Eating Disorder: Not Otherwise Specified

Eating Disorder: Not Otherwise Specified is a personal and artfully reflective piece about the struggle with eating disorder. Messages and images portraying various eating disorders are littered throughout the media, and in this piece, Brittany Ladin explores the correlation.

My entire journey as a young adult has been clouded by food. The fear of food, the obsession with food, the struggle of understanding how food interacts with my body. This piece is my auditory journal, if you will — a peak into my experience with the most common eating disorder, EDNOS – Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.

In “Eating Disorder: Not Otherwise Specified,” I explore my own, personal journey battling an eating disorder. My goal is to reflect on how my obsessions have consumed me, causing me to lose touch with reality and myself. Furthermore, I would like to better understand how the media — television, music, and web pages — have influenced my eating disorder and perception of myself and my body.

There is often a stigma around mental health that I hope will soon be abolished. People often forget that mental illnesses are, in fact, illnesses. They alter our well-being, and take control over our lives, deciding on our actions, leaving us out of control.

This is a piece about sickness. It is, for me, at least, extremely triggering. This is what I intended. However, I do want to explain that by no means is my project glorifying eating disorders — rather, I hope that it can relate to some individuals struggling with disordered eating, or, to those who are not/have not, provide an experience of what my “reality” has looked like for so many years.