Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - Can GLP-1s Treat Eating Disorders? One Woman’s Controversial Story Is Challenging Everything
Episode Date: September 29, 2026In today’s episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, I’m joined by author and eating disorder research advocate Paige Gordon, who lived with bulimia for 22 years before starting a low-dose GLP-1 medi...cation that she says eliminated her drive to binge and purge. We explore whether biology, appetite signalling, and reward circuitry could play a larger role in some people’s eating disorders, and whether GLP-1 medications could eventually have a therapeutic role beyond weight loss. This is a nuanced conversation about food noise, bingeing, purging, recovery, and what Paige’s experience could mean for future eating disorder research. Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode: What Does the Urge to Binge and Purge Actually Feel Like? When Recovery Doesn’t Make the Food Noise Go Away What Changed After Starting a GLP-1? Can Different Causes Create the Same “Food Noise”? Did the GLP-1 Treat the Eating Disorder—or Suppress the Symptoms? What Does Recovery on a GLP-1 Actually Look Like? Could GLP-1s Ever Be Studied as a Treatment for Bulimia? Could Paige’s Story Be Misused by the Weight-Loss Industry? Are We Overcorrecting Toward a Biological Explanation? What Does the Research on GLP-1s and Eating Disorders Actually Show? 👩🏼💻 RESEARCH LINKS: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40337-026-01634-6 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39891848/ Check in with today’s amazing guest: Paige Gordon https://paigegordonauthor.com/ https://www.instagram.com/paigegordonauthor/ https://www.tiktok.com/@paigegordonauthor #GLP1 #bulimia #eatingdisorder #foodnoise #bingeeating #eatingdisorderrecovery — DISCLAIMER:The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. — 📚 GRAB MY BOOK: The Hunger Crushing Combo Method ⤵️ Learn how to reach your healthiest weight without dieting using evidence based nutrition strategies. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306836793?tag=hacboogrosit-20 More purchase options: https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo/ 🎙 LISTEN TO BITE BACK WITH ABBEY SHARP ⤵️ Real conversations about nutrition, wellness, diet culture, parenting, and the biggest food debates. https://lnk.to/Bite-Back?utm_source=hoobe&utm_medium=social ⭐ Enjoying the podcast? Follow Bite Back on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're enjoying the show, leaving a rating or review really helps support it! ✉️ SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER https://abbeyskitchen.myflodesk.com/kd6ijl0y3e 🥞 FREE Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-Book https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo/ 💪 FREE Protein 101 Guide https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/protein-intake-recommendations/ 📖 MY FIRST COOKBOOK: The Mindful Glow Cookbook Amazon: https://amzn.to/2nev0lf 👩🏼💻 COACHING: 🍽️ Feeding Kids Without Diet Culture Webinar Raise confident eaters without food battles, guilt, or diet culture. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/coaching/ 📈 Business Coaching Build and grow your online brand with proven social media and business strategies. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/coaching/ 🤝 Personalized One-on-One Coaching Tailored support for content creation, business growth, podcasting, AI, brand partnerships, and more. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/coaching/ 📱 FOLLOW ME @AbbeysKitchen Instagram: www.instagram.com/AbbeysKitchen TikTok: www.tiktok.com/AbbeysKitchen Facebook: www.facebook.com/AbbeysKitchen Pinterest: https://ca.pinterest.com/AbbeysKitchen 🌐 VISIT MY WEBSITE Healthy recipes, nutrition resources, parenting advice, and evidence based articles. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com 💬 If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a comment below with your thoughts and let me know what you'd like to see next! With Science & Sass, Xoxo Abbey 🌸 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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How do you know that the medication treated your eating disorder rather than simply treating one symptom by suppressing your appetite so effectively that you couldn't binge and purge?
Welcome to another episode, A Bite Back with Abby Sharp, where I dismantled Diet Culture Rules, call it the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good.
For decades, people who binge ate were told some version of, you just need more willful.
power. Like, just stop being such an undisciplined glutton and you'll lose weight.
Thankfully, we now know it's much more complicated than that. We know that restriction,
trauma, dieting, emotion, regulation, genetics, neurobiology, and our food environment
can all play a role in binge eating. But as conversations around GLP-1s and food noise have
gone mainstream, I think there's another uncomfortable question we now need to
In moving away from the willpower explanation, have we sometimes become too confident about what is driving the behavior?
Because we talk a lot about food obsession and binging as consequences of restriction, dieting, trauma, and unmet emotional needs.
And for many people, they absolutely can be.
But what about the person who stops dieting, adequately nourishes themselves, challenges their food rules, understands their triggers,
goes to therapy and does all the psychological recovery work, and the volume on food is still screaming.
What if, for some people, there's an additional biological component to that drive that we haven't
adequately understood or treated?
Today's guest Paige Gordon sits on the board at Nita after living with bulimia for 22 years.
After starting a low-dose GLP1 medication, she says something,
extraordinary happened. The drive to binge and purge disappeared. Now, to be extremely clear here,
that does not mean that GLP-1s are a proven treatment for bulimia. They are not. The research is nowhere
close to that. But her story raises a question that I don't think we should be afraid to ask.
Have we sometimes been treating a biologically amplified drive as though it were primarily a thought
pattern that someone just needed to unlearn? And on the flip side, are we now at risk of swinging
too far in the other direction and turning a deeply complex psychiatric illness into a hormone
or reward circuitry problem that we can simply medicate our way out of? Because that is the
uncomfortable gray space I want to live in today. All right, and before we start, I just want to
take a moment to thank you all so much for joining me today. If you are new here,
Welcome to the Byteback family.
Please do take a moment to leave me a little five-star review and a little love note and subscribe
on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you are listening and watching so that you never miss out
on an episode.
All right, kids, let's do this.
Hage, thank you so much for joining me today.
I'm really excited about this conversation.
I'm glad to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Okay, so take me back before the GLP1.
What did the urge to, you know, binge or purge actually feel like in your body and brain?
So before I started purging, which started when I was around 18, I would binge.
And I started binging when I was 11.
And so I was a binger for a good seven years before I started purging.
And it had really nothing to do with feeling hungry.
That would be the first thing I would say.
It was an impulsive, oh, my.
almost like something that was on my mind all the time in terms of a certain type of food.
I tended to go for the highly ultra processed food or highly satiable food that were high in sugar
and fat.
You know, I certainly wasn't binging on broccoli.
And it just kind of became this obsession in my mind where if I didn't give in to those behaviors,
then it was difficult for me even to function.
And it had very little to do with being hungry.
I could eat three meals a day and I still found myself at the donut shop eating two dozen donuts,
for example.
And so in that way, it was almost maybe a little bit like OCD.
I mean, we called this food noise now, but that's not a new concept in the eating disorder
field for sure.
They just used a different name.
And I had that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And just for folks who, you know, hear this term now, food noise over and over again, like,
we're not talking about like, oh, what's for dinner or, you know, I can use a snack. We're talking
about relentless mental chatter about food that can crowd out cognitive space for creativity and
relationships and work and self-care and a million other things like you just said. Like you can't
focus on anything else until you kind of give into that, what that food noise is asking for.
So in your experience, was there a point where you, you know, like you generally, genuinely were not
restricting anymore. You were adequately nourishing yourself, like you said, you're doing the recovery
work and the food obsession was still there. Always. Yeah. So for me, so I had, I'm 44 years old. So I had been
eating disorder in the 90s. That wasn't in the DSM yet. So I don't think anyone would have known what to
do with me if I had asked for help. And when I first went into treatment, which was in 2000,
the treatment was definitely based on a restrictive modality, which is, you know, good evidence.
I don't think I'm the normal in terms of what's typical.
So I'm not, I'm not criticizing treatment in that way.
I just was an outlier, I suppose.
And so, yeah, when I first started treatment, I was in a larger body.
I was not restricting.
You know, the first time I learned about sizes was actually in like quantities of food was
in treatment.
Like before treatment, I had no idea that a half of banana was one serving size of fruit.
I would eat a normal, I would eat a banana like a normal person.
And ever since treatment in 2000, now I'm like, oh, half a banana, that's a certain.
You know, this information I didn't need.
But I learned it an eating disorder treatment, which is funny.
So, yeah, I did never restrict.
And that was always the basis of what the, I kept being told if I just ate three meals, two snacks a day, that this urge, this craving to binge would go away.
and that wasn't my reality.
And so I think probably that was the miss.
No one ever asked me in treatment if I binged before I started purging ever.
And I don't know if that happened because I went into treatment early in the 2000s.
I'm not sure if it would be different now.
But it was always assumed that, you know, my bulimia was the way it was because of I was restricting
and it just wasn't true.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think one thing that the GLP one era has really forced us to confront here is that, you know,
we may be lumping very different experiences together under this umbrella of food noise,
because, you know, as you're kind of alluding to, we've long known that restriction
itself can make the brain extremely preoccupied with food. But now we're learning more about,
you know, genetics and biology and how that can influence hunger and satiety and reward sensitivity
and susceptibility to weight gain. So I'm so glad we're now having that conversation. But let's talk about
the GLP1 now. So what changed for you, symptomatically, psychologically, when you started the
GLP1? Sure. So I take a very low dose, first of all. I take sub-therapeutic of what you would,
what's FDA approved for weight loss, more than half less than the starting dose, for example.
But I would say around week three, just that urge to binge completely went away. It was
completely off my mind. And because I didn't have this overall.
writing biological signal that was like driving me towards this behavior. I was for the first time
in my adult life able to make better choices for myself because I always knew what I needed to do.
I knew I, you know, I make a joke, Abby, that like I have probably more hours than dietitians
than some dietitians do at this point because I was in and out of their treatment for
which I think is pretty common for people with eating disorders. They're pretty well educated on nutrition.
You know, so I knew what I needed to do. I just couldn't get myself to do.
it. And so once I kind of, the GOP helped turn the volume down. And so I felt like I had more
agency to make those better choices. I was really motivated not to have my eating disorder anymore.
So as soon as that dial went down just a little bit, I was very easily able to be like,
okay, three meals, two snacks, three meals, two snacks. And I did that right away. And even if I didn't
necessarily want to, but similar to what you do when you're first going to treatment, right?
I just did it myself. And I was able to stick with that.
You know, in my case, I actually gained a little weight because I was, you know, and I was fine with that.
I just didn't want the urges to binge.
And for the first time, it actually worked.
And I was like, oh, my God, I think we might be missing something for a subset of patients, certainly not most.
And I don't know how many.
But I felt like it was a scientific question worth investigating.
Oh, yeah.
I think this is where your story is so interesting and complicated in some ways,
because it raises this possibility that the exact same surface complaint, which is, you know,
I can't stop thinking about food, could arise from very different mixtures of deprivation,
reward sensitivity, aptite signaling, learned behavior, compulsivity, psychological distress,
like so many different factors here.
And theoretically, the appropriate intervention could be completely different depending on what's driving it.
So, you know, for one person, those intrusive thoughts might be their,
brain appropriately screaming like, feed me, you know, because they are depriving themselves. So
suppressing that signal further via a GLP1 could be extremely dangerous. Absolutely. But then for another
person, like perhaps in your situation, reducing that intensity, that food salience of the
intensity of that food salience and the reward-driven urges might be super therapeutic. And unfortunately,
you know, as we know right now, we don't have a validated clinical tool that
can confidently tease those experiences apart.
And just looking at someone or weighing them is not evidence of what is going on in their head.
It's just not.
And so I love your story because I think it complicates the status quo because I imagine a lot of eating disorder
clinicians would ask, you know, how do you know that the medication treated your
eating disorder rather than simply treating one symptom by suppressing your appetite so
effectively that you couldn't binge and purge. I'm curious, what do you think of that suggestion?
Did you initially interpret your experience as proof that your illness had been biological all along?
So I think there was a couple questions there. The first one in terms of clinical responses or
clinician's responses to me, I think it's a valid question. And I think that that can happen in some
instances and where you're just completely eradicating your hunger cues.
And so then you're just sort of on autopilot.
Even in that instance, though, I wonder if there's not an opportunity for that to be
a helpful intervention in some instances, as long as someone is being properly monitored
to stop the behavior and to get them on the new habit, right?
So, I mean, that's an if question.
I don't think we should be, like, trialing this on people randomly.
but I wonder even in that instance if there aren't like some specific instances that could be helpful.
Certainly for me, I had been sick for 22 years.
So by the end of my disease, most of my meals were binges and then purging.
And so I think it did kind of stop that behavior because at that point it had gone from binge eating to, you know, making a bad situation a lot worse with my stomach being stretched out and all the things.
So it really was able to stop that and make new habits for myself.
But, you know, like the gastric emptying portion of taking a GLP, that goes away in about a month or so.
It's a short-term effect that is known.
So the rest of that is all psychological.
So for me, I saw it as evidence that there was something biological going on with me.
However, I would argue that all eating disorders are biological.
And what I mean by that is this conversation we're having right now is a neurological event.
So I don't think it's like, oh, it's based in biology or genetics or, oh, it's based in an environment and social cues.
They're all together.
I mean, whether or not you're having preoccupation with food or if you have body dysmorphia or whatever, that is still something going on in your brain.
So it's all biological.
And I don't think those two things are like at odds with each other.
But for me, certainly, this is kind of crazy.
Abby, but like you would think that I would know that I was mentally ill because I had an
eating disorder for 22 years.
And I did.
But I was like, you know, I knew what I was doing.
In some ways I wish I would have had, you know, that I didn't realize what I was doing.
It would have been easier because it just made me hate myself more because I couldn't stop the
behaviors.
But taking the GLP medication was such a profound effect in terms of even just affecting the
way my mood was.
It was the first time I was able to.
to confidently admit that I had a mental illness
because I had a comparison point
to how I felt in my brain and my body before versus after.
And I was like, wow.
I'm like, it did for me what they were hoping
60 milligrams of Prozac would do, right?
Right.
That didn't work at all.
I tried that.
It did absolutely nothing for me.
And so I was like, wow.
There is something so profoundly dysregulated in my brain
that this medication is somehow indirectly helping
It's probably not fixing the exact thing, but it's helping just enough for, and I'm really motivated,
so I was able to make change.
Like, it was just amazing.
It was amazing.
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And so tell me more about that, the kind of like holistic effects, the holistic success of a GLP1.
What happened to body image and food rules or need to compensate and purging and weight obsession?
Like what about all of those elements that we know are associated with eating disorders?
Right.
So I've had some people tell me they didn't think I had bulimia because I didn't have obsession with body image.
and that's one of the requirements for having bulimia in the DSM.
Some people tell me that they think I had food addiction,
which I'm like, eh, I was throwing up like three or four times a day.
Are you sure I didn't have bulimia?
You know, so it's one of those things.
I think that's probably one of the problems at DSM is like all based off of symptoms, you know?
And, you know, anyway.
So it's a tricky question.
Fat phobia and weight bias certainly contributed to me getting bulimia.
There's no question.
I started gaining weight because of my binge eating disorder.
And what I sincerely thought to myself is like, I'm going to end up being one of those people
that is so disabled, they're not going to be able to physically walk.
And they're going to have to get craned out of a house.
I was like, that's what's going to happen to me.
I can't control myself.
So if that's the way I'm going to be, I might as well not be that and be thinner.
I wasn't necessarily going like, oh, I need to be a size six.
I need to be size eight.
I just didn't want to be a thousand pounds.
So that contributed to my original decision to start purging, unfortunately.
So I had weight obsession in that way.
Like I was afraid of being obese.
And there's no question about that.
And, you know, that's something I've had to really think through of like, why did I feel that way?
Like what messages were told to me as a young child that made that seem like worse than having bulimia?
That's quite sad.
Yeah.
But I never had I wasn't I never weighed myself multiple times a day.
I wasn't obsessed on anything like that.
So that didn't change because I didn't have that.
I've never counted calories.
Thank God because that's something you can't unlearn.
So I'm lucky in that way.
So I, you know, that didn't change.
What did change, I would say, is there is a long time where I would avoid certain food,
not because I was afraid of weight gain because I knew it just putting it in my mouth
would be an instant binge similar to like an alcoholic.
not wanting the first drink.
So it wasn't related to me being afraid it was going to make me fat,
but I just knew it would turn into a binge.
And so once I took the GLP, it really opened up what I was able to eat and enjoy,
sincerely enjoy, because now I can eat absolutely anything,
and I don't have to worry about it turning into a binge.
So it really opened, I eat way more food than I ever did before.
It's kind of amazing.
That's amazing.
Yeah, it's so interesting because, like, again, we don't have validated tools for this yet,
But I feel like when it comes to that earlier question of like, could a GLP1 actually treat an ED as opposed to suppressing a symptom?
I think, you know, perhaps one litmus test or question to ask yourself could be something like, you know, if this medication had completely eliminated all binging and purging and giving you your life back, but you hadn't lost a single pound, would you consider equally successful?
Because I think if that the answer is yes, then I think that is a really incredibly important distinction.
Because now we're not talking only about a weight loss treatment that happens to reduce binging.
We're talking about whether there could be theoretically some kind of, you know, some psychiatric or behavioral therapeutic effect independent of weight loss.
And that's really powerful here.
That is what I want to see, you know, invest.
I'll take it a step further.
So I, you know, I think I just had a Dexa scan and my body max indexes.
It's within the normal range, but it's on the lower end.
If someone, because this is so confusing to people, this concept, if I went to eating disorder
clinic and they told me that the only way they would give me this medication is if I
was no longer weight suppressed, because I am weight suppressed, meaning when I first went
into treatment, I was like 180 pounds.
I'm now around 125.
I would think you were stupid for telling me that because I think it would add a whole other host of side
effects that aren't positive.
But I would do it.
I would do it in two seconds.
I would be in a larger body, no problem if it meant that I didn't have to have this urge
and this craving all the time.
And that's what I always had a problem with in treatment.
I was like, I don't have a problem being in a larger body, but it's not going to solve my
problem.
I'm just going to be in a larger body and I'm still going to have this obsession with food.
So like, why are you guys making me do this?
So, yeah, I would do that in two seconds if it's what I needed to do.
That's amazing.
I think that's very telling, right?
Now, you now sit on the border at NIDA, and I assume you're sitting beside a lot of eating disorder clinicians who understandably are reluctant to entertain this idea of giving GLP1 medications to people with eating disorders.
And I think there are real concerns here about restrictive eating and nutritional inadequacy.
and weight loss reinforcement and fat phobia
and the normalization of ultra-thinness
that has come with this JLP1 boom that we're seeing.
Yeah.
Now, what are the questions that you think
the eating disorder community, like, is afraid to ask
that may stand in the way of us fully understanding,
you know, binge biology and improving treatment?
Well, it's hard, it's hard to take a look in the mirror
and be realistic of where we are
in treatment. I would say that's the first thing. Anytime I make a post, like if a paper comes out,
like there's been two papers recently. One came out recently about like why a treatment hasn't
improved in 20 years and it like listed out all the reasons. And then another one came out in December.
I met an analysis that said like, you know, in terms of binge eating, the outcomes have actually
gotten worse in treatment unless. So anytime I do a post on that, like the clinicians start coming
for me, you know, because I think it's really hard.
to have a realistic look in the mirror and say, like, what we're doing isn't working that well.
It's almost treatment resistance is the norm.
And so if that's the case, then it means we're missing something.
It's not the patient's fault.
It means we fundamentally don't understand something.
And I think that anything that could potentially reduce suffering deserves rigorous clinical investigation.
I'm not suggesting that people go try this at home.
You know, what I'm suggesting is that this deserves investment from the scientific community to see if there's something there.
And wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to figure out ahead of time if someone is going to respond well to this medication instead of causing harm?
Because right now, I have no idea if it's causing more harm than good.
You know, I've had 85 women contact me say they love it, but that doesn't mean anything.
That's a biased response.
And then I have other people say clinicians are like, I'm talking to people with anorexia.
And it's causing someone.
I'm like, well, that doesn't mean anything either because most people would go into treatment
have anorexia.
You're not seeing people with Benjiating disorder.
Yeah.
So we don't have a good sense of it.
And I would like to know.
I'd like to know.
And for you, are you worried that your story could be weaponized by the weight loss industry?
I mean, like I can just imagine some telehealth company seeing a story like yours and turning
like this medication changed my relationship with binging and purging into gelp1 is now treating food addiction and
eating disorders when that's not what the evidence says yet right they want to uh i'm not worried about
it at all because pharma wants to stay far far away from this topic right now um you know historically
pharma has abandoned eating disorders that's why we only have two approved FDA medications which were
both repurposed drugs um you know they don't they don't want to invest in us some reasons are we're
difficult, all mental health are difficult to run clinical trials on. And the group is too small.
They don't see it as having any money. So for the most sort, they want to stay away from us.
So I'm not particularly worried about that, to be honest. I do worry, and it was a big worry of
mine when I wrote my book, that someone would read my book and pick it up as a prescriptive
thing. And I was really, really worried about that. I'm super clear in the foreword. And I'm very
clear throughout the book that this isn't prescriptive. What it is is a
call to action with researchers and clinicians to ask better questions. And that's pretty much it.
Although there are doctors who prescribe this off-label and, you know, off-label medication is not
illegal. You're allowed to do that. But definitely don't try it at home. No, you know, of course.
Yeah. I mean, I guess there's also the kind of risk that someone with a restrictive eating disorder
could hear your experience and then use it to justify to themselves or to their healthcare
care provider, like I should be prescribed a JLP1.
And, you know, so that's where it's, again, we need better standards of care for folks
with e-dissorders and more research so that, you know, clinicians do have, you know, have an
understanding of when they can be used and when they should be used and when they may do more harm
than good.
And I think, you know, I think it's also the responsible thing to point out that the opposite risk
exists of this conversation too, because JLP ones now have become so dominant in conversations
that we may reduce all problematic eating behaviors as just some kind of biological reward
circuitry problem where you kind of said earlier, like it's not one or the other, which
these eating disorders are the result of a complex interplay of perhaps that circuitry problem,
but also dichulture, trauma, learn behavior, food environment.
Right. And so I think it's important that we don't replace psychological, you know, reductionism with biological reductionism. For sure. And we, you know, the bio, psychosocial, we shouldn't be picking whichever one agrees with our own kind of personal ideology. We, a good health care provider. Yeah, we need to be investigating all three. And so I guess what I would love to hear from you, what exactly do you want researchers to?
investigate? What is the most important questions we need to be asking next?
A great question. So I'm pushing really hard for feasibility studies right now to see if
these medications are appropriate to be used in specifically weight suppressed delimary
nervosa patients and patients with binge eating disorder. That's sort of like the first step before you
would go to a randomized control trial. So I think that's really important. We're having trouble
getting investment. I mean, I've personally ponied up money to say that I will throw money towards
this problem. So that's the first thing, because we can argue about this all day long, but, you know,
we don't have any, if we don't have any money to study it, like, what are we doing? The second thing
is, is I think, really more investment in understanding about rare variants. So the Broad Institute at
Harvard is doing a large genetic study right now, and it's free to submit your swabs. They're trying
to look into that. I have a rare variant on my GLP pathway that we think is associated with
disorder eating. And, you know, in my very simplistic best case scenario, wouldn't it be
wonderful if we could identify some of these gLP variants that would be a predictor of response
to these medications that we would know ahead of time? Pharma is not going to support that type
of study. That would have to be independent because they would rather get FDA approval for a broad
group that works okay instead of it working extraordinarily well for a very small group.
So it's really going to have to be independent funders that come up and bring the money to the
table to get it done. But I think that's the most interesting questions that I have,
about precision medicine, really. Because I think that paper that I alluded to from Dr. Levingston
that came out about treatment outcomes not improving in the past 20 years, one of her main points
was that we're treating to averages and we're not having precision medicine. And that's
It's one of the reasons where we are.
Yeah.
And when it comes to eating disorders specifically, you know, there is no one-size-fits-all.
I know that we have, you know, we have specific criteria to hit in the DSM, but every individual's
experience is so highly variable, what their triggers are, what their origin story is, what
specific, whether they're, you know, we're now talking about genes and variants and the intersection
of those variants with, you know, their food environment and diet culture and what they're exposed,
to you and all of those messages. And so I think, yes, an individualized approach is going to be
so critical. And so I'm very, very appreciative of, you know, the work that you're doing,
the advocacy that you're putting forward. And also for coming on and sharing your journey. This
was such a fascinating conversation. Yeah, this is fun. And can you tell everyone where they can find
more information about what you're doing and in any way they can support you? Great. Thank you. So my
website is pagecordon author.com. You can pre-order my memoir that's coming out. So 100% of the royalties
to this book are going, donating back to NIDA, specifically to a fund that's supporting research
on this topic. So it's really just important to me in that way. And I always like to point out
the NIDA website, because they have a wonderful screener tool there. If you think you're having any
issues with food. You can go on there and they will give you resources for next step so you can
talk to professional. So yeah, my website's the best way. And then I'm also on Instagram. I'm really
vocal on there. Same name, Paige Gordon author. And the last thing, you've touched on it, but I just
want to make sure I'm really clear that as much promises these medications may have for binge eating
type disorders, it's the absolute opposite for restrictive type eating disorders. And I say restrictive
type because people that have been geneating disorder can have restrictive binge eating disorder.
So anyone that's coming from a place of restriction, you've got to stay really far away
from these medications.
And anyone even with, you know, that it could be promising, if you're thinking about using
it in a weight loss context, it's also bad news bears.
Yeah.
It's a red flag.
Yeah.
So I just always want to tell that to people.
Yeah.
I appreciate just kind of nailing that home because absolutely we don't want this.
And that is what I was kind of alluding to.
We don't want this conversation to turn into, oh, well, you know, this is kind of, you know, my way to get a GLP1, which is obviously not what we want to be endorsing.
So, again, thank you for that kind of hammering home that disclaimer.
And thank you again for what you do.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
It was a lot of fun.
Okay, this was such a unique and interesting conversation.
And, you know, as someone whose only encounter with food noise was through extreme diet restriction in, you know, my teen years when I had an eating disorder, I am always so eager to learn from those with varying food journeys.
And I'm very, very much invested in the future of GLP1 research and the advocacy work that Paige and others are doing to help us make these medications safer and more effective for those who use.
them. And while we have loads of research on their use for obesity and metabolic disorders,
we are still a very long way from seeing official label expansion for various EDs. And the lack of
research really is evidence of that. So a recent 2026 review found only nine empirical studies
looking specifically at GLB1 medications in people with eating disorders or disordered eating. And
most of that work has focused on binge eating, so not bulimia or anorexia, orthorexia,
arphid, or other combinations of eating disorder presentations. But what we do have for BED or binge
eating is definitely quite interesting. So a recent meta-analysis of five small studies involving
182 people did find that these drugs may help to reduce some symptoms in some people with BED.
But in addition to being still very small and heterogeneous, they generally are studying weight loss as a primary outcome with eating disorder symptoms as kind of almost side effects.
And that leaves us with some pretty massive unanswered questions.
So we still don't know whether GLP-1s are actually modifying eating disorder psychopathology or simply making binging harder by lowering aptite and food reward.
We don't know who might benefit versus who might become more restrictive.
We don't know what happens to body image distress or compensatory behaviors or nutritional adequacy
over years of these medications use.
And we have remarkably little evidence in bulimia specifically.
The newest reviews are essentially saying the same thing.
Promising signal, major safety and misuse concerns, and not enough evidence.
yet to guide routine eating disorder treatment. So I don't think that Page's story gives us an answer
yet, but I do think it gives us a really good research question and some hope that future
treatments won't put all people with binge type symptoms into an existing explanatory box. We clearly
need more studies designed to figure out who is binging, why they're binging, what exactly the
medication changes, and whether that change actually looks like recovery.
And I will absolutely be keeping my finger on the pulse as more unfolds.
But on that note, that's a wrap for today.
If you have not already, please make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Do leave me a nice little five-star review and a comment.
And until next time, signing off with Science and Sass.
I'm Avi Sharp.
Thanks for listening.
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