In honor of National Pride Month (June), Project HEAL is expanding the eating disorder conversation to include more LGBTQ+ voices. The week of June 27, we will be hosting different high-impact conversations each day on Instagram Live, amplifying a variety of LGBTQ+ stories aimed at raising awareness and creating a safe space for both learning and healing.

Professional beach volleyball player Molly Turner describes the painful feeling of being “at war” with her own body while balancing recovery from an eating disorder and her athletic career, especially given the pressure for female athletes to be both thin and strong. With the assistance of her therapist and MyClearStep (a numberless scale), she is gradually unlearning and finding healing—and feels as if she’s truly been reborn.

In eating disorder recovery spaces, fatphobia shows up in deeply harmful ways, including through pernicious, all-too-common assurances from clinicians that their clients “won’t get fat”. Such remarks uphold the oppressive belief that being fat is something to avoid and reprehend—that fat people ought to be devalued. Sarina illustrates why we must interrogate our own anti-fatness in recovery and beyond, shaping more safe, equitable spaces for all bodies.

As a Mexican immigrant who works to help Latinx heal their relationships with food through an intersectional lens, Dr. Jimenez reflects on how dominant power structures conditioned her to be calladita, or silent. She now unapologetically takes up space to discuss the lack of BIPOC voices in anti-diet movements and how diet culture disconnects a person from their cultural and ancestral roots.

“The practice of loving your inner child is an opportunity to heal our shame, explore our emotional attachments, and let go of some of the armor we carry from childhood that may no longer serve us in adulthood. Loving your inner child is an opportunity to remember who we were so we might become who we are.”

Amidst the violence and xenophobia that afflict diverse Asian American communities, artist and activist Vivian Auren unpacks how white supremacy also perniciously distorts Asian American conceptions of “perfection” and attitudes towards hobbies and interests—all of which contributed to their struggles with an eating disorder. They have now embraced authenticity, making peace with quitting and exercising autonomy over their trans, queer nonbinary body.

As a body-positive yoga instructor, Grace Izzo often reminds her students to “take what you need, and leave the rest.” This mantra has proved meaningful in her recovery journey as well. Grace relays how despite feeling imprisoned by her eating disorder, she simultaneously derived a sense of safety from sexual harassment and disrespectful comments about her body; her illness rendered her body invisible to objectifying individuals for the first time. In pursuing recovery, she has found healing in practicing yoga and gratitude while continually grappling with patriarchal power structures.

Eating disorders are often thieves of joy, leading to missed opportunities to form lifelong memories. In this deeply moving blog post, Rachel Yates describes her courageous journey to reclaim her life—partaking in treatment, finding support in loved ones, and resolving not to let her eating disorder steal away her life and fundamental sense of self.

In an effort to spark nuanced conversations about mental health, mainstream media has increasingly featured characters with eating disorders. Yet conventional representation of EDs has been dangerously monolithic, almost always portraying a thin, white young woman with anorexia. Depictions of disordered behaviors are often graphic and triggering as well. In this blog post, Victoria Brown addresses the media in an open letter, outlining how it can foster more constructive discourse around EDs and diet culture.

Body image in music is a story as old as time. Musicians play on stage for thousands of people, and the pressure to put on a good show, to reflect their desired style and vibe, and to look "appealing" to the masses is a burden that many musicians bare. In this latest blog post, singer-songwriter Kate Cosentino discusses her struggles with body image, which she often explores via her music.

The importance of a support network in facilitating healing from an eating disorder cannot be overstated; community care is powerful indeed. Mental health advocate Lexie Manion outlines ways in which we can support loved ones in recovery, amplifying their lived experience and making it clear that their unique needs matter.

In honor of Lunar New Year, our very own Blog Manager Alexandra Xu discusses her struggles with orthorexia as a young Chinese American. In this post, she describes her reckoning with the vilification of Chinese cuisine as "dirty" and her journey in unpacking notions of "health" rooted in white supremacy and colonialism—all of which fueled her passion for intersectional body liberation and health justice advocacy.

The eating disorder recovery space has long erased Black & Brown voices, and our healthcare system perpetuates the erroneous belief that eating disorders only affect white populations. 17 year-old recovery advocate Julissa Minaya discusses her experiences recovering from an eating disorder as a woman of color and outlines ways in which we can individually (and collectively) work to dismantle whiteness in recovery spaces.

Eating disorder treatment centers profess to facilitate healing, but the pressure to fill beds and turn a profit can give rise to the very opposite effect, causing immeasurable harm. Halley Marie Shaw describes how her treatment center prioritized profit over genuine recovery, failing her and shattering her trust. We are reminded of the importance of advocating for compassionate, identity-affirming care that values each individual rather than reducing them to a mere number.

In a society that deems “health-consciousness” a moral virtue, many people fail to recognize that an all-consuming fixation with “health can be incredibly destructive. In this latest blog post, Sophie Smith discusses her struggles with orthorexia and how the illness transformed her into someone she virtually couldn’t recognize. We are deeply inspired by how Sophie found HEALing, now pursuing advocacy work to assist those also recovering in our “wellness”-obsessed culture.

Under a medical framework that glorifies weight as a barometer of health, weight stigma is deeply pervasive. Doctors’ anti-fat behaviors and remarks (and blanket prescriptions to “just lose weight”) cause so much trauma and harm. High school junior Siya Angras relays how from the age of 10, she was told her body was not good enough and that she must be “unhealthy”. This fueled her struggles with an eating disorder, especially as she navigated diagnoses of high cholesterol and PCOS and faced both South Asian and U.S. beauty standards.

Eating disorders cannot be entirely ascribed to one’s cultural upbringing; folks from all backgrounds are deeply affected. Yet one’s relative degree of access to diagnosis and equitable care is often linked to their identity. Alison D’Mello explores the nuances of how Indian American culture shaped her experience with an eating disorder and offers powerful advice to those systemically excluded from the eating disorder space.

For those struggling with disordered eating, birthdays can be deeply distressing times. Melissa Kaufman powerfully details how one birthday proved to be life-altering as she challenged her eating disorder’s loud voice and enjoyed a delicious treat with her mother and sister. That day, she boldly determined to savor the gift of life and found unbridled freedom, joy, and connection.

For the children of immigrants, the coinciding of two seemingly disparate cultures with equally unattainable beauty and “wellness” standards can shape a multi-faceted struggle with disordered eating and body image. 17-year-old journalist Serena Li describes her journey to find HEALing from diet culture and navigate her identity as a young Chinese American woman.

The DSM-5 is often hailed as the cornerstone of clinical psychology and psychiatry. Yet Project HEAL Ambassador Regina Colie illuminates how the DSM-5 often upholds structural oppression in the mental health space and imposes rigid labels on what are in fact deeply individualized struggles influenced by socio-political factors. As a future clinician, Regina harbors so many critical insights.