Eating Disorder Awareness Week is drawing to a close. As someone who has recovered from an eating disorder, and who is currently an official ambassador for NEDA (the National Eating Disorders Association,) this is an important week to me.
I’m glad that NEDA is working to correct the eating disorders community’s long history of excluding those who are not thin, white, cis, het younger women and I’m proud to be part of that work (especially considering the fact that fatphobic fuckery is still very much a part of the ed community.)
This week I was honored to be included in pieces from a couple of media outlets:
I was one of the people who shared my story with Patia Braithwaite at Self Magazine for an article called Important Reminder: Anyone Can Have an Eating Disorder (Quick clarification on this one – while I may have received a diagnosis of “atypical anorexia nervosa” today, my actual diagnosis at the time was EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified)
I also wrote a piece for The Mighty called We Need to End Fatphobia in Eating Disorder Awareness and Recovery because we really, really do.
Everyone who is dealing with disordered eating and eating disorders deserves support, and the eating disorders community needs to fix its exclusion problems and it needs to fix them yesterday. If you are looking for support – from a screening tool, to a free helpline, to help with treatment options and more, here is a good place to start.
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“the eating disorders community’s long history of excluding those who are thin, white, cis, het younger women”
I think you have a missing “not”.
Fixed, thanks!
I thought it was meant to be ironic… Those wealthy thin young women refusing to eat to the point of death, just being ignored by mainstream eating disorder clinics… Such lack of consideration, dis interest in anyone not stereo typically fat, frustrated, self starving…
That might make for an interesting subplot in a persecution-flip novel, like a darker-and-edgier version of Fatropolis; a thin woman with an obvious eating disorder nobody believes she has because of the way she looks. Even she’s skeptical that someone like her could get that.
Persecution-flips are really hard to do right, though. When they’re done well, they’re “Do you get why this is bad, now that you’ve seen an alternate world where you’re the target?” but done wrong… and it is very easy to do them wrong… they just wind up contributing to the privileged party’s victim complex a la “Yes, that thar shore is the way those Evil Others want to treat us! They really are that evil! We can’t ever let them be our equals or we’ll slide down a slippery slope, right into that dystopia!”
The 365 degree “change”. You come all that way and they still manage to make it about them.
Good grief, if I never have to hear another Peloton add. I Love watching The Tour de France, I am not impressed by people peddling really really fast in their living rooms. Jesus people, your on a stationary bicycle, you’re not pedaling up the last fifty yards of the third mountain stage!
Madison Avenue really had to do some work to make pedaling on a stationary bike in yer basement ‘cool’. Oh right, it’s not. Nevermind.
As someone who loves video games, I think Peloton should make some biking video games that go beyond the “virtual standard spin class” thing they’ve got going on now. Like a Wizardry-style maze you could bike through, or a misty nighttime Halloween ride through a forest cemetery with ghosts flitting in the darkness, or for those of us who are total sickos, a first-person recreation of Volkmire’s Inferno where you have to perform certain maneuvers to dodge the zappy-walls. I mean if you’re going to gamify the bike, you might as well gamify it all the way.
OK, I’ll give you that. I would ride a stationary bike through a maze, but I must have a wide padded seat!
I thought you were a gamer. I looked up Rhapthorne. Came with a pic. Do I want to know what the little opening on his underside is? 🙂
*Lady Rhapthorne bursts into defiant laughter*
The only potential “downside” of a “biking simulator,” from a certain perspective, is that genuinely good games might turn off the fitness puritans who think that if you ever start enjoying the exercise it stops being good for you, and that’s probably not an insignificant portion of the market. “Nobody’s yelling ‘pedal faster, landwhale!’ at me? The music doesn’t sound like elevators and hold lines would kick it out for tarnishing their good name? Is… is this… fun? HERESY! Only wanton people feel emotions that aren’t misery.” 😉