Eriksson

Disordered Eating and Athletic Performance: Where’s the Line?

Emma 4 Comments

If a person severely restricts his diet and exercises for hours each day, he has an eating disorder. If another does exactly the same but it is because she wants to make the lightweight rowing team (which has an upper weight limit), she’s a committed athlete. When the two overlap, and an athlete presents with eating disorder symptoms, how do we distinguish between the demands of the sport and the illness?

I’ve been interested in the distinctions we make between disordered and non-disordered eating and exercise behaviours for a while now. Recently, when I was browsing through articles, I came across a literature review by Werner et al. (2013) (open access) of studies examining weight-control and disordered eating behaviours in young athletes.

The authors start by noting the sheer lack of research that has actually been done in this area. This is worrying: typical onset of eating disorders is during … Continue reading →

The Finest Quality Snake Oil: Mandometer(r) Treatment for Eating Disorders – Part I

Tetyana 6 Comments

PROTIP: When selling your snake oil treatment, try NOT to make wildly outrageous efficacy claims. But if you can’t resist that temptation, try to limit your hard-to-believe, eye-roll-inducing claims to your treatment — there’s no need to go further.

In this post, I’m going to give a brief history of the Mandometer® treatment and its apparent rationale. In the next one or two posts, I will do an analysis of the most recently study by the group that claims to show remission rates of 75% and relapse rates of only 10%. Sounds great, right? Well… we’ll see.

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We suggest that the reason self-starving patients do not fit the DSM-IV criteria of anorexia nervosa is because there is in fact no psychopathological basis of the disorder … The DSM-IV offers no definition [of psychopathology], but it is reasonable to assume that a psychopathological basis of anorexia nervosa would be reflected

… Continue reading →