A Hunger Artist

Learning to let go of disordered eating

Emily T. Troscianko

You Don't Deserve This Cake—Nor Do You Not Deserve It

It seems such an obvious route to self-empowerment: I deserve to eat this. But maybe it's the opposite.

Who Wants to Be Normal?

Is normality for you a shining beacon, a haunting impossibility, a reviled trap, an ironic fiction? In anorexia and recovery from it, it can be all these things at different times.

Anorexics and Bulimics Anonymous: Does It Make Sense?

I analyze the ABA literature to explore whether or not the translation from alcohol addiction to eating disorders results in coherent and constructive principles and practices.

Traveling, Fighting, Dancing: Illness and Recovery Metaphors

Metaphors shape our language and our thought. Paying attention to them in illness and in health can help us clarify our defaults and experiment with other possibilities.

10 Steps to Making and Following Your Recovery Plan

How to construct your recovery meal plan, and how following it will take you all the way to no longer needing it.

How to Make the Decision to Get Better

Thoughts on making the crucial act of decision-making (recovery or not?) feel less paralysing.

12 Reasons to Use a Meal Plan in Recovery from Anorexia

Why not to entrust recovery to your appetite alone.

Is Thin Beautiful? Looking and Seeing

Part II: What actually happens when you look at thin people, or not-thin people, including yourself, and what can you change?

Is Thin Beautiful?

There are a number of ways thinness can disguise itself as beauty.

An App for Recovery from Anorexia

A new idea for an app to provide a structure for recovery from anorexia – without total calorie counts or bodyweight targets.

Hunger

Reliving a small insight.

How Much Does a Blog Title Matter?

Lately I’ve begun to wonder whether A Hunger Artist is an awful name for this blog. How do you interpret it? How do I worry you do? How would I like you to?

A Mathematician’s Education in Mental Health

Having grown up blissfully ignorant about mental illness, you now have a partner whose writing and research center on eating disorders, and your take on it all starts to change.

Why Your Mistakes Matter Less Than You Think

You lose something valuable. You kick yourself for it. Why do you never congratulate yourself when you don’t lose things? Just how confused are we about the mistakes we make?

Making Space for the Exceptional

In illness, in recovery, and in health, it’s easy to forget how significantly magical a momentary departure from the everyday can be.

Early Intervention as Panacea: Reality or Myth?

Might the mantra that early intervention improves the chance of full recovery from anorexia lack solid evidence, and do harm as well as good?

Christmas in Recovery

Tackling a few of the trickiest questions about anorexia recovery

Lose Your Phone, Find Your Body

As technology helps us live more and more distractedly, it becomes both more important and less likely for us to engage positively with our bodies, as subjects not objects.

Biscuits Before Breakfast: Recovery in Microcosm

Eating a plain biscuit reminds me of how different healthy eating needs to be during recovery versus the rest of life.

Questioning Medical Authority by Accident

While I was giving a recovery talk at an eating disorders clinic, one of the patients asked whether I disagreed with her medical treatment plan. I said yes. Should I not have?

Dissecting the Clean-Eating Meme

At the heart of 'clean eating' is a potent metaphor. It's worth taking a long hard look at its threats and promises and the rest of its dangerous box of cognitive tricks.

To Failure

What would a world look like in which we made our failures as public as our successes?

Am I Really This Selfish, or Is It Just the Anorexia?

Anorexia turns people into less nice versions of themselves. What does this mean, exactly, and does that nicer person you used to be really resurface during recovery?

The Forking Paths of Children and No Children

Can an eating disorder, even years after recovery, carry on affecting how we think about the possibility of having children? If so, how? Can we ever really tell?

How Does Metabolic Rate Really Change After Anorexia? Part 2

What is the relation between energy intake, bodyweight, and metabolic rate in the later stages of recovery from anorexia?

How Does Metabolic Rate Really Change After Anorexia? Part 1

What is the relation between energy intake, bodyweight, and metabolic rate in recovery from anorexia?

Twelve Hours a World Champion, One More Lesson Learnt

A little story about powerlifting, bodies, and balance.

Sleep and Dreaming in Anorexia

What can we learn about eating disorders and ourselves from attending to our dreams?

The Road Long Past Recovery…Called Life?

How stopping eating something sweet before bedtime can be a decision against anorexia rather than for it – and how a bit of ruthlessness can make space for future freedom.

How to Help Someone With an Eating Disorder

What should you do if you think or know that someone you care about has an eating disorder? What shouldn’t you do? What can you do?

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