, people feel great, in control, about to embark on a new phase of their lives. Then, when it comes back, they blame themselves for having been weak or given in to temptation. When a new diet comes around, they are ready to try again, and once again get that initial euphoria.

That may be part of it.

Another part may be the persistent messages from doctors, the media, friends and family that excess weight is unhealthy and unattractive and that all it takes to lose weight is a little bit of exercise and will power.

Despite the fact that science does not seem to back their claims, obesity researchers continue to promote obesity as a major health risk. Why has obesity become the nation’s whipping boy?

I go into this a lot in my book, but there is no short or easy answer.

At the conclusion of Rethinking Thin, you write that you see a major paradigm shift coming soon about diets that will radically change how we think about weight-loss; research, you say, that is “starting to open doors.” Yet, many in the fat acceptance movement see these same doors continuously slammed shut. Are you optimistic about the direction obesity-related research is taking?

I think the research will be revealing more and more about how and why weight is controlled. That does not necessarily mean that there will be a wonder drug that will allow people to weigh whatever they want. It may be that there are so many controls on weight that if you disable one, another will take over. And that makes sense - it is so important for survival to have some fat on your body that the brain may well have evolved lots of overlapping controls. But maybe someday society will accept what science is finding and not demand that everyone meet weight standards that are only achievable by the very few.

OK, so I haven’t even left the state yet and I’m already posting another story despite my promised absence. But, I couldn’t let this one go unposted, as I am one who experienced an adult-onset eating disorder.

The Associated Press reports today on “More Women Over 20 Battling Eating Disorders.”

More adult women than ever are seeking help for an eating disorder, reports the article. The Eating Disorders Institute is building a new facility, set to open in 2009, that will offer a treatment track for mature patients.

In the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, Park Nicollet Health Services’ Eating Disorders Institute saw 43 patients age 38 in 2003 — about 9 percent of its total patients. For the first six months of this year, the institute has treated nearly 500 patients over 38, about 35 percent of its total.

The Renfrew Center, a network of treatment centers in the eastern U.S., said about 20 percent of the 522 patients treated at its Philadelphia center in 2005 were 30 or older. In 2006, about 13 percent of the 600 patients were in that age group.

Most disorders often peak in a woman’s teens and early 20s, says Dr. Donald McAlpine, director of an eating disorders clinic at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. And as author Trisha Gura discovered, they don’t just disappear with the right to vote. Gura’s book, Lying in Weight: The Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders in Adult Women, was just released earlier this year.

Read The-F-Word’s interview with Gura here. Or, another book to check out is Aimee Liu’s latest, Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders.

Okay, on to vacation. I swear.

Here’s another new eating disorders-related book to look for, Inside Out: A Portrait of an Eating Disorder by illustrator Nadia Shivack.

Shivack offers up a personal narrative and graphic-novel-style depiction of her eating disorder, including anorexia and bulimia. Chronicled on napkins, notebook paper, or whatever scrap was available, Nadia’s story unfolds as she endures it. She refers to her eating disorder as “Ed,” draws it as a dragon, and details its hold on her life and sanity starting at age 14.

Especially poignant are the pictures, such as the anatomy of a flower with a torment of words on each petal describing her angst while a small figure leans over the central blue seed, the toilet bowl. The drawings are laid out on yellow pages, while a hindsight commentary about what was happening appears in white type over black boxes. Facts about the illness are presented in darker yellow boxes and each is linked to a specific Web site at the conclusion. A list of resources for intervention is appended.