A Hunger Artist

Learning to let go of disordered eating

Emily T. Troscianko

Pros and Cons of Taking Time Out for Recovery from Anorexia

There are arguments for and against putting life on hold for recovery. How should you decide, and how can you make what you decide on work as well as possible for you?

Raising Children After Anorexia

A mother of four and paediatrician in recovery shares what she’s learned about parenting post-anorexia—both how parents can shape their children, and vice versa.

The Complicated Relationship Between Anorexia and Sex

Sex often vanishes in anorexia and returns in recovery. Learning—or relearning—how to let sexual appetites and connections be part of life again is complex and often scary.

Pregnancy and Early Motherhood After Anorexia

Many women worry that anorexia will affect their ability to conceive or to cope with pregnancy or motherhood. A medic and mother recovering from anorexia shares what she's learned.

Should You Exercise During Recovery From Anorexia? Part 2

A guide to how to exercise and not exercise in anorexia, recovery, and life after recovery.

Should You Exercise During Recovery From Anorexia? Part 1

People in recovery from anorexia often ask whether it’s OK to keep exercising during weight restoration. I team up with a doctor with personal experience to attempt an answer.

Consuming Fictions: Reading and Eating Disorders

I report on research I conducted with the charity Beat on reading habits and eating disorders, and link the findings to how my own reading changed with illness and recovery.

You Are Not Your Genes: Menstruation in Anorexia & Recovery

A look at the evidence for when menstruation stops and starts in anorexia and recovery offers a different perspective on health and illness.

The Six Seductions of Anorexia

How does anorexia take hold, and what, in the end, makes it loosen its grip—or makes you let go?

What Does the Mando Method Mean for Independent Recovery?

What does the success of the Mando eating-normalisation method for treating eating disorders mean for anorexia recovery?

A Simple Eating Disorder Treatment No One Ever Talks About

A little-known treatment for eating disorders is achieving high remission and recovery rates – and defining remission and recovery in meaningful ways.

CBT for Eating Disorders: A Not-Yet-Success Story

An outline of the current evidence for CBT efficacy in eating disorder treatment, including problems with relapse reporting and questionable definitions of remission and recovery.

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.

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