Hats Off to Dr. David Herzog for Advocacy on Eating Disorders

This week The Boston Globe named Dr. David Herzog one of “12 Bostonians who are changing the world.” The shoutout was for Dr. Herzog’s leadership and advocacy on eating disorders—encouraging people to speak out to fight the shame attached to anorexia and bulimia—and for his diplomatic outreach to the fashion media, which this spring resulted in a pledge from Vogue magazine to avoid using underage models or those who appear to have eating disorders.

Our congratulations to Dr. Herzog, who is a friend and member of the Child Mind Institute Scientific Research Council. Dr. Herzog is the director of the Harris Center for Education and Advocacy in Eating Disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital. Every year the center sponsors a public forum on body image and the media, inviting prominent players in fashion and the media to speak.

The headliner of the forum this year was Arianna Huffington, who acknowledged that her two daughters, now at Yale, both struggled with eating disorders. Huffington said she knew her daughter Isabella had developed an eating problem when, at 12 years old, she refused to eat a piece of her own birthday cake. “The image of Isabella refusing her birthday cake,” Dr. Herzog writes in a blog on the Huffington Post, “captured the fear and powerlessness that many parents encounter upon spotting signs of an eating disorder in their child.”

You can hear Dr. Herzog talk about the early signs of an eating disorder parents should be alert to in the video below.