This past week was Eating Disorder Awareness Week in Canada, which is really like any other week in my world. A week of reminding people that eating disorders don’t only impact young, white, thin, cis, hetero girls, and that when treatment doesn’t work, people aren’t failing – treatment is failing them. A week of calling for systemic changes to support a world where more people’s bodies are made welcome. A week of reminding people that…

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Please excuse me while I nerd out all over your computer screen. I recently turned a corner on my appreciation of the value of quantitative social science, having taken a structural equation modelling class last winter, and today I’m going to share a little of that with you. While I’m still a qualitative researcher through and through, this course taught me that there is great value in understanding how scales are constructed and what that…

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Something I have come across several times when reading ED research studies is a disclaimer that research has been dutifully carried out, but the findings have to be viewed with some scepticism because the participants (and – more specifically – the participants with AN-R) were in denial when completing the self-report questionnaires. In this post,...

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I find the idea of treatment retention for eating disorders to be quite interesting. Mostly, I find it intriguing to dissect the way that authors write about treatment retention – that is, how they tend to look at factors within people that make them more or less able to complete treatment, rather than things about...

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I spent the last weekend of October attending the Binge Eating Disorder Association Conference in San Francisco and it was awesome. I have attended several conferences over the past several years and each and every one fails to be inclusive. The discussion is always centred on the cisgender white straight middle to upper-middle class thin...

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Have I mentioned that I go to too many conferences? This week I attended the Eating Disorders Association of Canada (EDAC) conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. If you follow me on Twitter, this post might be a bit repetitive, as I seem to think that live-tweeting conferences is my single handed responsibility (that and convincing everyone...

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It’s no secret that I am not a fan of primarily psychoeducational interventions for people with eating disorders (EDs). It irks me that the overall theory in implementing this kind of intervention seems to be: if they only knew what they were doing to their bodies, people with EDs would take better care of themselves....

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Identifying risk factors for eating disorder symptoms may help us develop more evidence-based prevention mentions. Personally not convinced that prevention is really possible with the types of individual-focused programs we have today, I would argue that identifying risk factors may at least help us determine which individuals should be screened in subsequent years. If they...

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This is part II of posts on why I am highly skeptical of the argument that we need to understand the genetic basis of eating disorders in order to improve outcomes. If you would like to leave a comment, please read Part I as well. I worry about the implications of focusing on genetics and neurobiology in...

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I no longer support genetics research into eating disorders. Okay, that’s not quite right: I no longer support genetics research into eating disorders under the pretense that it will improve treatment outcomes or prevent eating disorders. I just don’t believe it. Moreover, I think emphasizing the need for a genetic understanding of eating disorders shifts...

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