Community Munchausen's by Internet (Malingerers, Munchies, Spoonies, etc) - Feigning Illnesses for Attention

[Oracular Slug]

and they focus and adulation is on the team not the star player.

It's not just that, you wash out of soccer/football and you join a weekend league in college, no biggie. You wash out of ballet/skating/music and that's that, there's no friendly weekend figure skating competitions, and you'll need a rink to skate at all.

I'm not sure track and field is the best choice though, I tried it in high school and those girls are cruel. It's not actually a team sport, you need to be better than your teammates too and they absolutely will tell you that. Plus, running is pretty much the go-to exercise purge.

Maybe hockey? They can still skate but the focus is performance not appearance.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

It's not just that, you wash out of soccer/football and you join a weekend league in college, no biggie. You wash out of ballet/skating/music and that's that, there's no friendly weekend figure skating competitions, and you'll need a rink to skate at all.

I'm not sure track and field is the best choice though, I tried it in high school and those girls are cruel. It's not actually a team sport, you need to be better than your teammates too and they absolutely will tell you that. Plus, running is pretty much the go-to exercise purge.

Maybe hockey? They can still skate but the focus is performance not appearance.

I think the difference between even solo sports (like track) vs ballet/ ice skating is that the later is about “performing”, pleasing an audience/judges and aesthetics. Competition against an opponent is more clear cut and psychologically healthy. No judging on abstract criteria, esp criteria surrounding appearance. Being prettier, daintier and thinner helps you get points

Every ice skater has to worry about their body shape, their make up, their hair, their attire on top of technique and ability. No other sport (besides synchronized swimming, but that’s a team effort) requires all that bullshit on top of athletic ability. There’s a reason ice skating attracts gay men like no other sport on earth, aesthetics and performance are as important as athleticism.

 

[Kate Farms Shill]

Gold star to @Kate Farms Shill for her wonderful write-ups. You should start a side-hustle in helping folks figure out their genealogy on Ancestry or similar because your sleuthing skills are second only to Sherlock.

my job both happily utilizes (exploits?) my skills and compensates me fairly.

Yes, it’s way too tall for high level competition. 5’1 to 5’3 is average. I think 5’6 is the tallest any female Olympic skater has ever been. Long legs are a hindrances to double and triple axels and other jumps.

Oh wild. I know nothing about figure skating and just kind of assumed that the height and long legs would give her an advantage. It was actually what I based a lot of my belief that she was once a real competitor on and that either covid or her weight (or both) was the thing that ruined it.

I made the same mistake with Jordan Asbee, lol. I saw that she was getting what looked like good scores and her level was called Xcel Gold and I was like "oh wow, she must have really been good." I therefore wrote it with the belief that she had really had a shot to get recruited into a college team but had a few bad meets in her late teens that just pulled the rug out. Had no idea that Xcel is the competition track for the hobby gymnasts and that at Xcel Gold she was still learning foundational skills the real competition girls learned when they were kids. After someone told me that I actually went back and watched her gymnastics videos I had skipped over and lmaoooo she was so bad and SO delusional if she thought she had a shot of getting into college with that.

FTR Charlise only posted a few brief clips of her skating. When I first started I was only looking at instagram where her only references to skating made me think she started in her late teens and just wanted the "I lost so much" sob story about having to hang up her skates because she got so sick. But then on Tiktok she posted a few clips of her doing spins and stuff and it looked good to me so I thought I was totally off base. Then I saw her say she was over 6' tall, thought it would put her a an advantage, and added it to my proof she was probably really good.

 

[Not_a_Doctor]

A few thoughts that I will attempt to chunk up into spoilers with further detail below for those interested. Hopefully this posts with appropriate formatting. Please shout if there are things I could do differently to make content easier to read, or less boring. Thanks!

Spoiler: Ice Skating is not compatible with being tall

Source: I’ve done figure skating as an adult just as a hobby and I am moderately tall. You can definitely learn to do some of the fancier moves for fun, but competition level is a whole other world.

Skating is incredibly dangerous - you are going very fast on literal blades and you fall onto a very hard surface if you mess up. The taller you are, the harder you fall. Also the centre of gravity is off for jumps and spins. The bigger your body, the more power you need to exert to get yourself up and spinning so even if you were short, ice skating is one of those sports that are rife with EDs because smaller often means faster. It is also much harder for someone to lift you if you are tall. There are always exceptions, of course.

Here’s a BBC article which is a good flavour of the issue: Eating Disorders: The Darker Side of Figure Skating

I went onto Apple News to read the previously linked article about Tilly and discovered she has been pimping her story out to any news outlet that caters to bored, middle-class house wives who want you to PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

I have read and summarized so you don’t have to! Commentary and selected quotations below for your reading displeasure. I’ve linked to all articles but some are behind a paywall if you don’t have Apple News.

Spoiler: Tilly’s Ten Minutes of Fame

Good Housekeeping - April 25 2005. Bethan Rose Jenkins.

“I spent 20 years in the hospital - here are the horrifying things I saw”: A medical mystery patient on what life’s really like on NHS wards

• Complains about the general lack of funding for the NHS and how she had to suffer from flannels that were not soft and nurses who didn’t bother learning her name and called her Bed 3 (Jean Valjean feels your pain, Tilly). Don’t worry, Tilly, they’ve only got 52 other patients to look after, many of whom require complex care, several of whom will regularly flash their cock or call them a cunt, and they will probably get blood, pus, piss, shit, or vomit on them during their 16 hour shift, but YOU ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT.
• Complains about used bed pans piling up, obviously unaware of the importance of measuring ins and outs for patients and not understanding that they can’t just flush things sometimes. But, ew, icky!
• Blah blah appendix burst at age 10, terrifying traumatic ordeal, in and out of hospital, bowel resection at 16. Naughty doctors just don’t know what to make of it.
• At least the nurses could go home! I was “in prison”! No, Tilly - you put yourself here you useless flappy tit. You are in hospital - people are unwell, they will die on the ward and yes, life goes on “as if nothing had changed”. But, recounts Tilly: “I had seen death, and I’d never be able to unsee it” (small violin starts playing in the background)
• TB drama. Adrenal drama. Convulsion drama. Psychiatry drama. Why won’t anyone believe her!
• Graduated from Oxford with an English degree but uses “restraints” when she means “constraints”. Seriously, how much money did her family donate to get her into Oxford?
• Instagram saves me! Look at all the wonderful people who paid attention to ME and my terrible, terrible suffering.
• EDS diagnosis of course (vomit / take a shot). It was “a perfectly imperfect storm”. Seriously, whose cock did she suck to get her degree?
• Parents sold their house to pay for her “treatment” - isn’t it funny how the NHS is stretched so thin and yet you spent two decades malingering because of ouchies and were enabled by your wealthy family, putting further pressure on wards where people are literally dying waiting for medical care? Why didn’t she just see a private specialist?
• Complains about being on a temp ward. Sounds like one of those interim wards you get shunted to from A&E when you are not emergent enough to need urgent care, but not been allocated to any of the specialist teams. For example, if you go to hospital with chest pains, you might get moved to the temp ward while they wait for your bloods to come back, and if needed you’d be admitted to the cardio floor. I guess it is like hospital purgatory. It amazes me that no specialty wanted to touch her with a ten foot pole. I wonder how reliable a narrator she is about her dire symptoms (coughtotallyunreliablecough).
• Lol, TB from unpasteurized milk Bet her mumsy thought it was all natural! I also highly doubt she had TB.
• If multiple qualified doctors think you are full of shit, you’re not rare and special, you’re probably full of shit. Do the math, Tilly.
• She wants to “be a voice” which is why she wrote all about her unique situation and how important it is that she should have got top notch care, kisses on the forehead, cherry on her cake, and asspats for how brave and special she is.
• How is this advocating, Tilly? It’s just masturbatery navel gazing. What are you actually changing? Are you donating profits of your book to healthcare? Are you doing patient advocacy or outreach? Are you using all your connections from the inbred hive of self-satisfied Oxford grads you rubbed shoulders with to speak truth to power and demand change? Nah…too busy contouring your steroid moon face for your latest head shot.

The Times - April 11 2025. Louise France.

20 horrific years as an NHS patient - I saw things I can’t unsee

• Woe is Tilly, offered nothing more than “comfort care” (snort) isn’t that funny, she ponders, because she is FAR FROM COMFORTABLE. No, you twat, it is a euphemism because telling people who are dying or terminally ill (which is the vibe you are going for here, max sympathy) that they are going to go through an agonizing struggle while their body shuts down and they suffocate or drown in fluid or whatever horrible, horrible way millions of people more worthy of time and sympathy than you are dying from every single day. “He was, essentially, leaving me to die”. But you aren’t dead, Tilly! You didn’t die and were not suffering from anything life threatening other than a terminal lack of personality.
• Lists the multiple departments who did not give a fuck.
• How dare they tell her she liked being ill! I mean, who would want to live in a grimy ward?! I don’t know, Tilly, maybe an alsoran who is beige as sand and has no redeeming qualities or anything of interest to do the heavy lifting on her total lack of charm and personality, seems like playing the sick little girl has got you out of life, responsibility, being an equal partner in your relationship, and generally doing anything of value with your wealth and privilege, but what do I know!
• Instagram to the rescue again! HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE COME TO HER AID and shower her in sympathy, attention, sharing their expert diagnoses based on five minutes of googling. It was just like House, guys! Tilly, who is no where near dead or dying, is desperate for someone to save her pathetic life.
• Her memoir is the best memoir to ever have memoired. It is a mystery, a horror story, “darkly funny”, “deeply shocking”, and an awe inspiring story of bravery. This journo really loves licking at Tilly’s crusty cunt. I’m sure they are now BFFs forever.
• Hah! So, her memoir is advocating because she HOPES that the health secretary or head of the DwP will read it. Yeah, nah.
• Tilly is “not only a patient; she’s a long-term, chronically poorly one”. How is that different to the guy on dialysis, or the fan of fried foods on statins, or the fat and forty year old female with joint pain, the cancer patient in remission but still recovering from treatment, the autoimmune patient heading for their regular mab infusion. I could go on and on and on. You’re not special, Tilly. No one cares!
• “Young, articulate, smart, charming and attractive, with almond shaped eyes and long blonde hair, she makes a compelling argument”. Alright Looloo, get your nose out of Tilly’s arse for just a second and let’s fact check some of that stellar journalism. Young - not any more, fast approaching forty! Articulate - have you read her book? She writes like a seven year old thinks adult women write, trying to sound profound and sincere but coming across like the literary equivalent of wearing your Mum’s high-heels and lipstick. Smart - yeah, nah. Charming - she’s got about as much charisma as a flatulent probbo uncle pressing his dick against you in the family Christmas portrait.
• She literally refers to her time in hospital as a “sleepover from hell”. Oh no, Tilly! Was there not enough pajama time and hair braiding?
• She lists all the same complaints as the previous article. How dare she get such low rate service! Again, why didn’t she just pay to go private? She didn’t have to go to the NHS.
• She thinks this makes her an “expert”. I think the only thing she is an expert on is the sound of her own voice wailing falteringly in increasingly empty rooms.
• Her mum is a literal life saver! No one was coming to help a patient who was suffocating! THE HUMANITY!
• Louise thinks Tilly “isn’t whingeing”. I think Louise is incompetent.
• Tilly’s words of wisdom: bring dry shampoo and a phone charger! Well, I’d have never thought of that myself. Thank you, Tilly!
• Hauling out the prison analogy again. No one was keeping you there, Tilly. You did this to yourself.
• Isn’t she amazing - she proved everyone wrong! Go Tilly! Take a long walk off a short cliff, please!
• Parents were enablers, particularly Mumsy.
• Spreads some fake news about Addison’s only being picked up on autopsy FFS. The thousands of living Addison’s patients out there would like to have a word.
• Lol, pops steroids like sweets! Hello, moon face!
• My god, this girl is boring. All she does is complain. Where is the advocacy?
• Despairs at a woman being told she is going to die on a hospital trolley in a busy corridor. Not ideal, but shit happens and the NHS is at breaking point. You, Tilly, are not dying. Go home and free up some space!
• At last! A hero appears - the Germany saga begins. EDS is to blame! Take a shot!
• She says that what was “groundbreaking” was the communication between specialties. Does she not know that just because all her doctors aren’t sat around her bed pondering the intricacies of her case that there aren’t letters, and charts, and inter-departmental meetings when they discuss cases like hers and multiple doctors add to the conversation? Not everything happens within your view, Tilly. I guarantee your doctors are talking to each other and passing your hopeless case between them like a poorly wrapped shit-filled diaper being tossed around in a desperate game of pass-the-parcel because none of them believe you, and they have other patients that they can help. They don’t want you to read your chart because it is difficult to properly sugar coat a dx of BATSHIT INSANE ENTITLED BRAT and they don’t have the time or money for you to get all litigious.
• And after all of that, she’s still not better. Funny that, isn’t it, how so many doctors have told her there is nothing wrong, and the one doctor who says that there is something wrong can’t fix you? Almost like he wants to retain you as a money-cow for him to milk whenever his bottom line is inching too far into the red.

Stylist Magazine (a supplement published with The Sunday Times). Tilly Rose.

What it’s really like to be a a patient in the NHS

• “Being ill”, ponders Tilly, “is not a choice”. Being ill is “a tragic tombola” and Tilly is the winner. Lordy, the only real tragedy is Tilly’s writing.
• Casually digs at her doctor for sticking her eight times in a row trying to take her blood. Tricksy doctors, just can’t get the staff these days!
• Blah blah 20 years of malingering. Mentions the appendicitis origin story again: “the gunk all welled in my weirdly deep pelvis, and I lived”. Praise Jesus! Tilly Lives! I can’t comment on whether Tilly actually has a weirdly deep pelvis but if so it’s the only thing about her that is weirdly deep. I’ve seen deeper puddles.
• She gets all LITERARY and SCHOLARLY quoting that tired Theodore Woodward phrase that our EDS (take a shot!) warriors love to wail about being zebras. Tilly is “100% zebra”. The thing is, Tilly, there are now so many girls who think they are zebras wasting medical resources and sucking all the air out of the room that doctors don’t have time to treat the horses. Doctors don’t prefer horses - they like being able to treat patients who are actually sick. They fucking love a genuine zebra. Give a doctor a real one in a million case and they are all over it. Ask any patient with a genuinely rare disease (not EDS - take a shot!) how exhausting it can be when every nurse, doctor, pastoral care support worker, radiography tech, phlebotomist, intern, and medical student wonders if you have a few minutes to answer some of their questions.
• She waxes on about how cool it is to be a mystery except when it comes to medicine. Yeah, gonna agree here Tills. You are not cool.
• “Everyone was trying to solve a horrific crime but the evidence was all lost and the detectives were struggling to come up with new leads”. In this shitshow of an analogy, isn’t your body the evidence? Why can’t they find anything wrong with you, Tilly? Maybe because there is nothing actually wrong with you? HEAVEN FORFEND!
• Tilly thinks she is the most expert in every aspect of the NHS now.
• The tagline to her big summer blockbuster: “the sleepover you’ll never forget”.
• Such serious, much complex. Blah blah TB. Bet she wasn’t vaccinated. She is the right age to correspond with the start of anti-vax hysteria. BCG shots were done in school as standard, along with MMR. I doubt hers was active and was likely more a case of “you didn’t get the vaccine, and now we can’t rule out that you never had TB, so we are going to treat you for it just in case”. She’ll have done 9 months of isoniazid or similar. Boo-fucking-hoo, Tilly. Unless you literally coughed up a lung my sympathy meter is empty.
• EDS! Take a shot!
• Again lists the multiple specialisms that wouldn’t touch her with a fucking barge pole.
• Gets all LITERARY on us again and admits to reading a book (well done, Tills, gold star). Adam Kay actually has something substantive to add to the health debate and is talented enough to have had his book picked up and turned into a little drama. From reading this one super recent and easy to read account of life through the eyes of a doctor, she realised THE WORLD NEEDED TO HEAR HER VOICE!
• For someone with a degree in English she is amazingly inept at placing herself in the history and context of the subject she claims to now be expert in - there are troves of studies, theses, articles, books, fiction and theory about the role of the patient. There are patient advocates and highly articulate and informed people out there actually trying to make a difference. But no, Tilly’s MEmoir is the answer.
• Tilly wants us to think about having to use a nappy or not having a pretty view or having to look at pans of your own urine. Jeez, Tilly, if this is the worst you suffered, there are plenty of folks in actual agony on the wards counting down the seconds til their next morphine shot who would love to swap places with you. She basically complains about the NHS not being a five star hotel.
• She dismisses “reports, targets and statistics” because they don’t consider what the word “care” really means. It’s ok, Tilly is going to tell us.
• She claims that her book is actually about all the people around the patient in the system but from what I can see it’s a treatise on the unfairness of her minor suffering in a broken system.
• Tilly has no answers. She just likes to sound serious and important, asking the BIG QUESTIONS. Isn’t it dreadful, she concludes, offering no solutions or stop-gaps because she doesn’t have the mental capacity or intellectual curiosity to look beyond the end of her own bed. Her advocacy is performative.
• She really doesn’t know how to structure an article so we now repeat the Instagram as saviour story, the heroic mumsy typing away on Google late into the night, vomiting her experiences and patting herself on the back for being so brave.
• “Changing patient care isn’t a choice anymore; it’s a necessity. And this, sharing my story, is just the beginning”. I wait on the edge of my seat for further trenchant observations on the state of national health care. What will Tilly do next? What resources will she waste? What entitlements will she assert? WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

That’s me done for the day. I need some literary bleach for my brain. Those of you playing the EDS drinking game, I hope you are now pleasantly buzzed. Have a nice evening

 

[Otterly]

Honestly, in the modern era I think there is a much bigger downside to ice skating and ballet vs upside for young girls. As for physical activities I’d certainly steer any young girl towards team sports or track and field instead.

I actually didn’t let mine do either. Skating happens for larks on the outdoor rink at Christmas if it’s up. No ballet. Even when I was a young ‘un ballet was known for producing anorexics.

Maybe hockey?

Hockey is excellent. Gives a girl team spirit, fitness, and a vicious streak a mile wide. And a big stick

 

[BunchofMunch]

As for physical activities I’d certainly steer any young girl towards team sports or track and field instead.

I agree, but make sure to be on the lookout for troon invasions in the locker rooms of those more accessible sports.

 

[InternetDramaFillsTheVoid]

The crossover between munchies and eating disorders is obviously well documented, but I’m curious…

With munchies, is the eating disorder a secondary issue, possibly brought on by the munching? Because a lot of these girls Hun for nose-hoses, but I know for a fact that any anorexic would have a panic attack at the thought of being given one (because it’ll mean being forced to take high-calorie formula and it’ll be harder to hide their restrictive intake/ED tricks) so I feel like maybe these girls don’t so much have eating disorders, it’s moreso a symptom that comes about from their munching. The dream of getting a feeding tube seems to outweigh the fear of weight gain.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

The crossover between munchies and eating disorders is obviously well documented, but I’m curious…

With munchies, is the eating disorder a secondary issue, possibly brought on by the munching? Because a lot of these girls Hun for nose-hoses, but I know for a fact that any anorexic would have a panic attack at the thought of being given one (because it’ll mean being forced to take high-calorie formula and it’ll be harder to hide their restrictive intake/ED tricks) so I feel like maybe these girls don’t so much have eating disorders, it’s moreso a symptom that comes about from their munching. The dream of getting a feeding tube seems to outweigh the fear of weight gain.

Eating disorders comes first. They want the g-tubes and other shit because it allows them to purge very efficiently and since they claim they have gastroparesis it’s a good excuse for why they can’t eat or are thin.

 

[InternetDramaFillsTheVoid]

Eating disorders comes first. They want the g-tubes and other shit because it allows them to purge very efficiently and since they claim they have gastroparesis it’s a good excuse for why they can’t eat or are thin.

Aaaah…thank you for explaining! I feel like the possibility of not being able to purge easily, or having tube feeds closely monitored would cause someone with a genuine ED to get very anxious because there’s the small chance that there will be some weight gain.

 

[Commander Suzdal]

With munchies, is the eating disorder a secondary issue, possibly brought on by the munching? Because a lot of these girls Hun for nose-hoses, but I know for a fact that any anorexic would have a panic attack at the thought of being given one (because it’ll mean being forced to take high-calorie formula and it’ll be harder to hide their restrictive intake/ED tricks) so I feel like maybe these girls don’t so much have eating disorders, it’s moreso a symptom that comes about from their munching. The dream of getting a feeding tube seems to outweigh the fear of weight gain.

If getting a feeding tube is Act I, being unable to use it is Act II. Munchies know that the tube isn't going to fix what it's supposed to fix, because they know they don't have that problem in the first place and they don't want to get well. So they'll fuck with the lines, run their feeds at low rates because it's all they can tolerate, claim they're allergic to the feeds (hence all the jokes about Kate Farms boutique TPN formula, for the most delicate of sick princesses) - tricks like that.

Lots of munchies want toobz to show off, including some who started out as ana-chans - then realized that if their parents think they have anorexia, they'll be treated for it, but if they can say "I try to eat but my mysterious illness stops me", they can play stupid games until their hearts give out. They'll also avoid steroids or other drugs that have weight gain as side effects.

Some superstars from that crowd:

Cheyanne - starved herself to multiple organ failure, finally went on steroids when she realized she could die for real, died anyway after a multi-organ transplant
"Sad Walrus" Paige - tormented her family by forcing them to watch her starve herself, then switched her self-harm to munchies
Amanda "Skinwalker" Winig - binged round-the-clock on vacation with friends; one of them caught her draining her tube to purge in the bathroom
Sofia Rodriguez - pretended she'd recovered from anorexia and was trying so gosh darn hard to eat, wasn't it too bad she had this tragic illness? Also dead.

Spoiler: Sofia's leg before the end

Most of these girls are discussed across multiple posts, so I didn't link to them - if you limit the Search function to this thread, you can find all the posts about them.

Then you get the girls who don't have eating disorders and want a feeding tube ... but also don't want to give up their snacks. They'll often gain weight on feeds, then get mad when the doctors take their toys away. A couple of notable ones:

Kat Loosmore - "cripplepunk" who ballooned on feeds, takes all her pictures in a kitchen where you can see lots of food in the background. She lives alone.
Katie Schmude - fat nurse who slashes herself with scalpels, somehow got toobz

 

[athousandrustynails]

I sometimes wonder if the motivations can be different for eating disorders.
To me, someone with no education on this subject apart from rubbernecking train wrecks, there seems to be various types:

• Skinny queens. Those who just can't bear to be fat. Skinny = pretty to them (or just that fat is the worst thing you can be). For the most part I feel they would die before getting nose hosed.
• Frail babies. The ED to munch pipeline is obvious there. Arrested development. Need to stay cared for.
• The control freaks. OCD. Those who think "I can't control most things, but I can control what I eat". Probably less likely to go into munch mode.
• Malignant forces. People like Paige or Andie who use their eating disorder to control others with their health. Punishing others for not making them the centre of their lives. Possibly just a manifestation of BPD or narcissist traits? And when the ED isn't getting them the results they change over or disguise their Ed with mysterious, tragic and unfair illnesses that only an evil person would doubt or push back against.

Just a quick and dirty schema as I see it.

 

[often puzzled]

Parents sold their house to pay for her “treatment”

I don't know how these girls don't die of shame. I can't imagine cheerfully confessing that to a news outlet. "My parents sold their biggest asset, the home they chose for themselves and hoped to grow old in, to fund my Peter Pan Syndrome!" Appalling.

 

[duck duck suck]

Source: I’ve done figure skating as an adult just as a hobby and I am moderately tall. You can definitely learn to do some of the fancier moves for fun, but competition level is a whole other world.

I have quite a bit of experience in dance/ballet and can add some context for that as well since a lot of subjects here talk about their history with ballet and dance
EDS and other collagen disorders are not comparable with ballet.
Ballet bodies for girls traditionally look the same: small round head, long thin neck, long legs and arms, skinny, 5’6 is ideal but shorter will go over better than taller (has to do with proportions and partnering), natural flexibility (different from hyper mobility and often hyper mobility can make it harder for a ballerina.
Properly executed ballet requires an intense use of all of your muscles to lift up through your body, which can be near impossible when your joints can’t stay in place. Some famous dancers are hyper mobile and make it work but it comes from years of dedicated muscular training that most people won’t be able to complete without serious injury. Ballet is essentially being able to move between specific bodily positions held in place by tiny muscles.
Collagen disorders generally work against a ballerina in all aspects of their performance. You need tough skin that is able to recover quickly to do pointe, as even healthy dancers bleed heavily while executing pointe work. You need to be able to build toned muscles and be aware of your body in space at all times (proprioception). Ballet is dangerous and causes a lot of injuries because of improper technique, with a collagen disorder those would be multiplied by ten.
If you were to do ballet with a collagen disorder and complete each exercise perfectly you could actually quite improve your dislocations/strengthen all your muscles/improve balance and proprioception.
Someone with a collagen disorder will have a very specific look when dancing, someone who knows what to look for can find it instantly. Seeing hyper mobility in dancers tells me that they don’t use the correct form and are depending on flexibility without incorporating strength.

 

[Spunt]

People think Ballet is dainty and ethereal, whereas it's really about incredibly muscular people with dangerously low amounts of body fat slamming themselves into the ground with tremendous force and learning to make it look like it doesn't hurt.

 

[Commander Suzdal]

I sometimes wonder if the motivations can be different for eating disorders.
To me, someone with no education on this subject apart from rubbernecking train wrecks, there seems to be various types:

• Skinny queens. Those who just can't bear to be fat. Skinny = pretty to them (or just that fat is the worst thing you can be). For the most part I feel they would die before getting nose hosed.
• Frail babies. The ED to munch pipeline is obvious there. Arrested development. Need to stay cared for.
• The control freaks. OCD. Those who think "I can't control most things, but I can control what I eat". Probably less likely to go into munch mode.
• Malignant forces. People like Paige or Andie who use their eating disorder to control others with their health. Punishing others for not making them the centre of their lives. Possibly just a manifestation of BPD or narcissist traits? And when the ED isn't getting them the results they change over or disguise their Ed with mysterious, tragic and unfair illnesses that only an evil person would doubt or push back against.

Just a quick and dirty schema as I see it.

I agree that there are different motivations for eating disorders - and munching. (I've thought about writing up a Field Guide to Munchies with the different subtypes we've seen in this thread, though there are some overlaps and some change over time - more than one has gotten hooked on her post-surgery opioids and turned into a drug seeker even though she didn't start out that way.)

I think there can also be a distinction between an anorexic or munchie's internal motivations, and the face they present to the world. Sometimes we Kiwis only see those motivations when the mask slips.

Years ago, before social media, I was around a couple of families with anorexic teen daughters. Sometimes the other adults in their life felt sorry for the poor innocent waifs, but what struck me was what cunts those daughters could be. One announced that she was scared of gaining weight because she didn't want to be "gross and fat" like her pre-teen kid sister - who was slim and RIGHT THERE. Another would run and tattle that her siblings had teased her about her weight (press X to doubt), so now she couldn't possibly bring herself to eat. It was clear that these families' lives revolved around the disease, and the anorexics knew it. Maybe the parents were just desperate to keep their daughters alive; maybe they bought into it. I always wondered just how nasty these girls were to their families when there wasn't an outsider around to hear them.

In this thread we got a glimpse of something similar with Abby and Nicole, the ED/Munchausen's twins - I can't find it, but I remember a post with one of them gleefully sharing pictures of how much skinnier she was than her sister.

Similarly, munchie social media is usually the face they want to present to the world (even if half of them are too dumb to realize how much they tell on themselves) - but look how many of them have a crisis on a holiday (forcing their family to gather in the hospital instead of around the dinner table), or show up at someone else's wedding with a new mobility aid, or whatever. How much of that is an infantile "I want all the attention all the time", and how much of it is a nasty impulse to hurt other people and get away with it?

 

[Kate Farms Shill]

I don't know how these girls don't die of shame. I can't imagine cheerfully confessing that to a news outlet. "My parents sold their biggest asset, the home they chose for themselves and hoped to grow old in, to fund my Peter Pan Syndrome!" Appalling.

Yeahhhh I knew they sold the house because I found realtor listings for it but I didn't learn until the book came out that it was to pay for her playing sick little bby girl in the clinic.

The shit these girls do to their families kills me. I know in Tilly-kate's case mummy is as big a part of the problem as she is but man. I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach when I write some of the dead girls because I know the family might stumble on my posts. Like Taylah Keating? That kid made one big mistake. Yeah it was the culmination of many smaller mistakes, but when you boil it down to it, she decided at 22 to get a single, extremely risky surgery and she never got to take that back. She had a lot more going for her than many of these girls: a boyfriend, a social life, hobbies, job skills. Had that sociopath's license been revoked before she made that decision she might have decided on the "no doctor will help me so I must bravely keep myself alive at a very low weight by forcing myself to only nibble on tiny bits of food" narrative to keep up her ED or maybe done what her friend Bianca did: got pregnant, decided being a mom was way more interesting, and gotten over it.

I really hope her mom never understands that it was all for attention and to protect an ED. I hope she dies thinking Taylah really needed that surgery to live and it would have been fine if that surgeon didn't go rogue on her daughter's organs. Hate the doctor, let it be his fault because it was.

(and since you were watching this train wreck too, you know this does not apply to Charlise, who I will try to finish tonight and I hope her mom does one day understand what she helped her daughter do, lol)

In this thread we got a glimpse of something similar with Abby and Nicole, the ED/Munchausen's twins - I can't find it, but I remember a post with one of them gleefully sharing pictures of how much skinnier she was than her sister.

Please forgive my lack of capital a but I am working on a VERY broken computer and to type that letter at all I have to copy-paste it. I don't know what specific photo you're talking about but there's a few that pop into my head and I can fill in the lore because I love the competition with these two.

abby and Nicole competed like that from the start and it was one of the reasons I wasted so much time writing about them. Pre-college abby was always at the gym and showing off her super healthy (by teenage definition) meals, not-so-subtly comparing it to Nicole's sedentary lifestyle and junk food diet. Nicole wasn't noticeably bigger than her sister at the time although abby had much more muscle mass. She used to pull stunts like show herself lifting Nicole like she was in the weight room.


Nicole went to college in Chicago while abby moved to Los angeles. While separated Nicole started starving herself and talked about exercising all the time trying to get a feeding tube like Mary Frey, and she got real skinny. at the same time abby started claiming she had CRPS and EDS and could only lay around in pain, so she lost all her muscle mass and got soft. They went home to Georgia after their failed trial separation and took a family photo where it is obvious Nicole is winning the game. Mybe i'm reading too much into the photo here but abby doesn't have her usual smug mug. She looks like she knows she's the fat one. Nicole posted this photo several times. Right around here is also when she cut gluten and dairy out, got Pippi, and claimed she needed the dog to do gluten detection and anything the dog alerted to was contaminated.


Then they moved into an apartment. Nicole lost more weight and became friends with a truly noxious bpd-ana-munchie who gave her the name of a compliant gastroenterologist, and got herself tubed.


This is when abby started ramping up her attention olympics, did the aerie campaigns, started working out again and trying to wedge herself into parasport for the first time. This is also when she got and very shortly rehomed Maua, the "service dog" that looked suspiciously similar to Pippi but couldn't hold her shit together in public.



That summer she posted a pic of her and nicole in matching bikinis to show off that thanks to tube-chan Nicole is no longer the skinny twinny.


Nicole decided she needed an attention-chair like her twin, but after this they separated again. abby moved to 'Bama with her fiance and Nicole moved to a new school with a hilly/mountainous campus that made the attention chair too difficult to use. She stopped being friends with the tubestie and got her tube pulled citing that it just hurt too darn bad. She took up rollerskating and lost whatever weight she gained. We now have the skinny one and the one who doesn't skip leg day.


Then Nicole moved to Chattanooga and got a personality, made friends with some normies, got hobbies that don't revolve around illness, learned to drive. Then she lost her job, couldn't find a new one, got scammed out of her savings, and had to move home. She was out of work and depressed for a year and got fat.


She spent the next year trying to get herself healthy and lose weight but she also really really likes fried food. abby would like you to know that Nicole is the fat one. Both posted pics from this trip but Nicole did some cute ones of them jumping off the dock and abby did the one where Nicole's back fat is front and center.


The pendulum is swinging again though. Nicole's been super active and outdoorsy and is losing weight and abby's obsession with training and larping as a paralympian is making her bulk up and look like the chunky one when they're together.


I love talking about these two so much, lol.

 

[Not_a_Doctor]

I sometimes wonder if the motivations can be different for eating disorders.
To me, someone with no education on this subject apart from rubbernecking train wrecks, there seems to be various types […]

• The control freaks. OCD. Those who think "I can't control most things, but I can control what I eat". Probably less likely to go into munch mode.

Apologies if I haven’t quoted this correctly.

From what I understand many of the folks presented here have at the root of all their issues an underlying diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. That will make them more prone to exaggeration, histrionics, etc. Once they realise that being sick gets them specific kinds of attention they latch on to that as their drug of choice. Interestingly, eating disorders are also more prevalent in BPD patients. See some sources below:

Eating disorders among patients with borderline personality disorder: understanding the prevalence and psychopathology

Eating disorders and the nine symptoms of borderline personality disorder: A systematic review and series of meta-analyses

I think the key differentiator is that where the underlying issue is BPD, the ED becomes another tool to get attention, and so they are not secretive about it. They want everyone to know how sick and fragile they are and they don’t hide their disordered behaviour - they think it makes them special. With “true” eating disorders, they are desperate to keep their behaviour a secret and will go to great lengths to hide it from the world - it isn’t about attention.

I didn’t want them to see: secretive eating among adults with binge eating disorders

The prevalence of secrecy in eating disorders

So, to summarise: ED in BPD is about attention, and the ED is just one manifestation of the underlying disease, and one of various methods used to manipulate others. Traditional ED is often very secretive; they don’t want attention, they often want to exert control over themselves.

Slight nitpick on your use of OCD as an example of being a control freak. OCD is more typically driven by fear that harm will come to you or someone you love or complete strangers because of something you did. It’s not about being in control, it stems from feeling profoundly out of control. Sufferers are controlled by their OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder is the one more associated with being a “control freak”, I think, but have limited understanding of it so couldn’t say for sure.

What does OCD feel like

OCPD vs OCD: What is the difference?

 

[Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet)]

A lot of you are giving intelligent and educated answers on ice skating and dance. But may I suggest the following: As long as you have money to pay for lessons, shoes, costumes and everything else, there is someone who will take that money. There are pay-to-play recitals and competitions. Just because someone is a "competitive dancer" or "competitive figure skater," that does not mean that she is a good dancer or a good figure skater.

These girls come from the sort of middle and upper middle class homes that keep dance studios in business.

 

[duck duck suck]

that does not mean that she is a good dancer or a good figure skater.

Exactly, sorry if I didn’t not write it clearly enough. I’m saying anyone claiming to do dance and/or ballet at a high level it would be quite obvious who is and who isn’t lying. However, pay-to-play studios exist
and there’s is an incredible cost that comes along with studio, limits on where studios are located and what level they are able to provide, equipment costs (shoes, clothes, trust me you have no idea), and a great deal of racism and classism involved

 

[gourmand]

OCD is more typically driven by fear that harm will come to you or someone you love or complete strangers because of something you did. It’s not about being in control, it stems from feeling profoundly out of control. Sufferers are controlled by their OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder is the one more associated with being a “control freak”, I think, but have limited understanding of it so couldn’t say for sure.

In my experience, this feeling at the root of OCD (being out of control and without agency) is exactly what makes OCD sufferers scramble for anything they can exert control over (see compulsive rituals- "flicking the light switch thrice saves my mother from dying of brain cancer, which satisfies me because through this ritual I exert a modicum of control over the future, esp. about potential future occurrences that I ruminate (obsess) over. I must continue doing this in a highly ritualised fashion in order to maintain my frail grip on some magical avenue of control that I have discovered"). i.e., this root feeling is what causes OCD sufferers to tend to be (excluding pure O types, who give me a sense of absolute neurotic catatonia and disavowal of any agency at all) definitively control freaks.

I've been thinking a lot about how themes of agency underlie so many contemporary psychopathologies, munchies being another primo example. If I ever get to writing it down as more than a sentence/dotpoint/idea, I'll be sure to share. I'm sure it would be easy to link it in to broader cultural worries about agency. Always interesting to me to see the political concerns these ladies have in common- your local extinction rebellion march (do they still do those? I have a job, so I'm a bit out of the activism loop) is a great place for munchiespotting in the wild, for example.
I've never understood the psychopathological distinction between OCD and OCPD. As far as I can tell, the latter has more of a moralistic character to the former, but that can easily be elaborated to be a part of OCD proper too (as in how intrusive thoughts often propagate specifically because of the moral upset they cause the thinker).