“Kashia,

This year has been incredibly challenging with the national pandemic. Through it all, you have maintained an excellent work product. You have taken on ad-hoc tasks (creating individual posts for the physician’s telemed clinics, interview videos, etc.) and established yourself as a content expert with the physicians and within the department. You always have a willingness to take on any project.

Your accomplishments this year include growing our social media platform, integrating our physician team onto the platforms, and increasing social media awareness without physicians. You’ve also increased your familiarity with the physicians and they are comfortable going straight to you with assignments.

You have been a pleasure to work with and always able to execute on any project requests. You are incredibly talented and I am confident you will go far in your career. Thank you for all the hard work this year! I’ve enjoyed working with you and getting to know you over the past few years.

Jeannine”

“Thank you for your article. I am a 26-year old woman who has battled anorexia, obsessive-compulsive exercising, bulimia, and body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). I developed a full-blown eating disorder by the time I was 16, and I can tell you that eating disorders are absolutely devastating to both your physical and mental health. I thank God every day that my family was able to provide me with the best treatments available, along with unconditional love and support which contributed to my recovery. I sincerely hope that you have made progress and continue to make progress in accepting your body – after all – we are all stuck with the body we were born with.

All that said, I do understand your concerns about the lack of eating disorder awareness among minorities. These disorders are often categorized as issues that only affect white women, wealthy people, homosexual men, and/or wrestlers or other athletes where weight is scrutinized.

As a white woman, I remember all too clearly all of the stereotypes people threw in my face when I was battling my eating disorder: “you and every other blonde chick”, “what’s with you white women wanting to look like Kate Moss”, “you do this for attention”, “why do you starve yourself are you that obsessed with fitting into a size 2 jeans”… I could go on and on with the insensitive comments people made to my face while I was in treatment and, quite frankly, fighting for my life.

The fact of the matter is, eating disorders can affect anybody regardless of their age, race, gender, ethnicity, job profession, income level, sexual orientation, etc. I hope that as more research on mental health disorders is published, that our society will become more educated on these disorders and that those who do suffer from these disorders will be more likely to seek help – rather than suffer in silence.

Love the body you’re in – remember, you only get one! 🙂”

“This is amazing and inspiring, I have struggled with bulimia for four years and I am an African-American female it is not right that our stereotypes override our treatment. Thank you for speaking out about this.”

“I am SO happy to see this. I’ve dealt with EDNOS/OSFED on and off since hearing about the “pro-Ana” movement when I was about 12. I was never necessarily overweight as a kid, but I went through puberty early and was always much bigger than other kids in the predominantly white neighborhood and school I went to and it got to me and screwed my body image up at an early age. I was the girl you’d never think could ever have an ED (relatively popular, outgoing, and of course black) but by the end of high school ED behaviors had taken over and it was full blown. I started to recover once college came around and even dabbled in therapy here and there. Even so, I never felt that thin white therapists could ever grasp or understand life with an ED as a black girl and the different cultural dynamics that led to it and it hurt tbh. All the research on EDs is almost always concerning white women and rarely touches the subject when it comes to women of color or larger women. Eating disorders effect ALL women and ALL types of personalities. Thank you so much for writing this!”