Living in Our Bodies: Embodiment, Eating Disorders and the IDEA Scale

A good deal of my time is devoted to reading articles about eating disorders, feminism, qualitative research, and embodiment. I don’t know if this makes me a very interesting person or a very boring one, but it certainly makes me a very opinionated one, especially about these topics. Lately, I’ve been exploring the literature around eating disorders and embodiment in particular, trying to get a sense of how researchers attend to “embodiment” in the development, course, and outcomes of eating disorders and recovery. Predictably, I have my own opinions about this relationship, but am of course interested in how other researchers have explored embodiment in the context of eating disorders.

In my research spiral to find relevant articles, I came across an article by Stanghellini et al. (2012), in which the authors look at how individuals with eating disorders experience their bodies. In the article, the authors discuss … Continue reading →

The Anorexia Nervosa Brain: A Summary of Neuroimaging Studies – Part 1

Journalists like to report on novel and exciting findings regardless of how likely they are to be replicated or how well they fit with everything else known about the topic. It is an all too common occurrence that a small pilot study which has favourable results, creates a buzz and gets into our heads, only to produce negative results once the sample size is increased. But the latter, negative finding, rarely makes it to the printing press. So, we are left thinking the results of the pilot study are correct, when they might be an outlier or a false positive.

Given this, I wanted to summarize an article that provides a critical overview of the current neuroimaging studies in anorexia nervosa. We can use this as an introduction to neuroimaging in AN: to get a sense of the scientific consensus, the trends that emerge and what can be learned from … Continue reading →