From 27 February until 5 March 2017, it is Eating Disorder Awareness week, an international awareness campaign, fighting the myths and misunderstandings that surround anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder and EDNOS.Joff Powell writes about his experience of suffering with an eating disorder after coming out as gay.

Whilst I may have been late to the party understanding my sexuality, having a somewhat strong (some would say stubborn) personality and being extremely liberal in my attitude, I found it relatively easy to accept the fact I was attracted to men when it finally happened for the first time (20 years old). This isn’t to diminish the difficulty in coming out to a family within a rural community and the years of work I have had to put in to educate people on the subject.

Being gay was just who I now was and if you didn’t accept it, then in my eyes that was your loss. But in the hard and somewhat brash approach I took to force people to accept me, was I missing the signs of a potentially life threatening mental health issue?

Dating in the gay world is hard, and I mean that quite literally. Sometimes it feels like you are banging your head onto a solid brick wall. As a homosexual looking for love (not the kind of love you will find in a cubical toilet), you will come across a barrage of dead ends and disappointments. You will be judged, you will be ridiculed and you will have your heart stomped on just because you dared to be different and follow your heart rather than your throbbing penis. While searching for “the one,” you will come across many who are not “the one.” In fact, you usually come across “the one” you will never want to see or even remember again. 

Here are the 10 types of guys you will most certainly come across in the dating scene: 

1. The straight / in the closet guy. 

Yes, he is very tall, yes he walks like a man - a real man - and yes he is every inch the ultimate masculine form and has no limp wrists or sassy “sista” mannerisms in sight, but he is not boyfriend material and you deserve so much better.
This relationship is bad for your self-esteem and has no real future, unless you’re comfortable with being known as a dirty secret for the rest of your life.

2. The slutty guy. 

Creeping and lurking in the darkened corner of Grindr until the early hours, the slutty guy is a very common species in the genus of gay men, in fact, most homosexual men are sluts and void of any ounce of love and romance, so coming across these creatures is as common a sight as a Pikachu jumping out of a bush in Pokémon Go. Don’t get too attached to a slut, in fact don’t even converse with one, remember, you are looking for love, not an STD.

3. The short guy. 

His profile clearly stated he was 5 ft 10, so why am I now looking down at you? Not only is he a liar, but this is just completely awkward because I was 100 percent expecting someone else.

4. The ghost guy. 

You think everything went really well on that amazing and out of this world first date. Conversation was stimulating, he was attractive, you had an incredible and passionate kissing session and he even paid for the meal and drinks at the end of the date. But a few days pass and nothing. You check in for a sign of life and silence prevails. You resign yourself to the fact that he has vanished and magically disappeared from your life, leaving a gaping void in your heart and a million unanswered questions. You have been “ghosted,” and all you want to do now is call the Ghostbusters.

Let’s all be real for a moment and face the fact there is often a lot of pressure from friends, family, coworkers, and others for a gay person to be in a relationship, especially now that marriage equality laws are on the books. In the LGBT community, as in other communities, finding the “perfect partner” is considered by many to be the holy grail. It’s not an especially fair or reasonable expectation, however, and some people who prefer the single life are left feeling compelled to defend their choice.

What’s to defend, really? Pressure and Hollywood fantasies aside, maybe, just maybe, it’s Ok to be single. Being on your own doesn’t have to be a shameful or isolating story; instead, it can be a celebration of your growth and development as an individual.

Without further ado, here are five reasons why it’s good to be single and gay:

1. You are fully responsible for the big decisions in your life.

Change jobs, travel the world, or buy a new car, if you like. Guess what? The only person on the line for these decisions is you. This single-minded energy can be incredibly invigorating and empowering.
When you make a life-changing decision on your own, it is a chance to build personal power and take responsibility for creating the life you want. And if the choice falls through or proves untenable? You still get to take ownership, learn, and grow from the experience.

2. You have the opportunity to get to know yourself better.

As a single person, the opportunity to explore who you are and how you want to be in your world is an amazing luxury. There is no need to morph yourself to a partner’s ideal, and you have room to discover who you are, what you want, and what you need. As Oscar Wilde said, “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” Being single offers time not only for introspection that allows you to explore aspects of yourself needing attention, but to actively pursue those things as well.

3. You may become more resilient and confident.

Sometimes life gets tough and we start to doubt our choices and ourselves. As a single person, this energy can feel overwhelming and perhaps lead to lack of self-confidence. At the same time, you and only you are making the tough choices that must be made to survive tough times. When you face difficult choices head-on and get through them, unscathed or otherwise, you build resilience and confidence that you’re strong enough to face most anything.

Australia - Advocates for marriage equality have expressed a renewed sense of optimism following the release of the consensus report from the Senate Select Committee into the Government’s Draft Marriage Amendment (Same-Sex Marriage) Bill last night.

With Penny Wong declaring that “the clouds of partisanship have parted”, leading advocacy groups including Australians for Equality (A4E), Australian Marriage Equality (AME) and just.equal were quick to welcome the surprisingly united report.

The release of this report today means we are a step closer to marriage equality in Australia,” Co-Chair of Australians for Equality and Director of Advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre Anna Brown said.

“Significantly, the report delivered a cross-party consensus on the issues that need to be addressed in the Marriage Amendment Bill including a number of sensible solutions to address concerns about religious freedom,” she said.

Throat cancers grow in the organs that help you swallow, speak, and breathe.

About half of these cancers happen in the throat itself, the tube that starts behind your nose and ends in your neck. It’s also called the "pharynx." The rest start in the voice box, or "larynx."

These diseases tend to grow quickly. That's why getting treated early on gives you the best chance to beat them and keep a good quality of life.

1. What is throat cancer?

Key points
a) Throat cancer is often grouped into two categories: pharyngeal cancer and laryngeal cancer.
b) Throat cancer is relatively uncommon compared to other cancers.
c) Symptoms of throat cancer include coughing up blood, trouble swallowing, and swollen lymph nodes.

Gay relationships benefit for being the very thing straight relationships are not: a union of two people of the same sex.

Ask any husband and wife and they’ll admit that marriage is hard-but social science is beginning to discover that part of the challenge of marriage stems from the fact that most couples choose to marry a member of the opposite gender. Mixing a man and a woman in a marriage, it turns out, makes a union harder.

As trite and overdone as the cliché “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” may be, it does contain a grain of truth: Men and women are fundamentally different in certain ways, and those differences can pose major challenges in straight marriages.
Same-sex couples, by definition, don’t face these obstacles, which is why recent research suggests that same-sex marriages aren’t just equal to straight marriages: in important regards they are superior.

Now that the Supreme Court has decided that gay marriages deserve the same rights as straight ones, it’s worth keeping in mind the findings of psychologists John and Julie Gottman, arguably the world’s leading experts on what makes relationships work. They are finding that gay and heterosexual marriages share a lot in common in terms of why they thrive or fail, but on one of the biggest determinants of marital success-how couples fight-gay couples have an edge.

“They are,” John Gottman told me, “a lot nicer to each other during fights.”

Some couples fight frequently and other couples avoid conflict altogether. The key distinction between couples who ultimately stay together and those who get divorced is not how often they fight, but how they handle themselves during conflict. And gay couples have a healthier fighting style than straight couples.

For one peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Gottman and his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of Washington brought straight and gay couples into Gottman’s lab and interviewed each couple separately about an issue they fought about. Gottman has performed some version of this study many times and has found that couples often bring up topics like uneven division of chores, money problems and sex-usually one person wants to have more and the other person doesn’t.

UK - The Sun was accused of going back to the 'worst tabloid excesses of the 1980s'

The Sun has removed an article outing a gay nurse as a former porn star for ‘legal’ reasons.

In a post yesterday, a 23-year-old recently qualified nurse at a top hospital was publicly outed. The tabloid posted pictures from his alleged 23 films, his Instagram, and sent a photographer to snap shots of him taking out his bins.

We will not be linking to The Sun, or naming him, in order to protect his privacy.

The first step could be the easiest (or most difficult) step you’ll ever take in your journey of connecting with your soulmate

Try as you might to defy cultural pressure and social expectations, it’s nigh on impossible to feel the slightest tinge of disappointment – or envy or rage – if you don’t have a date on February 14. And God help you if you’re scrambling to organise one via social media or dating apps at this late stage.

Instead of chasing fleeting moments, however, why not build a foundation that will create long-term satisfaction? Rather than taking a lackadaisical approach with swiped-right dates, consider turning yourself into the right one so that you can find the right one. And we’re here to help you become that Special Someone.

Violet Lim, co-founder of Lunch Actually, a matchmaking agency, has been connecting individuals for more than 13 years. In all her time of taking singles off the market, she noticed a startling trend (that was backed up by a survey her agency conducted): the number one problem that prevents guys from becoming attached is “a lack of confidence”. “Ladies are looking for guys that have a plan – someone who knows where he’s going; has ambitions; someone she can look up to or respect,” Lim says. “Some guys come across as indecisive or unambitious, and that’s a big put-off for ladies.”

All single people spend an inordinate amount of time wondering where they’re going to meet attractive, eligible members of their preferred sex.

But on the surface, this question seems a little tougher to answer for gay men than for the straights, primarily because straight people sort of assume that everywhere they go they’re going to meet other straight people, while gay people can’t make the same assumptions.

Still, there are plenty of great places gay men can meet other gay men, and in practice, these places don’t look that much different than the sorts of places straight people meet their matches.

1. Cities.

As a general rule, cities have much larger populations of gay people than rural areas and suburbs. On one hand, cities tend to be much safer and more welcoming environments for gay people than less densely populated locations, but gay people also tend to flock to cities because, well, there are a lot of gay people already living in cities.

It’s a Catch-22, so instead of trying to work out this chicken-or-the-egg scenario, just relax into the knowledge you will find many, many, many more gay people living in cities than a small town.

All this means is that if you’re a gay man and you want to meet and date other gay men, you should consider moving to a city if you don’t already live in one.

The bigger the city the better. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, New York… pick one, move there and watch your dating life become a whole lot easier.

“If it helps you find the man you’re looking for, you might as well tap every resource.”

2. Your friend circle.

The number one place people meet each other is through their friends, and this is as true for the gays as for the straights. It doesn’t really matter what your friend circle looks like either.

As long as your friends are cool with the fact that you’re gay (and they really should be if they’re your friends), then they are ready, willing and able to hook you up with other gay men you might want to date.

If your friend circle is primarily filled with other gay people, then trying to find a date through your friends is a no-brainer. They will know who is single, who’s taken, who’s looking for a relationship, who’s looking for a hookup and with whom you’re likely to share a mutual attraction.

Provided you live in a major metropolitan center, the number one way you can meet gay men to date is to make gay friends and let them know what you’re looking for.

Even if your friends are mostly straight people, those friends will be MORE than happy to help you find other men to date. Straight people love to hook up their gay friends for a bunch of reasons.

First of all, it’s usually pretty easy since straight people don’t usually have dozens and dozens of gay friends. They usually have a few gay friends, which makes the whole pairing up process a simple matter.

Straight people also like to set up their gay friends as a way of banishing whatever lingering hetero-guilt they might have.

Yeah, this is a little paternalistic, but if it helps you find the man you’re looking for, you might as well tap every resource you can think of, and letting your straight friends feel better about being part of the hetero-normative majority by finding you a cute guy is a relatively harmless win-win for everyone involved.

Oh sure, we can’t get married, we can get fired for no good reason at all and there are angry pastors claiming we’re all going to burn in the eternal pits of damnation (so long as they’re not there, that’s fine, by the way). But if you asked if we could trade being gay for being straight, we’d laugh in your face. Here are 13 ways that being a homo beats the pants off the breeder lifestyle any day of the week.

1. The S.e.x.

By far, the best part about being a gay dude is that s.e.x is totally easy. I know this sort of propagates the whole ‘gay men are sluts’ meme, but it’s the god’s honest truth. Men like s.e.x and so, stick two of us together and s.e.x comes pretty easily. It’s a fact of life that lots of gay men, meet, hook-up and become friends and when we tell this to our straight friends, they’re very jealous.

If you really want to depress your straight friends, explain that your partner will never withhold s.e.x until you do the dishes or take out the trash or what not. Never happens.
Oh– and nobody ever gets accidentally pregnant!

2. We’re more open-minded.

Look, I’m a blond-haired, blue-eyed white boy who grew up in middle-class suburbia. I’d like to think that I would be a tolerant, open-minded person regardless of my sexuality, but being gay has done a lot to make me a better human being There’s a world of difference between sympathy and empathy and knowing what it’s like to be treated differently simply because of who you are. It opens your mind to the casual racism and classism in this country.

3. Double the wardrobe.

This is an old Seinfeld joke, but as a closet full of ex-boyfriends’ clothes (we trade!) attests to, you don’t just get the boy, you get his fashion, too. There’s something incredibly sexy about seeing the guy you’re into hopping into your jeans.

4. The Toaster Oven.

As you all know from your own coming out experience, one of the great gay thing about being gay is all the toaster ovens you get when your recruit new gays to the cause. The only down shot of this is that, at this point, I’m eating toast morning, noon and night.

5. We can ask for directions.

Lost your way? No reason to demand you know the right way to go, just pull over and ask a gas station attendant. Can someone explain to me why straight guys can’t do this?

SPONSORED: Robert McCaffrey of London Women’s Clinic highlights the most common myths around surrogacy in Britain

Myth 1: That it is illegal

It isn’t illegal in the UK and the confusion seems to arise because it is against the law to advertise for a surrogate or for a surrogate to advertise their services.

It is also against the law for an agency to engage in pairing couples for a fee.

The good news is that a host of volunteer organizations and online networks have sprung up to help intended parents and surrogates connect in a safe and secure environment.