A Hunger Artist

Learning to let go of disordered eating

Emily T. Troscianko

Dietary Self-Regulation: Beyond Eating Disorders

How can understanding the process of relearning effective self-regulation after an eating disorder help us answer wider questions about how to eat and move well?

Dietary Self-Regulation: Rendering Your Limits Irrelevant

Practical self-assessment questions plus simple structural adjustments to help you make rigid rule-following on diet or exercise a thing of the past.

Dietary Self-Regulation, Plus or Minus Feedback

Effective self-regulation—with diet, exercise, or anything else—occurs when a system is closed loop rather than open loop.

Dietary Self-Regulation: Milkshakes and Dietary Restraint

Milkshake pre-load experiments show what you do with ice cream when you normally don’t allow yourself milkshakes, and shows how dietary restraint impedes effective self-regulation.

Dietary Self-Regulation: The All-Inclusive Resort Analogy

The all-inclusive experience illuminates how systematically lifting the standard constraints lets the truly effective regulators take back over.

Eating Meat To Recover from Anorexia: 6 Things To Try Today

This veganism/vegetarianism series concludes with a 6-part process for asking yourself why you eat the way you do and what you might gain from switching something up.

Eating Meat To Recover from Anorexia: Nothing Is Forever

Temporal absolutism (treating everything as if it were permanent) is an important maintaining factor for eating disorders, systematically preventing radical dietary change.

Eating Meat To Recover from Anorexia: Life Tradeoffs

Remembering that tradeoffs are inevitable can be immediately reassuring as well as longer-term effective in recovery. Many goods can’t be maximized while also minimizing all harms.

Eating Meat To Recover from Anorexia: Acting on Appetites

Reforging the direct link between appetite and action is one of recovery’s central tasks, and broadening your diet to include animal products is one efficient way to do it.

Eating Meat To Recover from Anorexia

Full recovery from anorexia tends not to come about by accident. Dietary decisions like meat or no meat contribute at many levels to what your commitment to recovery really means.

Eating Meat To Recover from Anorexia: Asking Who Benefits

"Who or what really benefits?": A simple tool for checking the rationale and the consequences of our dietary principles (and any other important life choices).

Eating Meat To Recover from Anorexia: Correlation and Cause

Vegetarianism or veganism can be a contributing cause or an early effect of a restrictive eating disorder, and feedback dynamics easily kick in to maintain both.

Eating Meat to Recover from Anorexia: The Ethics Trick

The first part in a series on vegetarianism/veganism and eating disorders, mapping out the essence of the "ethics trick" that can keep people V/V who really shouldn't be.

Applied Optimization in Eating Disorder Recovery

In the final part of the series, we offer a third perspective on the perceived “bodyweight” versus “health” tradeoff, and consider what changes as recovery proceeds.

The Mathematics of Optimization in Recovery

In Part 2 of our series on recovery as an optimization process, we consider how multiple objectives get reconciled, and the difference between technically optimal and good.

The Basics of Optimization in Eating Disorder Recovery

A primer on optimization, eating disorders, and how recovery so easily gets stuck halfway.

Cognitive Dissonance and Anorexia: Optimizing Differently

I propose a set of interlinked questions designed to disrupt dissonance reduction patterns and create possibilities for behavior change to eliminate—not just reduce—dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance and Anorexia: Optimizing for Tolerable

I suggest that the evolved skill of “optimizing for tolerable” is a major factor in deferring and preventing full recovery from anorexia.

Cognitive Dissonance and Anorexia Nervosa: How They Play Out

Cognitive dissonance helps us understand some fundamental features of life with anorexia, and how it ends.

Cognitive Dissonance and Anorexia Nervosa: Existing Evidence

A successful preventative intervention for eating disorders works by exploiting the power of cognitive dissonance reduction.

Cognitive Dissonance and Anorexia Nervosa: The Basics

Cognitive dissonance is a powerful psychological theory that can offer a revealing angle on how eating disorders survive. Here, an overview of the basics of the theory.

“I’m Not Sick Enough to Get Better”

How can we better understand the idea that "If only I were more seriously ill I would do something about it", and then let it go?

“I’m Not Sick Enough to Get Better”

How does a statement like "I'd commit to recovery if only I were sicker" come to feel it makes sense? How does it keep so many people hesitating so long on the brink of recovery?

Treating Eating: New Research

A new paper argues that to treat eating disorders effectively we need to acknowledge the psychological and physiological aspects but intervene where it works: in the behaviors.

Disordered Eating and Mental Health in a Post-COVID World

What the divergent trends in disordered eating versus depression and anxiety might mean for society and health after lockdown.

Eating Disorders and Mental Health in the COVID Era

Why have the pandemic and lockdown affected people with eating disorders more negatively than those with other mental health conditions?

How and Whether to Make Recovery More Enjoyable: The Whether

Should we try to reduce the unpleasantness of the recovery process from anorexia, or might other approaches be more useful?

How to Make Recovery From Anorexia More Enjoyable

Recovery from anorexia is hard to say yes to, and harder to see through. How can we reduce the unpleasantness of the process?

Anorexia and Dietary Fat: To Ditch One, Embrace the Other

Three ways in which not limiting the amount of dietary fat you consume will help make your recovery wholehearted—plus reflections on the timeline of recovery and fat's roles in it.

Anorexia and Dietary Fat: Brain Function, Hunger and Satiety

An overview of dietary fat’s roles in healthy brain function as well as the regulation of hunger and satiety signalling.

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