This is one of the more unsympathetic and arm-chairy threads on HN I’ve seen in a while. It would appear that no one here has had an experience, tangential or o

This is one of the more unsympathetic and arm-chairy threads on HN I’ve seen in a while. It would appear that no one here has had an experience, tangential or otherwise, with eating disorders and are hypothesizing on it like some article on arxiv. A relative of mine has had an eating disorder their entire life, they look like a walking skeleton. In grad-school one year I went from 160 to 130 pounds because eating regular meals was often “inconvenient”, I’m 6’2”. To respond to comments here: Eating disorders are different from alcohol and substance abuse because no one expects you to do those things. The way women are expected to look in society is unrealistic in addition to all other things society demands of them. People in movies look that good because they are paid a lot of money to do so. Men, try to get a body like any of the Avengers and you will go mad. The process involves weeks to months of bulking up and then days of dehydration and food abstinence before a shoot. A weight lifting friend talks about how an average joe could out-lift any of them on shoot days. There is no advantage to an eating disorder. It’s miserable and makes anything with your friends around food awkward. Escaping an eating disorder is difficult because undertaking one fundamentally rewires your brain, it took a summer and the help of my partner for me to come to grips that yes, I do need to eat more. The proceeding year I had to very actively focus on eating regularly and I felt so much better and actually performed better academically because of it. Finally the article: TikTok should remove the body altering filters. Young people see images of digitally skinny people and don’t recognize it’s a filter and think that’s how they should look. They will do this in vain and in the supreme detriment to their health mentally and physically. Both platforms should ban ads on diets or weight-loss supplements. If you’d like to learn more, and stop Dunning-Kruger’ing yourself into oblivion, go on down to /r/EatingDisorders or listen to any episode of the podcast Maintenance Phase.