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I tore out this snippet I found in one of those “health” magazines at my doctor’s office. You know the kind… the ones that purport to be about health and yet the first half of the magazine is devoted to “losing weight” and “looking better.” Yeah, well, it was either that or read Nicole Ritchie’s gushing about her new baby.

Gym-goers who look out of shape aren’t the best role models, but they might actually inspire you more than people with buff bodies. University of California, San Diego, researchers found that women who exercised next to plump peers worked out two minutes longer than they did when working out next to fitness freaks. Lead researcher James A. Kulik, PhD, thinks the women wanted to show off next to (or avoid becoming like) someone less fit, but they felt demoralized when next to a woman who was more toned.

What strikes me most about this snippet is that because the “non-plump” gym-goers are compelled to exercise more, the tone of the brief seems to condone and even promote the behavior, regardless of the destructive motivations driving it (it was included on a page with other weight-loss advice and tips). Both hypotheses — the woman who wants to “show off” in front of a fatter woman or the woman who uses her “plump peer” as the yardstick by which she measures her own self-worth — indicates a degree of self-insecurity and self-anxiety, feelings that an extra two minutes on the stairclimber won’t ever whittle away.

I looked up the study and found it ironically enough to be published in the July, 2007 edition of the International Journal of Eating Disorders - abstract here. Some additional context: The study included female undergraduate students (who may be more susceptible to this kind of behavior) and sought to measure the the effects of peer comparisons in a naturalistic setting or on objective behavior one body-image perceptions. The results?

Exposure to a fit peer had undermining effects on women’s body satisfaction and exercise duration, whereas an unfit peer produced no compensating greater body satisfaction but did elicit longer exercise duration relative to controls.

The thrust of the study measured body dissatisfaction, and so it’s inclusion in an eating disorders journal isn’t strange. What is curious is the “health” magazine’s positive slant on it as evidenced by its very title, “Fitness Freaks bad for your figure.” Maybe a more appropriate title would have instead been “Low self-esteem bad for your mind.” Instead of recognizing the negativity revealed in the study published in an eating disorders journal, the magazine chose to appropriate aspects of it to further promote “health” and weight-loss. Once again, what would be considered disordered and even mentally ill for thin people is liberally disseminated as healthy advice for fat people. Who needs pro-ana sites when mainstream media normalizes disordered eating and behaviors?

My gym membership now is through our company’s on-site gym and I’m usually the only one working out in the late evening hours. My last gym membership where I worked out with other people was during the heydays of my eating disorder, when I habitually compared myself against every other woman anyway, so, my perspective may be a bit skewed. I do acutely remember one particular instance, though, from a few years ago, partly because I journaled about it. I usually ended my workouts with my own hillbilly version of yoga in a darkened, unused aerobics room. I was stretching on the bar when another, thinner girl about my age came in and started stretching also. I don’t think she was paying me the slightest bit of attention, but I soon began mimicking her movements and deliberately stretching farther than she and longer in a physical and mental game of endurance. She soon left and I “won.”

Have your workouts ever been subject to influence by the woman working out next to you? Do you feel like others pay any attention to what it is you’re doing at the gym?

The recent death of Polly Ann Williams struck a chord with a lot of people. Even now, months after her suicide, she remains among the top ten search words leading people here to this site and my eulogy to her remains one of the most visited entries since I began the site last January.

Polly, of course, was one of four women featured in Lauren Greenfield’s Emmy-nominated documentary Thin, which follows the womens’ experiences at the Renfrew Center, a residential facility for the treatment of eating disorders. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the film, although I do have the book it is based on, but many people who have seen the documentary have shared here that they really empathized with Polly and felt a connection, even through television. Polly’s life - and even her death - has left a lasting imprint upon many people.

Polly’s sister commented on my eulogy post here, suggesting that though Polly suffered incredibly in the past year of her life, her family is comforted by her show of faith. One of Polly’s sisters, Staley, has continued to update readers of Polly’s old blog. In her post today, Staley shares some Bible verses the Williams’ family has found especially comforting. She writes:

Although our hearts miss her, we find ways to rejoice. She still touches so many people today. For that, we can rejoice. Polly is no longer in pain–for that, we can rejoice. Polly is finally free of the torcher of the ed. and the saddness, for that, we rejoice. Polly shared her life w/ us for 33 year, for that, we rejoice.

Faith can be a potent and powerful force, one with regenerative healing powers for both mind and body. And when I speak of faith, I don’t mean to always imply a god figure, although many do find comfort in God or Allah or Vishnu or Shiva. Faith can take many forms and while some may find solace in religion, others may choose to vest their faith in something more tangible. Personally, I credit Buddhism as one of the strongest forces leading me to recovery from my own eating disorder. Buddhism’s emphasis on self-analysis and introspect, combined with its insistence on the cultivation of the mind and body to be an instrument of goodwill encouraged me to examine what it is I truly believed in, to discover the inner me, and to treat my body as kindly and compassionately and I seek to treat others. I’m not Hindu, but I also found the Bhagavad Gita to be one of the most inspiring and beautiful things I’ve ever read, and I’m also fond of Khalil Gibran, whose writings I also classify as spiritual in nature. I hope Polly’s own faith provided some semblance of reassurance to her as she made her final decisions.

Polly’s family has made available commemorative bracelets in honor of Polly through the Gail R. Schoenbach Foundation for the Recovery and Elimination of Eating Disorders (F.R.E.E.D.) at a cost of $5. The non-profit organization provides financial support for individuals to seek out eating disorder treatment. To order or make a donation, visit here.

Has Polly’s life and death had an impact on you? Or, has your religious or spiritual faith helped you in eating disorder recovery or body size acceptance? Share your thoughts below.

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.

I’m participating in a walk this Saturday to benefit the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). The organization is holding more than 200 walks across 69 cities this year to help benefit people with mental illness.  To check for walks in your area, see here.

I was diagnosed with both depression and an eating disorder within the past decade and despite the advances in mental illness awareness, I acutely felt a stigmatization with both. Raising funds to benefit mental illness research is much needed, but NAMI Walks also help to raise awareness about a problem still largely shrouded by shame. As the organization’s website states:

We may not be able to measure it, but we can sense that the tide of public opinion is shifting. Awareness brings compassion; compassion brings an openness to understanding and knowledge. Understanding and knowledge leads to empathy and a sense of community with one another. We are walking down that road, one WALK in one community, one step at a time.

I registered for an account on the website to sign up for the walk and was surprised to find a lot of resources at my disposal. You can customize your own homepage with news and updates on issues in mental health relevant to your interests or by disorder/condition, medication, by state and area, and type of news, like new research or legislative action. It’s a great resource for both researchers and those most intimately touched by mental illness.

How about you?  Do you think mental illness continues to be stigmatized?  Why or why not?  If so, what can we do to help eliminate the shame and bias surrounding it?

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?

The fabulous FatFu (of the famed Notes from the Fatosphere feed), has helped me set up a eating disorders feed I call the Eating Disorders Digest. I’ve also set up a Yahoo! Group called Eating Disorder Studies for activists at all levels to discuss the medical, social, and cultural studies on eating disorders, and to provide a place of support and recovery.

If your blog addresses eating disorders (it need not be dedicated to eating disorders) and you want to be added to the feed, submit your feed address below. If you’d like to embed the feed on your page, feed addresses are below.

Feedburner feed (recommended, platform independent)

Google feed (prettier to read)

Here are the blogs added to the feed currently: EDBites , Feed Me!, FatGrrl, 5 Resolutions, Digging Me Up, Mamavision , Good With Cheese and Disordered Times. All are pro-recovery sites, although not necessarily anti-reality sites, and all address a spectrum of eating disorders from binge eating disorder to anorexia. I’d like the feed to be even more diverse of eating disorder experiences, from young girls to adult women to men with eating disorders and yet others with unconventional experiences. Please help spread the word about both the feed and the group. If you know of any other blogs you feel would be appropriate for the feed, suggest ‘em below. And if you need help embedding the feed on your site, let me know.

Update: I wanted to add, the larger purpose of the feed is to promote cross-blog collaboration and a network of support to both readers and bloggers. If you want to be added to the feed, I would ask that you also add the feed so that it is visible on your site. If you have trouble adding the feed to your site, please let me know.

In my case for pro-ana/mia sites, I mentioned the pseudo pro-ana boards over at Teen Vogue’s messageboard. The magazine, of course, is owned by media mogul Condé Nast.

The board carries the well-meaning title of “Fitness,” but as I, Jezebel and now Teen Vogue’s editors have realized, it’s devolved into a forum where girls post unhealthy weight-loss techniques and distribute many of the same kinds of advice also seen on self-proclaimed and unabashed pro-ana/mia sites.

According to the site’s notice:

Dear TeenVogue.com Fitness Forum users,

The TeenVogue.com fitness forum was launched to encourage discussion on healthy body image and to create a dialogue about health- and fitness-related issues. After seeing the alarming number of posts regarding eating disorders over the past few months, we have decided to remove the forum completely.

The Fitness Forum will be removed from the site on Monday, April 28. We encourage users to continue to post health- and fitness-related questions and comments in the Beauty Buzz forum.

For those who want to learn more about eating disorders, please visit the following links:

Eating Disorders Anonymous: www.eatingdisordersanonymous.org
National Eating Disorder Information Centre: www.nedic.ca
The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness: www.eatingdisorderinfo.org
The Body Positive: www.thebodypositive.org
The Renfrew Center Foundation: www.renfrew.org

I applaud Teen Vogue editors for recognizing and acting to protect the health and wellbeing of its members. Hopefully they will monitor all of their forums more closely in the future so as to nip this kind of behavior in the bud and to provide more constructive alternatives. But it isn’t enough simply to remove a forum dominated by eating disorder talk and not to replace it with a space for responsible and monitored discussions of the subject. Nor does the removal address and work to solve the root issues in why such talk emerged in the first place. As you can infer, board members have simply created a new and underground forum to discuss the same kinds of tips and behaviors that are now banned at Teen Vogue and are using the board’s private message feature to spread the link.

Sadly, people who want to learn such behaviors will continue to seek them out and will usually be fruitful in their searches. Banning this particular forum might not make a dent in eating disorders development, but it is important that media publications like Teen Vogue also not provide and sponsor a forum for such self-destructive talk. Send Teen Vogue a note letting them know you appreciate the move here.

The belief that upward social mobility in the United States can be achieved with mere hard work and determination has existed almost as long as the country itself. America’s Protestant worth ethic has been encapsulated by people like Horatio Alger, who wrote a series of stories involving poor young men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to achieve great success.

Weight-based discrimination is rampant today because of our culturally ingrained stereotypes of fatness and fat people. Fat people, it is assumed, are fat due to “lifestyle choices,” that being a willful overeating of “bad” foods and sedentary lifestyle. So-called obesity-related diseases are viewed to be a drain on our national economy, as they decrease work productivity and increase health care costs. And because of the conflation of fat with overconsumption, those rapacious fat people are also thought to represent a threat to the environment and the security of the nation state itself.

The world collectively sighs as it wonders why fat people won’t just practice dietary restraint, eat healthier foods, exercise and pay scads of money for diet programs, even if such programs have been shown to be largely ineffective. Why, oh why can’t and won’t fat people pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become thin, socially acceptable, and responsible citizens?

Maybe it’s because fatness isn’t always caused by inactivity and a scarfing down of Twinkies. As anyone who has struggled with weight will attest, weight loss and gain aren’t always simple matters of “choice.” Here are some physiological reasons why some people are fat:

Read the rest of this entry »

Sixty-five percent of American women between the ages of 25 and 45 report having disordered eating behaviors, according to the results of a new survey by SELF Magazine in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An additional 10 percent of women report symptoms consistent with eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder, meaning that a total of 75 percent of all American women endorse some unhealthy thoughts, feelings or behaviors related to food or their bodies.

The online survey garnered responses from 4,023 women who answered detailed questions about their eating habits. Results and analysis appear in the magazine’s May 2008 issue on newsstands through May 19. Click here to read the article online.

While I don’t doubt the high levels of unhealthy relationships with food amongst a national cross-section of women, I do have to point out that Self isn’t exactly a paragon of body size acceptance. Every edition touts some kind of diet and weight loss plan, along with some half-naked airbrushed woman on its glossy cover.

Consider a sampling of recent headlines: “New fixes for stubborn fat!,” “A Diet to Shed Pounds Fast!,” “The 10-Calorie Secret,” “Drop Weight, Look Great and Never Go to the Gym,” “Shortcut to your Best Body,” “A Super Simple Slim-Down!,” “The One-Month Total Body Makeover,” “Peel off the Pounds!,” “Lose Weight Every Day!,” “The Beauty Diet,” and so on.

The magazine even boasts an online section dedicated solely to dieting, with “healthy eating” thrown in almost as an afterthought. Members here can join the Self Diet Club complete with “powerful tools can track your progress, analyze your diet and even tell you exactly what to eat (and what to skip) to slim down.” Because eating according to software dictates is much better than intuitive eating, right? Readers can also read about how to jump start their diet to drop a size in 30 days, take the Self challenge to achieve a “dream body,” learn fitness moves designed to burn more calories, and get such helpful reminders like how calorie-laden beverages can make you fat.

In the article “Scale Stuck?” Self urges women to consider 10 reasons why they’re not losing weight and genetics isn’t one of them. Such sage recommendations include recommendations to grocery shop online, count calories and don’t celebrate workouts with M & Ms. Other stellar recommendations are to deliver messages in person instead of email so you can lose nearly a pound a month!, as well as the same kinds of advice distributed on pro-ana boards, like encouraging women to wear tight jeans on weekends so you don’t overeat and to give away clothes the moment you drop a size to “ensure you won’t drift into them again.”

While Self does include constructive articles on how to beat stress, healthy recipes and basic nutrition, health issues like breast cancer, and green fashion and living trends, its overall emphasis is that women need to change. Specifically, that women need become thinner and more beautiful and ergo better people. I have to wonder if there exists an audience of women who don’t accept themselves as they are and Self simply fills that need, or does magazines like Self help to create and perpetuate such audiences?

With its predominant emphasis on dieting, weight loss and unrealistic beauty standards, it comes as no wonder so many of Self’s readers have unhealthy relationships with food, weight and body image. Perhaps the magazine ought to see its study more as an indictment of itself and less as a reflection of a national trend.

EDIT: Claire of 5 Resolutions advised me the survey was a national survey, and not solely of Self readers. My comments about the magazine still stand.

I’ve got lots of blog post ideas and not enough time to write them. Here’s a few quick hits of related topics in the news.

A new study reveals the obvious: one’s social environment affects eating disorder development. A study of high school students showed a small, but significant clustering effect in eating disorder behaviors and symptoms. Researchers found that a pair of students from the same county was 4 percent to 10 percent more likely to share an eating-disordered behavior when compared to pairs in which each person came from a different county. While the study wasn’t designed to look at why these behaviors might be clustering in certain areas, the researchers suggest that peer pressure, information sharing or students modeling their behavior on one another are possible mechanisms.

“These findings confirm the strong social influences on female adolescents in the U.S. to be thin, sometimes using unhealthy behaviors to achieve this goal,” the researchers write in the current issue of the International Journal of Eating Disorders. (h/t Mariellen)

An editorial in the Edmonton Sun nostalgically recalls the supermodels of the 1990s - Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell - compared to the skin-and-bones heroin chic cultural aesthetic of today. I think there is a tendency to overly romanticize these models as the pinnacle of a healthy body image when people in the 1990s were criticizing much the same things of models then, but there’s no denying that standards have changed to become higher, harsher. Writer Patrycja Romanowska opines:

There was one thing that the 1990s supermodels didn’t inspire us to do - starve.

We were not super skinny, nor were we fat. We grew breasts and hips, thinking that this was what teenage girls were supposed to do and didn’t obsess about weight.

How did bones and organs sticking out of skin ever become hot? Whatever happened to filling out a bra? To Marilyn Monroe? To Venus de Milo? …Let the Cindys and the Marilyns, the Venuses and Claudias come back and redefine feminity.

And let the rest of us eat our cake in peace.

Sage advice, indeed.

My husband let me know about British Ex-Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s confession of suffering from bulimia, but Kate beat me to the punch with this excellent summation over at Broadsheet of the social implications of Prescott’s revelation. Eating disorders are still perceived to be an intrinsically female phenomenon, and there still exists stereotypes of who does and who doesn’t develop an eating disorder. Kate rightly busts these stereotypes and calls for a questioning of these assumptions. Alas, the Broadsheet commenters reflect the confusion and misunderstanding that still exists about eating disorders today.

Lots of news from the British presses today: The Telegraph reports that some fashion magazines are digitally manipulating images of emaciated models to be more full-figured, not less. Nicky Eaton, the head of press and PR at Condé Nast, which publishes Vogue, GQ, and Glamour, confirmed that images of models were enhanced to make them appear fuller-figured. This, of course, represents a dramatic departure from those magazines who photoshop even the thinnest of models into more of an airbrushed perfection. The move comes as fashion magazines try to deflect or preemptively avoid criticisms of contributing to eating disorders amongst young girls and women.

While this certainly represents a turning of the tide for the better, I can’t help but think that if fashion magazines now want to feature women representing the vision of good health, why not use such women in the first place and not super-skinny models who require airbrushing?

And lastly, some sad news to share. Internationally-acclaimed British professor Rosemary Pope has died from complications of anorexia. Pope, a highly educated, 49-year-old health educator who suffered from anorexia since childhood, reportedly subsisted on Weight Watchers sweets and coffee. She was described by colleagues as a “shining light.”

Comments or questions on any of the above? Discuss your thoughts below.