Challenging What We Know About OSFED and UFED with Dr Ruth Cruickshank

Have you ever felt like your eating disorder didn't have a name, or that what you were going through just didn't quite fit? This episode is for you.

This week on the Full of Beans Podcast, I'm joined by Dr Ruth Cruickshank, Associate Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. Ruth has a background in French literature, but has carved out a truly unique space in eating disorder research, using her expertise in critical reading, food studies and her own lived experience of OSFED to ask the questions that others simply aren't asking.

Ruth is the only academic in the humanities working on OSFED, and she is doing extraordinary work to challenge why the most common eating disorder diagnosis remains so systemically overlooked.

In this episode, we explore:

• How Ruth's career took her from French literature and advertising to eating disorder research
• How representations of food in fiction carry deeper psychological and cultural meanings
• What OSFED is and why it matters that so many people have never heard of it
• Why OSFED and UFED remain under-researched despite being the most common eating disorder diagnoses
• The danger of diagnostic criteria focused on weight and behaviour rather than distress and daily impact
• Why not having a name for your experience can be so isolating and why that validation matters
• The "not sick enough" narrative and how diagnostic language can keep people stuck
• Whether a truly person-centred approach to eating disorder treatment could change everything
• What Ruth wants anyone to know if they've never been able to name their experience

Connect with Us:

• Subscribe to the Full of Beans Podcast
• Follow Full of Beans on Instagram
• Check out our website
• Listen on YouTube
• Connect with Ruth via her Research Profile
• Read Ruth's research:
  • Challenging the enduring epistemic injustice of eating disorders: Critically re-reading Occupation food insecurity in the Trente Glorieuses with Elsa Triolet and the 1944–1945 ‘Minnesota Starvation Experiment’
  • Not knowing and the problematics of naming eating disorders: OSFED/EDNOS/TCA-NS and Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille [A Girl’s Story]

⚠️ Content Note: This episode includes discussion of OSFED, anorexia, bulimia, and the difficulty of language in eating disorder treatment. Please take care while listening.