#Ed cw

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

Hey, if you live in the US, you've got Thanksgiving looming over your head. It's a very food-based holiday (and family-based, for many of us.) And I know that food and family can be our most major triggers combined. I just want you to remember some things.

Take a breath. It's just a meal, like any other meal, which can be hard to remember with all the fanfare around the feast.

It's okay and normal to eat a little bit more than usual on a holiday and you don't have to feel guilty about doing so. You also don't have to feel guilty if you can't.

It's okay to take some space if you feel the urge to binge. It's okay to take some space if you feel watched.

You're allowed to set boundaries if family members comment on your portions, eating habits, or body. You're allowed to ask them to stop, walk away, or, if you're not feeling up to confrontation, to just take some space in the bathroom and have a few affirmations and deep breaths.

If there's nothing on the table you can eat, it's okay to bring your safefood. It's not rude to make sure that there is something you can eat. People don't always understand things like ARFID, obscure food allergies, health conditions, or fear foods. Their lack of understanding doesn't make it less real.

If you struggle at all tomorrow, remember that you are absolutely not alone in finding the day difficult.

If you relapse tomorrow, or if you have mental health struggles tomorrow, or if you hold it together just by a fucking thread tomorrow, remember that it will end. After tomorrow, it will just be Friday, a new day in which you are free to start fresh.

Let's get through this, everyone. Sending love.

[incognitopolls]

Anon has had diagnosed anorexia nervosa and feels qualified to ask this question. Disordered eating is different from an eating disorder; if you don't know the difference, consider looking it up before answering.

This is a question asked in good faith and this poll is not promoting eating disorders or disordered eating. Do not promote either of these on this post.

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[txttletale]

are we pro ana now too?

i think politics and morality consist of positions that you take up re: things you want actually done in the world, and not making big lists of which things are bad and which are good in the abstract. now i think anorexia is bad [millions applaud me for my brave stance] but any serious stance on bodily autonomy has to extend to people doing self destructive things with their bodies. & i think it's unserious to blame small communities of mutually reinforcing / encouraging ed sufferers for anything when we have massive cultural apparatuses that socially encourage and reward disordered eating. like if you want to talk 'pro-ana' take it up with the diet and supplement industries. if you want to talk about encouraging and normalizing self harm take it up with amazon warehouses or contact sports

[emmaeatingdis0rd3r]

WHY DO MEN EXPECT YOU TO STAY SKINNY BUT GET ANNOYED WHEN YOU ORDER LOW CALORIE FOODS

Oh you want me to be visually appealing but eat a mcdonald's large meal with you twice a week? Sure, I'll just not eat the rest of the time so I don't annoy you with my "rabbit food" you entitled prick

[mercuryholixx]

Ik in fat acceptance I see a lot of "most fat people don't eat any more than a thin person! Stop assuming every fat person eats too much!" and like.... okay and I agree with that.... but some people who are fat DO need a supernormal amount of calories to function. I'm one of them where if I tried to adhere to just 2200 calories a day my body would probably begin shutting down like an anorexic's. Some thin people need a large caloric intake to function as well and they get praised for how much they eat. Whereas a fat person can't even talk about eating a lot and how it shouldn't be stigmatized without getting either insulted or told to "stop spreading stereotypes." SOME PEOPLE NEED TO EAT A LOT TO MAINTAIN A HEALTHY BODY. SOMETIMES THOSE PEOPLE WILL BE FAT. YOU GOTTA ACCEPT THAT

[tomboyyyaoi]

probably didnt realise til she hugged him

[velvet-games]

okay shitty aunt finally commented on my weight sorta <3 sick to fucking death of people thinking I started working out again cause I want to lose weight. no I fucking don't. no I fucking don't and that's very confusing to your very small brain isn't it?? if I wanted to lose weight I would be dieting and if I was dieting I wouldn't have deadlifted over 100 fucking lbs yesterday. christ. I don't want to feel like my body is withering away anymore.

[tommystummy]

I mean I think it makes sense for heartstopper to not have anything explicit going on as one of them only Just realised he liked boys and the other one has an ED, they do talk about it pretty directly in the show so its addressed not totally unrealistically. But as for fan response yeah there was a weird thing amongst… a certain subset of fans of making a joke/meme out of a single throwaway line in the books where they mention having sex, maybe the accessibility draws that type of crowd but I don’t think that’s the fault of the show/comic itself 😅 esp as things get fairly explicit in the comics later as they get older

I have complicated feelings about Heartstopper. I actually like it in theory as Baby’s First Gay Show (I would have rather had it then Queer as Folk when I was 14) and in theory it’s a uncomplicated cozy, warm, fuzzy story about two young boys falling in love. It’s the definition of Toothrotting Fluff

However in practice, it feels alienating to me as a gay man when the only two things gay boys are allowed to be in the show are Pure UwU Tumblr Softboy who Speaks in Therapy-ese and Pure Evil Rapist who is brought back into the show after the point the comic counterpart had been written out just to be a punching bag for the Valiant Bisexual Girl to yell at and out in front of their classmates and then Get Dunked On by his ex when he tries to apologize and then have The Symbolism Doodles symbolically reject him from the LGBT community and then get written out of the story.

Combined with the complete stripping away of any mention of sexuality outside of exactly One Scene where they discuss the gay equivalent of Waiting Until Marriage, it does come off as incredibly puritan even if it’s justified in-story by Charlie’s ED and I do actually attribute that in part to the source material. Alice Oseman is by their own admission, pretty uncomfortable with the idea of sex and it shows in the way Nick and Charlie are written. As Trixie and Katya put it: they seem like they just want to hold hands at the post office. The show to this point has been very very uncomfortable with the idea that these two boys might be attracted to each other in a not-purely-romantic way, and when the only other gay character that did show some level of sexual attraction that maybe wasn’t purely romantic is Ben Fucking Hope, the implication seems to be that there’s a Right and Wrong way to be Gay in the eyes of the story.

It also doesn’t escape my notice that Love, Victor petered away into obscurity but Heartstopper is seen as the pinnacle of Gay Representation to a lot of people. Love, Victor was unafraid of teenage boys of all sexualities being sexual beings and in fact reckons with it in ways that were VERY close to my actual experiences, like everything with Victor and his mom coming to terms with him having a romantic and sexual relationship with his boyfriend. Disney shafted LV a lot but Netflix has this Pure Sanitized Risk-free Romance on the front page every time a new season comes out and that also just stings. There’s the feeling that maybe if LV had been more chaste, more palatable, it would have actually been a major success.

I don’t want to sound too dismissive of what HS is for a lot of people but to me there’s just something that makes me feel like it was never for me and that could be because I’m too old for it, but it sometimes feels like it wasn’t for me because it’s not for gay men at all.

[monards]

girl i should not be alive on my diet

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

I hope every fat person with an eating disorder gets to enjoy a treat without guilt this Valentine's Day. Here's hoping that every fat person who wants a romantic relationship knows they are deserving of romantic love, and are worthy of feeling attraction. Here's to knowing that you don't need a romantic relationship to be whole, but knowing that you are allowed to want one. You are worthy of everything this day can bring. I hope you feel beautiful today, and if you don't, I hope you take extra good care of yourself.

[minmos]

sorry im not drowning the post because i disagree with it, i just dont want to derail and traumadump on a stranger's post, but this is my dad finding out that forcefeeding me new foods while hes drunk isnt going to cure my sensory problems around food and actually will make me want to try new things less Sorry

but also bc i have thoughts on this ^ 1. does anyone have any advice on how to ger your nutritional needs met with autism related food problems. yes i know that the most effective way to get proper nutrition is to have a balanced diet & nothing else i can do is going to replace that. But does anyone have any like, at least harm reduction style advice while i work on that

in return i offer: ive found that learning to cook has expanded my world so much & is such a treat for my food weirdness. i feel like it's given me a level of control that makes me feel so much more secure when i eat, like i can control exactly how it tastes & the textures, and i know what's in it. And in turn, that extra security lets me try new foods on my own terms in a way that doesnt feel as scary as people forcefeeding me or pressuring me to try things when i dont want to

Also if you can eat soup, ive found that making chicken soup has been an incredible way for me to try new vegetables. you can't really taste any of them (i know i know, but with a large pot i really do not taste it at all because everything tastes like the savory broth), but i think that there's enough slight vegetable taste that i'm very slowly building my resistance to it. and the texture of all the vegetables iz the same (very soft & unnoticeable) because of how long it cooks, so you dont have to deal with texture issues, and if you cut it up small then you don't notice it at all

Speak now my autism warriors

[lifeinpoetry]

we swear nothing is wrong.

we were just scratching our wrists! and biting our nails! and throwing up!

we already told you; we’re not hungry.

— Blythe Baird, from "Sad Girls Club," Sweet, Young, & Worried

[american-boyboss]

[robobee]

I would say "Oh this is how adamhenry wins" on this post but it's just not true. if Adam found out Henry had an eating disorder he would get really angry and go on a 4 chapter long tirade about how rich people can afford to ignore food and they're evil because of it

[androidboy]

i must not buy a scale. buying a scale is the mind killer. buying a scale is the little death that brings total obliteration

[pumpkaaboo]

the four dungeon lords are my absolute favorite characters in dungeon meshi, and i've been thinking about why.

(warning for mentions of eating disorders)

sometime last fall, i spontaneously lost almost my entire appetite. eating became very uncomfortable, i lost interest in most foods and only a few remained tolerable to me, i started to feel "full" after only a few bites, like i physically couldn't eat any more. i ended up losing a worrying amount of weight before anyone figured out what was going on. this is almost certainly a form of ARFID, Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, which is kind of an umbrella term for restricted eating that isn't caused by body image issues. i don't know why this happened to me, only that it's more common in autistic people.

so it would make sense that the characters who share the commonality of losing desires would resonate with me. something is wrong with the instincts that drive my survival, and now a thing that i'm supposed to desire, a thing that is necessary for my body to function, has become a chore i need to carefully plan around. it's frustrating, because i remember what that desire felt like, i know that i need this, but it's just... gone, and now i have to fight my way around its absence.

when talking about the themes of dungeon meshi, a lot of people focus on its presentation of the joy of eating. but what do you do if you've lost that? if eating is something difficult, something you don't want and find unpleasant? the manga does touch on these topics (anime's not there yet but it will), and that meant a lot to me.