Every morning I scroll through my Google Alerts to stay up to date on the media’s coverage of eating disorders. Some days, the headlines in the alerts point me toward interesting new research, or stories that expand my thinking around the challenges of eating disorder treatment and recovery.

But many days, the headlines and accompanying stories are a reminder of what’s wrong with eating disorder coverage. The most egregious stories tend to be littered with sensational photos, surface-level details about weight and calories, or oversimplifications of the recovery process.

As a longtime journalist who’s been in recovery from anorexia nervosa for over 20 years, I’m sensitive to both the challenges of covering eating disorders and the effect that these stories can have on people who are struggling and on those who are in recovery but still vulnerable to setbacks. I’m now writing a book about eating disorders (hence the Google alerts) and giving more thought than ever to the ways in which we talk and write about them.

Along the way, I’ve developed best practices around what to aim for and what to avoid. I’ve also sought advice from other journalists who have had lived experience with eating disorders and/or who have reported on them in meaningful ways.

As the 40th anniversary of Karen Carpenter’s death approaches on Feb. 4, followed by National Eating Disorder Awareness Week from Feb. 20-26, I hope these tips will help journalists expand and elevate their coverage in the month ahead and beyond.

Acknowledge the complexities of eating disorders — and the diverse array of people affected by them

Eating disorders aren’t lifestyle choices; they are complicated illnesses that can stem from a mix of physiological, sociological and environmental factors, as well as inherited temperamental traits.

And they aren’t simply a “white teenage girl issue” — a long-held stereotype that has proven to be problematic for BIPOC seeking treatment. A growing body of research has shown that eating disorders affect people from a range of different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Journalists should take this into account when identifying sources for stories. They should also realize that people of all different body types can struggle with eating disorders. I know, from my own experiences and interviews I’ve conducted, that people who aren’t severely underweight or overweight often struggle silently behind the guise of a “healthy” weight.

“I think there’s an understandable tendency to reduce stories about eating disorders to: This person is scarily thin or dangerously fat. To make it all about weight and appearance,” said Frank Bruni, a Duke University professor and contributing writer for The New York Times. “That can have a voyeuristic, freak-show aspect to it and, worse, it disregards that what’s going on — the biggest stuff, the messiest stuff — is often as much emotional and psychological as it is physical.”

Bruni wrote about his struggles with eating in his 2009 memoir “Born Round,” which chronicles what he has called his “love-hate affair with food.”

There are two mistakes, Bruni said, that journalists can easily make when reporting on eating disorders: “They don’t give an eating disorder the same consideration and gravity they do to other disorders —  it can seem to them more a failure of character or discipline than the kind of profound challenge it really is. Or they see an eating disorder simply in terms of food. It’s about much more than food.”

The National Eating Disorder Association has great resources that shed light on the complexities of eating disorders, including lesser-known and under covered ones like orthorexia; avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID); and diabulimia.

Approach questions with sensitivity

Freelance journalist Amelia Tait, who has fully recovered from anorexia and recently wrote an essay for The Guardian about her past struggles, said it can help to give sources a sense of agency.

“I think it’s always important to let people know that they don’t have to tell you everything; they don’t have to dive into their darkest memories, especially if they’re triggering,” Tait said. “To do this, I make sure I start difficult questions by saying something like, ‘As much as you’re comfortable with, can you tell me about …’”

She also avoids asking about weight or size, and she tries not to end interviews with difficult questions. Instead, she factors in wind-down questions.

“I always like to ask people what they wish would change about the issue we’re talking about; what they’d like to see in the world,” Tait said. “That way you’re respecting their opinion and perspective and not just mining them for their trauma.”

Understand that eating disorders aren’t just ‘women’s issues’

Men make up about 25% of people who struggle with anorexia or bulimia, and 36% of people who struggle with binge eating disorder, according to data on the National Eating Disorder Association’s website. And yet, media coverage of eating disorders tends to focus largely on cisgender women.

Ken Capobianco, a freelance music journalist who struggled with anorexia for three decades, said he wishes there was a greater breadth of stories about men with eating disorders.

“I’m still waiting for a good article on men with eating disorders that doesn’t solely focus on men who want to be ripped or bulked up. While that type of body dysmorphia leading to disordered eating is indeed a problem, it is not the full picture of men with eating disorders,” said Capobianco, author of the novel “Call Me Anorexic: The Ballad of a Thin Man.” “Rarely do articles explore men who strive for an impossible perfection of lean or those with a desire to disappear because they feel insignificant or their world is out of control.”

Be judicious when using details and descriptions

Capobianco believes that stories about eating disorders should contain trigger warnings as a courtesy to readers.

“It’s very difficult to write an article on eating disorders and their warning signs without discussing some destructive behaviors,” Capobianco said. “If destructive behaviors are discussed, the language needs to be precise and the anecdotes brief and specific.”

Stories that go into vivid detail about people’s eating disorder behaviors can be triggering for readers who are struggling and those in recovery. When deciding which details to include and which ones to leave out, it helps to consider the following questions: What am I trying to achieve by including this detail? Will the detail advance my readers’ understanding of the story? Does the detail’s potential to help readers outweigh the potential to hurt them? If you sense that a detail could hurt a reader, try to reframe it, scale back on it, or remove it altogether.

It also helps to be clear about the focus of your story and your goal in telling it. Megan Zhang, a culture journalist and food writer, experienced this when writing a recent piece about nascent research showing that psilocybin mushrooms could be an effective form of treatment for people with eating disorders. Zhang was intentional about the details she included, particularly when it came to describing the main subject of the story — a teenager named Sophia Anderson.

“I included what I believed were details that readers needed to know in order to gauge just how debilitating Sophia’s illness was. I didn’t think it was necessary or right to include excessive details beyond that,” Zhang said. “The goal of this story was to illuminate, through the lens of Sophia’s journey, an emerging and promising area of research — not to provide some sort of shock value or to harm or trigger readers. It was important to me to report the spectrum of her experiences with accuracy, while also showing her empathy as a fellow human being.”

Like Zhang, freelance journalist Kate Siber was selective about the details she included when writing her recent New York Times Magazine story about atypical anorexia, an eating disorder in which people share the same symptoms as those with anorexia nervosa but are not formally underweight.

“There’s this really hard line to walk where you don’t want to be triggering and you don’t want to be enabling, but on the other hand, you also want people to understand who may have no reference point for an eating disorder,” said Siber, who had anorexia in her late teens and now considers herself to be fully recovered. “The bar was higher with this particular story because there’s such a tendency for people to not believe those with lived experience with atypical anorexia; they just get looked over.”

Siber was also sensitive to how she described her sources’ bodies, knowing that terms like “obese” and “overweight” can be controversial. She asked her sources and editor for input and ended up using the term “people in larger bodies,” which she said felt true to how her sources wanted to be described.

Avoid sensational images

I cringe every time I see a story featuring photos of emaciated people, patients with feeding tubes, or before-and-after-body photos. These types of images can be triggering for people with eating disorders, who are prone to disparaging their bodies and comparing them to others.

Such images also minimize the complexities of eating disorders by focusing on the physical aspects of them without regard for the psychological underpinnings. And they can perpetuate stereotypes by incorrectly suggesting, for instance, that all people with binge eating disorder are obese or that all people with anorexia are underweight.

Whenever possible, writers should have a say in the images used in their story. If a photo seems like it could be triggering, consider using photos of objects instead — a stack of diaries, a mother and daughter holding hands, a refrigerator dotted with notes or drawings, etc. Illustrations can also be a worthwhile alternative. When publishing an essay about my eating-related struggles during the pandemic, The New York Times opted for a creative illustration that captured the essence of my struggles without glorifying them.

Strive for person-first language and watch out for warrior words

When writing about eating disorders, I try to use person-first language; instead of saying a person is “anorexic,” or “bulimic,” for instance, I’ll say the person has anorexia or bulimia. It’s common for people with eating disorders to believe that they’re defined by their disorder, or that their disorder is an integral part of their identity. By identifying people as “anorexic” or “bulimic,” journalists can unknowingly exacerbate this harmful line of thinking.

Journalists should also watch out for warrior language. It’s common to use words like battle, fight, defeat, and triumph when writing about people with eating disorders and those in recovery. But these types of words lack originality and leave little room for nuance.

I’ve found that it helps to ask sources for guidance on how to describe their eating disorder and their experiences with it. This is especially important if you’re talking with someone who hasn’t yet received an official diagnosis, or who is still struggling but no longer in acute distress. Questions that start with “is it accurate to say that…?” and “how would you describe…?” can help you arrive at greater clarity and accuracy, while expanding your verbiage.

In a survey I’m conducting for my book, I ask respondents to describe their eating disorder or their recovery in one word. The responses have been eye-opening, and they’ve expanded my thinking around how to describe eating disorders and recovery from them.

Explore the nuances of recovery

When we don’t fully understand the complexities of a disorder, it’s tempting to write tidy narratives that put people’s experiences into black and white buckets of “sickness” and “full recovery.”

But recovery from an eating disorder (and many mental health disorders, for that matter) is typically a nonlinear, arduous process, and that calls for nuance and an understanding that eating disorders don’t just go away; for some, they are a lifelong struggle or vulnerability. When relevant, journalists should try to unpack this “ongoingness” so that readers can understand the pitfalls and possibilities of the recovery process.

To gain a deeper understanding of this process, consider asking: How would you describe your recovery? What’s been the hardest part of your recovery, and the most surprising part? Do you consider yourself to be ‘recovered’? ‘Fully recovered’? ‘In recovery’? I like to refer to myself as being “in recovery,” with the acknowledgment that it’s a continuous journey. Others I’ve interviewed like to say they’re “fully recovered,” “partially recovered” or “healed.”

The language we use matters, and it can differ from person to person, story to story. The more precise our language, the more accurate our stories will be.