While eating breakfast this morning, I decided to catch up on my YouTube sub backlog and began this journey with the wonderful cunt Roary the Lion; seriously, top-tier Australian shit-poster who deserves more views, hence why I’m plugging him. Queuing up his latest video, I was having a bit of a giggle (mate) until it came to the EDNOS portion of the video.

Internet, I know I come across as a salty fucker on here, but I think we all understand that ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s embellished and I’m more frustrated than I am actually upset. That isn’t to say some of the stuff I’ve covered thus far doesn’t get my goose every once and a while or that by the time I’ve finished a piece, I’m not a cathartic mix of relaxed and wound-up; my point is that I don’t generally get mad the overwhelmingly vast majority of the time.

This is one of the extremely rare, one-percent occurrences that happens once in a blue moon.

I’ve poke a ton of fun at myself here, especially when it comes to my intelligence and especially my physique. For most of my adult life, I’ve been clinically overweight and it’s been a bear to deal with simply because, while I am fairly athletic and motivated, I’m a type-B person whose laxness definitely bubble into outright laziness. However, I have never been uncomfortable in being a fatass or tried to hide the fact that I’m indeed a fatass, and even if I manage to get myself down to a clinically healthy weight or into a truly fit physique, I’m completely okay with my current shape as I would be okay with being fit.

Thus, it should be to the surprise of nobody that learning about EDNOS set me off. I expected the shock to sink into frustration where I could simply lament how stupid society is becoming, how the once great field of Psychology is slowly becoming a field of quasi-science and that I hope by the time I’ve become ‘middle-aged’ that rockets to a colony on the moon will be available so I can go live somewhere where a modicum of brain power is required for survival. However, I did not become frustrated. Instead, I became even more upset at what was becoming of the world and society to the point I couldn’t even finish my breakfast and just pitched it in the trash, which made me even angrier since I spent half of yesterday trying to make jam which I had used on my toast and, even though it was not true jam, was still really good.

I rushed to the Google machine to hopefully find some evidence that this EDNOS was some kind of medical garbage like using apricot seeds to cure cancer or that it was just some new Tumblr bait used by the loud and generally unintelligent Fat Acceptance Movement crowd as yet another means to escape being walking mountains. Unfortunately, I was dismayed that not only was this considered a ‘real’ condition but that most of the existing literature on it seemed to indicate that the populace generally considered this amorphous blob of a ‘condition’ to be valid. I was dumb-founded and truly ‘triggered’ to the point of pacing around my room like a maniac. Taking a shower helped cool me off, and after a bit more time digging up more information, here we are.

The reason I’m so set off by EDNOS is, as with most things that grind my gears, is multifaceted. While I can understand and respect that there may indeed be some awful combination of bulimia and anorexia that does exist, what I can’t understand is why in the fucking world a community of people who are supposed to be scientific, who are supposed to go through years of research and training to become properly credentialed to the point where we trust their diagnoses, are just handing out these diagnoses for such an incredibly vague, poorly researched and completely misunderstood ‘condition’, if it even is that.

On the Wikipedia page for EDNOS, there are seven sources total. Seven fucking sources. Meanwhile, for Anorexia nervosa, there are one-hundred twenty-three spanning all the way back to the mid 1800s. The oldest source for EDNOS is from 1980. I have read page-and-a-half research articles that have twice as many sources as this EDNOS nonsense. Granted, that’s engineering stuff that I’m reading, but my point is that Engineering is a fucking science as is Psychology, so it’s perfectly logical to assume that a there would be a fair bit of documentation on a hugely important field of Psychology in the modern era, especially considering that, to quote the Wikipedia article:

EDNOS is the most prevalent eating disorder;^[3] about 60% of adults treated for eating disorders are diagnosed with EDNOS

Well no fucking shit, you hapless retards. That’s like saying ‘space is 90% empty nothingness’. Everything asymptotically trends towards being correct when you make the terminology or wording vague enough. As a side note, someone should do some research on what I just said because I would love to see if that’s a real phenomena and whether or not you can discern someone’s objective intellect if they continually make more and more general statements in order to make whatever dogma or belief they hold correct.

Pulling the Wiki article apart even more, here are the list of criteria that will get you diagnosed for EDNOS:

Meet all criteria for anorexia nervosa except their weight falls within the normal range

You can’t be fucking serious. How in the hell is psychology a respected field with this ass-backwards thinking. ‘Well, Mr. Sahltines, you meet all the criteria for anorexia nervosa, but your weight falls within the normal range, so even though you are constantly exercising, eat very little and have been documented as saying that you hate the way you look and that you’re too big and want to be smaller, you don’t have anorexia, you have EDNOS, which is really ambiguous and very little can be done to treat your problem outside of you paying me more money to ‘talk through’ your problems.’

No, you dipshit, that’s not how this works. If a person meets the majority of the criteria, they are what is described by that criteria. If I get ninety percent of the questions right on a test, but miss the last question, I don’t get a zero, I get a ninety. Even that comparison doesn’t make sense because you’re basically saying that not only do you not get the A-, you get a B in your music theory course, which you aren’t even fucking taking when you apply this kind of logic.

Meet all criteria for bulimia nervosa except they engage in binge eating or purging behaviors less than twice per week or for fewer than three months

 

This is a really shitty way of saying ‘you have EDNOS if you meet ninety percent of the criteria for bulimia but you only binge/purge once a week or binge/purge regularly for two months’. Hell, it doesn’t even account for if these two scenarios overlap, and in the once a week case, is that year round? At that point, you’re basically binging/purging fifty two times at minimum, possibly and likely more because you have bulimia. Call a fucking spade a spade.

Purge after eating small amounts of food while retaining a normal body weight

What? So basically bulimia except without eating ten buckets of KFC, six Big Macs and four Frosty Floats? Never mind that you wouldn’t be able to retain a normal body weight because the whole reason bulimia is a huge fucking deal is because the food never is properly digested and broken down into base nutrients, so a person who binges and purges would generally not gain weight once they’ve begun doing so, no matter the portion size. If you take out what you put in, that’s a net system zero; it would really behoove you psychologists to have taken some real science courses where you would’ve learned this in freshman year.

Repeatedly chew and spit out large amounts of food without swallowing

I don’t get this. What is a ‘large amount’ here? Is it just the actual size of the portion or is it referring to someone who take a bite at each meal and spits it out because that bite was potentially awful? This is why vague criteria for disorders doesn’t work; too many people end up having the ‘condition’ and the disease is either summarily made fun of as the rightful garbage that it is because it can be overdiagnosed, or everyone has it meaning it’s a baseline setting of the population, which no longer makes it a ‘condition’ since a condition or disorder, by default, needs to be something that is atypically found in people. Speaking to that point, if sixty percent, or the majority, have EDNOS, then EDNOS is not a disorder because, using the logic I just applied, the majority have this condition, thus making it not a condition because it is not ‘atypical’. If I can prove your trash through etymological reasoning, you need to go back to the research room and actually figure this shit out.

Meet criteria for binge eating disorder

This essentially means that if you and your pals decide to have eating contests between you every weekend that leave you feeling like a bloated whale afterwards, or you just decide to have a cheat day after spending a ton of time on the wagon, you have EDNOS. That is laughable. In order to have a disorder, there needs to be repeated behavior over a discrete time frame, but with EDNOS, I guess if something happens once or twice and then never shows up again until a half a year later, like I have parties where I pig out back-to-back weekends, that’s enough to justify having the ‘condition’.

What really motivated me to write this article was the girl in the video in Roary’s video. She mentions hearing a ‘voice’ in her head about how she’s not good enough. I know at a young age that most people in the US and other truly first-world countries are probably told about our moral barometer, or our conscience, and how it’s this little ‘voice’ in our head. I also think that most of us know by the age of about ten that it’s not really a voice, but simply a nebulous idea that is much easier understood as a ‘voice’ as it directly influences decision making. Perhaps that’s what this girl means when she says ‘voice’.

However, if this girl is simply calling this voice that she actually hears in her head Ed as she does in the video and is leaning on this EDNOS to simply ‘deal’ with this voice, then we are overlooking someone who is experience the early onset of multi-personality schizophrenia and, instead, completely misdiagnosing a real disorder with a poorly understood one that borders on straight quackery. That is what set me off and what is still boiling my blood as we speak.

It is this kind of lazy and objectively dangerous misdiagnosing that is turning people into dull-witted maniacs and giving rise to the social justice and Tumblr movements. People think it’s perfectly fucking okay to hear some voice in their head say, ‘Hey Becky, you fucking suck, you fat whore. Get on a treadmill, you bag of walking turnips.’ People think it’s okay to let themselves go and turn into actual versions of Jabba the Hutt because they have a disorder which prevents them from being healthy. No, you retard, the condition doesn’t prevent you from being healthy, your willingness to submit and abdicate control over the situation is what’s keeping you from being healthy.

At best, this entire situation is one borne out of poor understanding and education and, at worst, it’s collective disingenuousness that continue due to apathy or, worse, a desire to profit off of people who are stupid. I have no problem from parting a fool with his cash, but not at the direct expense of someone’s health, mental well-being or in a way that will cause long term damage and suffering. It’s a negative either way because it either means we have really stupid and foolish people in a very important field of medicine and therapy, or people who need real help are being actively harmed or left to suffer real side-effects out of malaise or avarice.

To wrap up, here’s an article from We Are the Real Deal, a blog website written about body positivity for women that also covers topics about nutrition and light fitness in the way of yoga amongst other topics. It’s a shame because there are tons of garbage health and nutrition websites out there and a place like this could’ve capitalized on bringing unbiased and intelligent material to the sex that historically and factually suffers from more eating disorders and body stigma images. Instead, they decided to focus on trash like bullshit ‘eating disorders’ in the linked above article and HAES. Spoiler alert: you cannot be healthy at any size. Until you evolve to have bigger bones or bones made out of stronger material, being obese is not healthy.

As for the article itself, I can only shake my head. Apparently, if you don’t like a certain food or don’t eat something because you think it has an unpleasing taste or texture and actively avoid it in any possible scenario when going to eat, you might have obsessive-compulsive behavior or the onset of bulimia or anorexia. Yeah, it’s not the fact that every single fucking human is built and wired completely different to the human being next to them and that sometimes we don’t like certain foods because we are wired to not like the textures, flavors, origins or what have you. No, it’s because we all have fucking bulimia or obsessive-compulsive disorder of EDNOS and that we all need treatment. God forbid we even consider that perhaps psychologists are getting way too bored or are not as educated as once was the case and are now churning out D-grade research results; no, the answer is that we all need treatment and medicine and therapy.

Fuck you.