Weighing up how calorie counting affects health | Letters/in /by

Prof W Stroebe sheds light on weight loss, calorie restriction and staying healthy. Plus letters from Simon Cooper, Laura Marcus, David Chan and Avril Levi

Weight control is not the same as calorie counting. Amelia Tait (After years of torture, I broke free of the tyranny of calorie counting, 8 August) suffered from anorexia and, for people with that condition, calorie counting is different from normal weight control.

Having been anorectic, it is probably difficult to get out of the habit. Although there are many (fortunate) people who do not have to control their weight at all and never gain weight, there are others (nearly half the population of the Netherlands, according to recent research) who are chronic dieters or, as eating researchers refer to them, “restrained eaters”.

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After years of torture, I broke free of the tyranny of calorie counting | Amelia Tait/in /by

Focusing on the calories in your diet is antiquated and destructive. I wish I could have told my anorexic teenage self

When science fiction writers imagine great, grandiose methods of social control – matrixes! Microchips! Really big bros! – they ignore one powerful form that already exists: the humble calorie.

Very little is more distracting, maddening, soul-destroying or totalitarian than the seemingly random number (egg: 155! Freddo: 95!) that is assigned to everything we eat. It is a number that will affect your body and – although it shouldn’t be the case – the way others around you value it. If you have ever counted your calories, and if you ever restricted them, then you have lived under a brutal regime. I’m really, truly sorry. I wish no one had ever told you that calories exist.

Amelia Tait is a writer on tech and internet phenomena

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Kate Moss ‘sick and angry’ at being made a scapegoat for taking cocaine/in /by

The British supermodel talks candidly on BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs about her drug use, defending Johnny Depp and being ‘objectified and scared’

Kate Moss, one of the world’s most famous models, has spoken of her anger at the condemnation she received after publication of photographs of her taking cocaine in 2005. She took the blame, she believes, for the widespread acceptability of drug-taking in her circle.

“I felt sick and was quite angry,” the British supermodel revealed on Sunday in a rare radio interview, “because everybody I knew took drugs. So for them to focus on me, and to try to take my daughter away, I thought was really hypocritical.”

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The mother whose daughter was sent 200 miles away for eating disorder treatment/in /by

‘It’s unjustifiable,’ says Anne Dobrée, who spends hundreds of pounds to see Sophie in hospital

When Anne Dobrée’s daughter Sophie relapsed while recovering from an eating disorder, she needed hospital care. But finding a bed was much harder than Anne could have imagined.

At first the 18-year-old was going to be sent more than 350 miles away from their home in the south of England to Glasgow. That was until a bed came up 200 miles away in the north of England, a four-hour drive from home. Now Anne travels to see her unwell daughter on weekends, spending hundreds of pounds on petrol and hotels. She is desperate to get the teenager treated closer to where they live, but the wait for a bed is long.

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Patients with eating disorders sent from England to Scotland due to lack of beds/in /by

NHS spent £10m relocating women and girls from hospitals in England since 2017, putting recovery at risk, say experts

A shortage of beds for severely unwell eating-disorder patients has forced the NHS to send more than 100 women from England to hospitals in Scotland for treatment since 2017.

The cost of relocating patients, which included under-18s, was more than £10m, with one patient staying more than a year in hospital, costing close to £250,000.

The cost of these placements, from April 2017 to December 2019, was £10.136m.

The maximum length of stay for a single patient in 2019 was 395 days, at a cost of £214,000. In previous years a patient stayed almost two years (639 days), costing £340,000.

The patients sent were all female and a number of them were under 18, although the exact number is unclear because the NHS withheld this information, saying it could allow the identification of patients.

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Nobody should be dying of an eating disorder in England in 2022 | Hope Virgo/in /by

Inpatient admissions should be a last resort, but rates are soaring. Help is needed before people reach a life-threatening crisis

It may be depressing, it may be shocking but, to be honest, it came as no surprise to me: inpatient hospital admissions in England for eating disorders have increased by 84% in the last five years, according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Children and young people are the worst affected, with a 90% jump, but adults have also seen a 79% increase in admissions over the same time. These are figures that should shame us – and spur action.

An inpatient admission should be an absolute last resort. It involves 24/7 monitoring and weighing, being observed eating timed meals and snacks. Some patients will arrive voluntarily, others will be there because they have been sectioned. It should be the end of the line treatment when a patient’s life is seriously at risk. The huge rise in admissions means that people are suffering alone without support for such a long time that their lives are at risk before anyone intervenes. That cannot be right.

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NHS reports ‘alarming’ rise in hospital admissions for eating disorders/in /by

Experts describe increase to 24,268 in England as alarming, with particularly stark rise among males

Hospital admissions for people with eating disorders in England have risen 84% in the last five years, official NHS figures reveal.

There were 11,049 more admissions for illnesses such as bulimia and anorexia in 2020-21 than in 2015-16, with 24,268 admissions in total. Experts described the increase as “alarming”.

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Calories on menus will do more harm than good | Letter/in /by

It should be an opt-in, rather than an opt-out system, so that it’s not damaging to the millions of people with mental health problems, says one reader

Since when did restaurants become a maths lecture, and why are people so eager to turn their bodies into calculators? I agree with Clare Finney (Putting calories on menus won’t solve obesity, but it will harm those of us with eating disorders, 1 April). Too many people continue to argue that compulsory calorie labelling will be beneficial and make them more aware of what they are consuming, but isn’t it sad that we can no longer listen to our bodies and make the right choices for ourselves without having to turn eating, an innate survival instinct, into some form of regimented algebra?

The proportion of eating disorder sufferers in the UK may be a minority, but it is a large one – nearly 2%. For context, people dependent on alcohol make up about 0.9% of the population. Almost two-thirds of the population are considered overweight or obese. Aside from the fact that the measurement used to determine this, the BMI scale, was developed in the 1830s without the scientific basis that would make it valid today, it is not fair or reasonable to implement a measure that is meant to benefit the majority, but with no conclusive scientific evidence of doing so, to the detriment of a large minority.

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Putting calories on menus won’t solve obesity, but it will harm those of us with eating disorders | Clare Finney/in /by

For many, restaurants are a place of refuge where calories are off the table. This new labelling policy will induce anxiety and stress

There was a time when counting my calorie intake was as easy as breathing. Though practically innumerate in maths classes, I could quickly tot up the calories I’d resisted, succumbed to and burned in a day. If restaurants and cafes had revealed the calories in their dishes, it would have played straight into my 16-year-old determination to whittle away my already whippet-like body. For the 1.25 million men and women with eating disorders in the UK, eating out is about to become even more stressful than it already is. From today, cafes, restaurants and takeaways in England with more than 250 employees will have to display the calorie information of all food and drink they prepare for customers.

This is part of the government’s wider strategy to help people who are overweight or obese, a category that includes almost two-thirds of adults in England and one in three children leaving primary school. In theory, this sounds like a simple solution: if customers who are watching their weight know a chicken katsu curry and a side of fried gyoza at Wagamama’s adds up to 1,224 calories, they might order differently. In practice, like most simple solutions, calorie labelling doesn’t really work.

Clare Finney is a food writer

BEAT’s advice on eating out with calorie labelling is here

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‘Some people are freaked out’: how Laetitia Ky tackles abortion, sexism and race with her extraordinary hair/in /by

From vacuum cleaners to menstruation, the Ivory Coast artist and activist creates incredible sculptures with her hair to tackle taboos. She talks about how learning to love her natural hair taught her to love being a black woman – and western criticism of her work

Laetitia Ky makes sculptures out of hair, although I’m not sure the word “sculpture” accurately conveys just how dynamic her art is. Her pieces are moments, scenes, statements, emotions, rendered in black afro textured hair. Ky is central to the art. Her sculptures can’t be displayed on a wall or a table. They can’t be bought or taken on tour. Every piece is on her head, extending high up into the space above and around her, a growth of coils and curls that she twists into shapes that seem unfathomable.

There are no gimmicks, technological cheats or shortcuts. Ivory Coast-born Ky, 25, doesn’t even create the sculpture on a flat surface or stand and then attach them to her head. She links hair extensions directly to her own natural fro and then, using a mirror, proceeds to mould both into shapes. If what she wants to build is particularly complicated, she uses wires and glue. This is even more remarkable considering the fact that her pieces range from the bucolic, to the domestic and the political. There are sculptures of household chores, where Ky’s hair extends into a vacuum cleaner she then grips to clean with; others where Ky is the body of an alligator, crawling out of a swamp, her hair the alligator’s head. There are more shocking ones, where Ky’s hair is a womb – on each side, instead of ovaries, there are two middle fingers – or a vagina with period blood pouring from it.

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