British Colombian Lindsay Kante launched RecoveryMinded.com, a blog-driven website designed to counteract the detrimental effects of websites like Pro-Anorexia’s Journal and the BlueDragonfly, which give advice on how to hide anorexia and bulimia from others.

Through her site, Kante, who suffered from Compulsive Eating Disorder and bulimia nervosa, allows herself to serve as an example for readers by sharing the story of her recovery.

Kante said that she was first motivated to begin the site last April as a way to release her feelings about her own personal battles with eating disorders and also as a way to show the realities of eating disorders that many pro-bulimia and pro-anorexia sites are so good at hiding. [See “Anorexia Goes High Tech”, published in July 2001 by Time.com, for details about pro-anorexia sites on the Internet.]

“I know the reality of it,” Kante said. “I am able to see beyond the denial that [people who start pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia sites] are in.”

Kante said she also wanted to start her site to challenge this denial.

“I get a lot of referrals from search engines and people looking for pro-bulimia and pro-anorexia sites,” Kante said.

Kante’s site previously displayed Yahoo! news feed, but she recently took the section down because she didn’t feel that “it was adding any value to the site.”

She stated that she had never put much effort into the news feed section of her Web site, but now she will most likely start adding links in her blogs to feature articles and Web sites that she finds interesting.

The Web site also has links to ads provided by Google AdSense. Kante stated that she often logs into her Google account and changes URLs that she finds questionable. When she does find questionable material, she immediately blocks the ads and notifies Google of illegal activity.

“Google is pretty good at keeping [pro-anorexia] and [pro-bulimia] sites from exploiting their ad services,” Kante said. “I haven’t seen anything too harsh show up in my ads so far.”

RecoveryMinded.com now receives about 50-100 hits per day and is broken into sections based on what type of eating disorder a person might have, Kante said.

Some of the sections include: All About Recovery, Anorexia Nervosa, Personal Experience and Stories of Recovery. Each section offers insight into identifying eating disorders, alongside explanations from Kante about how she has stayed on the path to recovery for the past three years.