I haven't spoken much about my PhD research on my blog, but it's such a big part of my life it seems wrong to leave it out. A lot of my blog is about things I love, things I'm passionate about, and I guess in a way this falls into one of my passions, or interests at least, as well.
My PhD research topic is very specific and often when I tell people about it, they look at me blankly. The research focus is on restrictive eating disorders in autistic women. We're looking at why the rates of anorexia and other restrictive eating disorders seem to be so high in autism (see Huke et al., 2013 for a review) and whether the causing and maintaining factors behind the eating disorder are different to that of a "neurotypical" (essentially, someone who is not on the autism spectrum) person with an eating disorder.
Hopefully, this research will have practical implications in helping autistic women to access appropriate services and receive better treatment and care. It's something I've been interested in for a while now (I became aware of it about 6 years ago), and so to be doing a PhD on the topic is pretty cool (yeah, PhD's are cool okay).
But for this blog post, I want to focus more on eating disorders in general. Eating Disorders Awareness Week (EDAW) falls in February each year, with the aim to raise awareness and encourage support for eating disorders. Most people know what an eating disorder is on a superficial level, but there are a lot of myths and stereotypes around them, which organisations like Beat (the country's leading eating disorder charity) help to debunk. They have some great online resources if you want to know more: https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/
