Eating Disorder Talk

Continuing onwards, week three’s top five is all about bulimia; weeks one and two can be found here and here.

1. Ask the Dietitian - First off, I was distracted from reviewing the site due to the damn top-right corner link to the site’s Healthy Body Calculator. It was pretty damn informative. Once I corrected the typo in the height category, that is. Back to the site. As the name indicates, it’s more of a Q and A area where people (I’m assuming visitors to the home site) are asking how to help friends and themselves, clarifying the differences between EDs and even asking for advice regarding firing a potentially bulimic employee whose work performance was horrendous (in part due to the bulimic cycle). Not bad, but I don’t know that it’s been updated in a while. Just check out the calculator and read the rest if you’re looking for camaraderie.

2. Mental Health -Provides links on the American and European descriptions, child and adolescent EDs from the US Surgeon General, diagnosis, treatment, research and other articles. No information provided on the actual page itself. Useful if you’ve got time to kill, opening page, after page. What I find moderately disturbing is the link in the sidebar, “diagnose yourself” - that phrase is a double-edged sword. The link itself is for signup to a 6 or 12-month computerized “decisionbase,” that reportedly tracks personality and psychiatric disorders. Can you say yay, for promoting hypochondria?

3. Healthy Place - The title of this site is Beat Bulimia, giving a positive first impression. Provides links in the sidebar and header to a community forum - also good. Sidebar also contains links about intervention, the author, articles and a newsletter. The main page is a letter touching on the lack of glamour of bulimia vs anorexia - speaking my language; good. This sums it up:

On the Beat Bulimia site, we’ll be talking about the causes of bulimia, what you need to do to recover from bulimia, and how your family and friends can help. Our goal here is to bring bulimics out of hiding and form a virtual community where we can help each other.

4. Payson Road - Well, we have a fuchsia header. And a black background. That’s it. If you Google it, you come up with a link to the Homepage which has a bunch more stuff in equally annoying colours. Which I have not the patience to look at or review because they lost me at the black screen. Hello? Could you not simply put a redirect link?

5. Selfhelp Magazine - This is only linking to an article written by a counsellor. The article thinks aloud about this therapist views initial contact and treatment with a patient showing signs of bulimia. She includes some rather insulting and stereotypical presentment types and explains how she doesn’t exert control over the patient’s binge-purging, choosing to spend time expanding and deepening the patient-therapist relationship. A little too Hallmark for me, but hey, I’m one of those permanent-bubble types of people.

Next week, we’ll be delving into the top ten ranked sites of all things ED-related.