 Hello and welcome back. Today we're talking about eating disorders and in particular we're going to be thinking about three common myths and misconceptions about eating disorders that I hear all the time so I thought I'd take a few minutes just to set the record straight. Number one is that eating disorders are just a vanity that we just suffer with eating disorders because we try to look good. This absolutely isn't the case. Eating disorders are severe mental illnesses they're not just a passing fad or phase they're not just about fashion so an eating disorder is when someone uses their weight, their shape, exercise and food in order to manage difficult thoughts, feelings, emotions, experiences and sometimes there will be this kind of drive for thinness and some of the early sort of precipitating factors might be around wanting to kind of put on muscle or lose weight for example but actually once an eating disorder takes hold that absolutely isn't the driving factor anymore. People will completely lose all sense of normality and will drive themselves further and further and further through their behaviors until a point where they can tell that they objectively don't look good. This isn't about how they look anymore this is about disorder driving them to more and more extreme behaviors. The other thing is of course that when we're thinking about eating disorders as a form of vanity we're just thinking about over exercising and under eating driving towards that kind of thin ideal or the fit ideal and but actually eating disorders take many different shapes and forms some of them will mean that we become very overweight majority of people who have eating disorders will fit within the kind of normal healthy weight range and many of those will go completely undetected and only a minority will be those who become very underweight or very very over muscular so they're not all about vanity at all. Number two eating disorders are a girl thing. No eating disorders can affect anyone of any gender. The male eating disorders have been hidden for a long time and I think that they have been massively under reported. A lot of the diagnostic criteria used to lean really heavily towards the diagnosis of girls because there was this misconception that girls were the ones who were affected but we've seen a huge increase in the reporting of male eating disorders whether that reflects an actual increase in male eating disorders or it means they were recognizing them better it's hard to say but either way eating disorders in men make up at least one in four of eating disorders across all genders now so eating disorders don't only affect women. The other group here are people who are struggling with their gender identity and actually they're even more prone to eating disorder behavior and self-harming behavior than any other group because this can cause a huge amount of distress and kind of deep unease with our body that can lead us to kind of exercise under eating overeating and other harmful behaviors. Number three, eating disorders are a lifestyle choice. Again, this absolutely isn't the case. One of the things that help us to understand the difference between a diet or a lifestyle choice and an eating disorder is when this becomes something that controls the person rather than them controlling it. So we might choose to live a really healthy lifestyle. We might choose to cut out certain food groups. We might make ethical choices about what we there's also different choices that we might make around food and exercise and all the time that we're able to give good reasons for those choices and actually we could take a step back and decide to take a day off from those if we wanted to and it's not adversely impacting on our ability to interact in our normal day to day lives. Then that's okay. But actually an eating disorder is something that ends up really pervading into every sort of part of someone's life. It stops them being able to do things that they might want to do and make some very physically and mentally unwell. Eating disorders are not a choice and one of the really difficult things in particular with anorexia nervosa is that as we start then the brain gets starved too. And this causes all sorts of very very strange thinking. We go back to a very primitive way of thinking. We become very very black and white in our thinking and the disorder makes us really kind of defend it and defend our actions around that disordered behavior. And so we find ourselves trying to say no this is what I want. This is how I want to be but actually the behaviors that we're carrying out are slowly killing us. And so whilst it might feel like a choice and it can feel very very difficult to intervene. Actually it's not a choice. This is a choice that the eating disorder is making for that person and it's driving them. They're not driving it. So there we go. Three common myths and misconceptions about eating disorders. If you have any extra thoughts and ideas to add on this then drop them in a comment below. Thank you.