Chapter 34 — Exercises

⚠️ CONTENT NOTE, and it changes how these exercises are built.

⚠️ There are NO self-monitoring exercises in this chapter — no logs, no counts, no tracking, and nothing that asks you to record your own eating. That is deliberate and it is a departure from every other chapter in Part VI.

⚠️ The reflection tier asks about your beliefs and your language, not about your behaviour. ⚠️ If any of it is difficult today, do the Tier 1 and Tier 2 questions and stop there.

⚠️ §34.14 is the section with the help information. It is fine to go straight to it.

Three tiers. 🔄 retrieval; 🪞 reflection.

Tier 1 — Recall and Comprehension

R1. ⚠️ In §34.2's terms, what maintains eating in Chapter 33's cycle, and what maintains it in an eating disorder? ⚠️ Why does that difference mean Chapter 33's tools can make things worse?

R2. ⚠️ Give the four things that maintain the system once it is running. ⚠️ Which is the one bystanders control?

R3. ⚠️ Describe anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, ARFID and OSFED in words. ⚠️ Why does this chapter refuse to give diagnostic thresholds?

R4. ⚠️ Why is the name "OSFED" misleading? What does "not fitting the criteria" actually tell you?

R5. ⚠️ Give the five terms of the stereotype and state what is wrong with each.

R6. ⚠️ State the most consequential misconception in the chapter. ⚠️ Name three documented consequences of it.

R7. ⚠️ Why is "atypical anorexia nervosa" a badly named category?

R8. ⚠️ Name six body systems affected and what can happen to each. ⚠️ Why does the gastrointestinal row explain something families find baffling?

R9. ⚠️ What is refeeding syndrome, and what follows from it practically? (Ch 29 §29.7.)

R10. ⚠️ Name six conditions that commonly co-occur. ⚠️ Why does §34.5b single out autism and type 1 diabetes together?

R11. ⚠️ What is RED-S? ⚠️ Give the two routes into it, and explain how route 2 becomes route 1.

R12. ⚠️ Why is detection harder in athletes? Give two reasons. ⚠️ What should be said about amenorrhoea?

R13. ⚠️ Give five ways nutrition material can act as a vector (§34.7). ⚠️ Which of them has this book done, by its own account?

R14. ⚠️ Give the verdicts for the seven myths in §34.8. ⚠️ Which two are 🟡 or 🟠 rather than ❌, and why?

R15. ⚠️ What is orthorexia's formal status? ⚠️ Why is it in this chapter rather than Chapter 20, and what are the five distinguishing questions?

R16. ⚠️ How does food insecurity connect to this chapter? (Ch 32 §32.10, Ch 33 §33.6.)

R17. ⚠️ Give five items from §34.11's language table with the reason for each. ⚠️ What is the rule about commenting on bodies?

R18. ⚠️ Name the treatments in §34.12 and their evidence levels. ⚠️ Why does nutritional restoration come early?

R19. ⚠️ Give four things family and friends CAN do and four they cannot. ⚠️ Reproduce the sentence in §34.12, and say what it deliberately omits.

R20. ⚠️ What is the strongest modifiable predictor of outcome? ⚠️ Which myth in §34.8 is therefore not merely wrong but costly?

Tier 2 — Application

A1. 🔄 ⚠️ The five exclusions. For each person, say which part of the stereotype would exclude them and what the consequence is:

a) ⚠️ A man in his thirties whose eating is organized around leanness and muscularity. b) ⚠️ A woman in a larger body with recurrent binge episodes and compensation. c) ⚠️ A man in his seventies whose intake has narrowed since his wife died. d) ⚠️ An autistic teenager whose diet has been very restricted since childhood, with no weight concern. e) ⚠️ A competitive runner whose performance improved last season.

A2. ⚠️ Write the screening question. ⚠️ It must find all five people in A1 and must not mention weight, shape, thinness, or wanting to lose weight.

⚠️ Then test it against someone who is eating a well-evidenced diet with no disorder. Does it produce a false positive? Revise until it doesn't.

A3. ⚠️ Rewrite the language. Rewrite each without moral, appearance or numerical content:

a) "You look so much healthier." b) "I've been really good this week." c) "I'll have to run this off tomorrow." d) "She's anorexic." e) "He relapsed." f) "You're not sick enough to need that."

A4. ⚠️ The bystander script. Someone you live with has stopped eating with you and seems distressed around meals.

a) ⚠️ Write what you would say. b) ⚠️ Check it against §34.12's four exclusions. c) ⚠️ Write what you say when they tell you you're overreacting. d) ⚠️ What do you do if the first appointment goes badly? (Case Study 1.)

A5. ⚠️ The vector audit. Take a nutrition article, app, video or influencer post.

a) ⚠️ Score it against §34.7's seven rows. b) ⚠️ How many does it commit? c) ⚠️ Rewrite one paragraph so it doesn't. d) ⚠️ Is the rewrite less useful? Be honest about the trade-off.

A6. ⚠️ The environment audit. Pick a gym, a workplace, a team or a social group.

a) ⚠️ Which behaviours get praised there that would be flags elsewhere? b) ⚠️ What is said about food, casually, in a week? c) ⚠️ What single change would reduce harm most?

Tier 3 — Analysis and Synthesis

S1. ⚠️ The threshold problem. This chapter refuses to reproduce diagnostic criteria.

a) ⚠️ Make the case that this is a mistake — that withholding information is paternalistic. b) ⚠️ Make the case that it is correct. c) ⚠️ Which do you find stronger, and does your answer change depending on who the reader is?

S2. ⚠️ The weight-advice dilemma. Rukhsana was repeatedly advised to lose weight, into an illness built on restriction.

a) ⚠️ How should clinical guidance be written so this stops happening? b) ⚠️ Does that require abandoning weight-related advice altogether? c) ⚠️ Reconcile your answer with Chapter 24 and Chapter 26. ⚠️ This is genuinely difficult — do not resolve it too easily.

S3. ⚠️ The book as vector. §34.7 criticizes this textbook by name.

a) ⚠️ Is the self-criticism adequate, or is it a way of appearing to address the problem? b) ⚠️ Find three specific places in earlier chapters that could function as a rule set. c) ⚠️ How would you rewrite one of them? ⚠️ What is lost?

S4. ⚠️ Orthorexia's status. §34.9 declines to call it a disorder and takes it seriously.

a) ⚠️ Is that position coherent, or is it evasion? b) ⚠️ What would establishing it as a distinct entity require? c) ⚠️ What are the risks of formalizing it? What are the risks of not?

S5. ⚠️ Insight without change. §34.2 says insight may be intact and change nothing, and calls this the part outsiders find hardest to believe.

a) ⚠️ Why is it so hard to believe? b) ⚠️ What does it imply about advice-giving generally? c) ⚠️ Find two other places in this book where knowing something didn't produce doing it.

S6. 🔄 ⚠️ Where the book stops. §34.13 says a nutrition textbook can describe but not assess, diagnose, treat or monitor.

a) ⚠️ Is that limit drawn in the right place? b) ⚠️ What would a nutrition book that overstepped it look like? ⚠️ Name a genre. c) ⚠️ Chapter 38 will claim something about what this book is for. Draft the version of that claim that survives this chapter.

🪞 Reflection

⚠️ These ask about your beliefs and your language. None asks you to examine your eating.

M1. ⚠️ Before this chapter, who did you picture? How many of the five stereotype terms did your picture contain?

M2. ⚠️ §34.11's language table. ⚠️ How many of those phrases are in your ordinary vocabulary? Where did you learn them?

M3. ⚠️ Have you complimented someone on weight loss? ⚠️ You will not know whether it was welcome. Does §34.11's rule — never comment on a body, including favourably — feel excessive? What is the cost of following it?

M4. ⚠️ §34.7 says a book like this can become a rule set. ⚠️ Has anything in this book made your eating narrower or more rule-governed? ⚠️ If so, that is worth saying to someone, and §34.14 is the section.

M5. 🔄 ⚠️ "I thought I was just greedy." ⚠️ What have you called a character trait that might have been something else — in yourself or in someone else?