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Let's talk food disorders

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Viewing 14 posts - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)
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  • #110752
    Ana Machado
    Participant

    Hello everyone,

    I suffer from a food disorder for what I think a year and a half now. When I moved into the UK to do my MSc degree I gained a lot of weight due to bad eating habits (let’s just say I was always a very practical pizza-oriented kind of girl) and also not moving much… or not at all, for that matter. I gained 10kg in around 4 months and that certainly shocked me, changed my perspective over myself and damaged my self-esteem. I decided that if I got myself into it, I would surely be able to get myself out and started doing a lot of exercise (literally EVERYDAY) and doing a major diet. This situation kept going till it reached its peak when I started eating less and less. For me, exercise and healthy practices were no longer effective enough. Although I had lost 6kg of the 10kg I gained, I realized I still hated my body and needed to keep on losing weight… this kept going till I came back to my country and to my family barely weighting 36kg… I developed a viral pneumonia due to my weak state and till today I am doing physiotherapy, psychotherapy and lung treatments to recover from what I put myself through. And I still have a food disorder. I still feel guilty when I eat and I get very anxious with the idea of gaining weight and not being worth of love anymore… I’m just too scared of myself and what I’m capable of doing to myself to actually be able to live peacefully and forgive myself…

    #110755
    Inky
    Participant

    Hi marykeat,

    Google the Health at Any Size movement, Dances with Fat and Fat Heffalump. I’m not fat, but I read things from those sources to prevent my mind going back and buying into society/culture’s beauty ideas/mandates.

    As (I hope) you already know mentally, your value has NOTHING to do with the number on the scale. You have to internalize the knowledge of your value though.

    Do you eat right? Exercise? Drink water? Take care of yourself (sleep, vitamins, doctor’s visits, etc.)? Then you look fine, and seeing even just a bit of your face in your profile pic, in my opinion, beautiful!

    Blessings,

    Inky

    #110762
    BitesizeKatie
    Participant

    Good Afternoon,

    I am in recovery from anorexia, I say that but its a case of taking each day as it comes at the moment. I can relate to everything you say Marykeat and I want to know you are not alone. When you are in the depths of your eating disorder it does not mean a lot but at some time throughout the day just step back and feel the positive thoughts I will send your way.
    Eating disorders take a grip and your life changes, but you can get through this. Take one day at a time, think positive thoughts and remember you are someone worth being here.
    I am starting to use my experience to help others and this purpose alone drives me to want to get better.
    It will not be an easy process, but one day we will wake up and want to get better, the grip will loosen and we will become free. Stay strong and I send a HUG from the UK.

    Katie x

    #110771
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear marykeat:

    Of all my behaviors that need healing, my disordered eating is the most difficult. I too have a great fear of gaining weight, eating too much. The feeling of fullness scares me. The thought of gaining weight scares me. I no longer weigh myself because the thought of weighing (used to do daily and record daily) scares me. I wear one size fit all clothes because the feeling of clothes being tight scare me. I am making progress though. It takes extreme patience all through the day, being mindful and learning that I can handle strong emotions without focusing on the “solution”- keep myself thin and everything will be okay.

    Would be glad to continue communicating about this difficult topic. There is hope, there really is!

    anita

    #110782
    Ana Machado
    Participant

    Hey Inky,

    Thank you so much for the tips on websites and blogs! From all the research I’ve done, which I admit hasn’t been much since I have been keeping this situation to myself till recently, I’ve only found very disappoint pro-Ana chats all over the web. This actually made me question the value of Internet on matters of health care, since information nowadays is so deceiving – I am now eating properly, exercising regularly both with a professional physician and by myself, I have a nutritionist and dedicate some of my own time into doing a small course in this matter (afraid more Internet will get in the way between me and healthy food habits again!). I also have a psychologist who is helping me out all of the anxiety problems.

    I hope one day soon I will have the consciousness of self-worth again, without any body standards getting in between.

    🙂 thank you so much for your wisdom and sharing it!

    Mary K x

    #110783
    Ana Machado
    Participant

    Hey Katie,

    It’s very difficult for me to hear other people suffer from the same thing, because I would never wish this to anyone, not even to people who have harmed me in all kinds of ways!
    You too are not alone here and, just like you mentioned, we both have to keep focusing that we are worth all the positive things that happen in our lives, even the smallest ones like having washed clothes in our wardrobe and a ceiling covering our heads.
    If you don’t mind me asking, what type of help are you giving back to the society? Volunteering directly with elderly and children, for instance? I have given this a thought and have considered it before, but was fearful of it no being helpful but rather even more self-destructive.

    Again, thank you so much for sharing your personal experience and I hope that whichever Hell you’ve been through, diminishes with every sunrise!

    Hugs from Portugal, both to you and to the UK, which I miss very dearly everyday of my life! :’)

    #110784
    Ana Machado
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    I too use the same tricks as you do. In fact, I stopped having any kind of food measurer what so ever at home (not even for cocktails) and neither do I own a scale of any sort. I weight myself once a month with my nutritionist, who owns a PROPER scale and who tells me what the best way to gain proper weight is, without me feeling like I am becoming a puddle of fat. Exercising also has been helpful, although I have to control myself not to go more than 3 times a week, so it does not become more of a bulimic reaction towards calories, rather than a search for a balanced health state.
    I also stopped buying clothes at normal stores from normal shopping malls… I’ve also been buying handmade/second hand clothes that are mostly one size fits all.
    Nonetheless, I advise you to take such measures in your life like I myself did and helped me release some of the anxiety I felt everytime I had to eat a proper meal.

    I’m still searching for hope everyday, and am more than willing to talk about this as much as necessary, if only to feel understood and a little less insane.

    Thank you for sharing your struggles 🙂

    Mary K x

    #110786
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Mary K:

    Thank you for sharing your experience with the internet “help” and the … proper ways you are taking care of yourself, with the help of competent professionals. Since you have this professional help and it is helping you (I am glad!), I do have a question or two:

    How do you successfully deal at any one time with the thoughts such as: “I am fat” “I ate too much” “What have I done?” and so forth…? Do you counter these thoughts with other thoughts?

    Also: how do you deal with being out with all the restaurants and food offered in stores, everywhere, potlucks and such- do these cause you extra distress, as is to me- and what do you do to survive or even… enjoy these?

    anita

    #110793
    BitesizeKatie
    Participant

    Hi Marykeat,
    I have started to simply share my experience and essentially my battle with mental health in the form of my eating disorder via my blog, I have also approached local colleges and universities to go and share my experience in the hope it will help others. As a women in her mid thirties, I have found it hard to find someone else of my age to relate to and most of the treatment I have found very much geared towards teenagers, which is great but not much use to me. I have used meditation and compassion for myself as a way of trying to battle against the self loathing I seem to have for myself.
    I also started therapy a few weeks ago and I can honestly say it has helped me hugely and I can feel a difference in how I am starting to see myself. I would love to say I have been eating more or prepared to put on weight, but that would not be truthful at this point in time. I look forward to the day when I wake up and know today is the day I will change.
    Until then, I will try and beat this with all of the strength I can muster. Eating disorders are destructive, but can be beaten.
    Best Wishes – more HUGS.
    Katie x

    #110838
    Ana Machado
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    Thank you for listening and writing back!I have been feeling quite alone in this disease by myself and the country I’m from there’s not much explicit help in these matters such as group meetings or other things of the sort unfortunately… This is my way of communicating an SOS into the World, as were the professionals I decided to seek back then. To be honest with you, I don’t. EVERYTIME I eat, the thoughts come back. What eases them is the following:
    1. Knowing I lost all notion of what is normal and what isn’t – when I gained a few kg’s, I really thought I was getting obese. That’s when I started wearing different types of clothes that wouldn’t be too tight (I am currently not very far away from a Gandhi type of fashion. When I went to my nutritionist she weighted me and said “Wow! Because of workout you gained 2kg of muscle alone!” Which first of all, is half of what I saw I had gained and second, there was a scientific evidence I was in fact as skinny as before, fat-wise.
    So, everytime I have those thoughts I realize my self-imagine is entirely distorted and does not depict reality;
    2. The professionals around me are of great help: good food habits aligned with good workout is the perfect way for you to be certain that you will gain/keep/lose weight in an healthy way – not something as random as “eat lots of cookies and you will be fine”. Trusting them and following their regimes will slowly take you back into place. This also answers your questions on restaurants and cafe stores: my nutritionist put me on a “gluten free, diary free, sugar free” sort of diet which will allow me to gain good weight and not fat, so I’m restricted from eating almost 90% of the bullcrap the offer me in those places, which helps A LOT;
    3. This is the most important aspect for me: what if I ate too much? Will that give me an extra kg? I get very anxious when I have those thoughts, I won’t lie to you – I have an anxiety disorder related to the idea that if I get fat no one will love me anymore, starting with myself (although I suspect I didn’t before, to starve myself like I did and go through all the pain and illness it caused me). So I started realizing, with all my unhappiness, that being underweight and overweight both caused me a lot of pain and I was’t happy in any of those circumstances. Everytime I think those thoughts I try to realize this: “What if I gain weight? What if I gained fat? I cannot control all things in the Universe and if by any means I gain more fat than what I wanted, at least I can go to the gym, talk to a Personal Trainer and lose it back properly. I can rely on the professionals around me to help me go back to the weight I want, but most importantly, in the meantime, I have people who love me unconditionally of my looks and behavior (whether I decide not to work for months, not using the intelligence and capabilities God gave me or if I decide to dye my hair blonde, which would look awful on me). I just have to start doing the same to myself I guess…

    I hope these ideas helped, share with us your feedback if you have tried them before and whether they worked or not.

    Mary K x

    #110841
    Ana Machado
    Participant

    Hey Katie,

    Thank you for some of your ideas into giving out into the world, in order to “feed” your inner self a bit more. I think I will try to follow a few of them myself, even with doing some sort of volunteering or something of the kind.
    I think it is difficult at any age to go through these issues, but believe you when you say most therapies or informations are more teenager focused… I have come to believe that for these matters, there is nothing better than the privacy of a therapist who gets to know you personally with no judgments. After I took on all the professionals I previously mentioned, it took me around 4 months to actually start gaining weight and it was a very slow process. Let’s say that in the 7 months I have had with my nutritionist, I gained 6 kg, most of which came all together in the past two months, due to working out and relaxation techniques that wouldn’t allow me to go back into the black hole of “I don’t deserve the food I put in my mouth”. Mostly, forgiving myself for what I have done to myself started being the step I wanted to take, more than anything else in the world. Weight just came alongside with it.

    Thank you so much for your tips and sharing them with us.

    Here follows a link with a very delicious chocolate mousse sugar free, low carb, healthy recipe written by a lady from your country, who taught me how to make myself some “gifts” for everytime anxiety doesn’t take over or when I am actually able to give back into the world somehow 🙂 : http://deliciouslyella.com/the-healthiest-chocolate-mousse-vegan-gluten-free-dairy-free-sugar-free/

    Big hugs from PT!
    Mary K x

    #110944
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear MaryK:

    I hardly ever get to communicate with a person with an eating disorder about the disorder itself. There were a few threads here about it but the original posters did not come back to their threads! You, I believe, are the first to start and come back to it, (answer each individual who replied to you!).

    I felt the ‘I am not alone’ relief in reading: “EVERYTIME I eat, the thoughts come back.” Like you, I am not glad that another person gets this distress, but I am not alone.

    you wrote that what eases these thoughts, and I am paraphrasing (correct me if I am not doing so correctly) is that you remind yourself that your thoughts regarding eating and weight are distorted, and you focus on the rules of healthy eating and weight that you received from trusted professionals. You remind yourself that you cannot control everything in your life/ in the world, that if you gain weight, there is something you can do: lose it properly, and you remind yourself that there are people who love you unconditionally.

    One thing that jumped out of the screen for me is that banning gluten, sugar and such is helpful to you when you are out. It jumped out because banning food caused me to crave them intensely which lead to my binge episodes (the flawed logic was eat as much as I can now because after this one time, I will never eat this food). What helped me was to no longer ban any food, all is allowed. This helped a lot. Not that it solved my disordered eating and this is the point: there is no ONE solution.

    There are rules that apply to everyone, science as it and then there are solutions that work for some and work against others, like banning food. So that would be an individual decision following a person paying attention to one own thoughts and motivations.

    anita

    #110990
    Ana Machado
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    I myself never thought of finding so much support and, unfortunately, so many people going through similar situations. I am very glad my words did not only lift up some of the weight I feel on my shoulders, but brought some light into your life.
    As you said exactly, that is my way of taking some control over all that is going on inside my head whenever food comes along. It is knowing that life is great and full of many situations in which I will mostly have no control over (pregnancy here pops up as an amazing example). What I do control is my actions: and if I was able to stop smoking cigarettes (I was a 7 year smoker) in the most stressful situations, I will too control my feelings on this obsession with food and weight, no matter hiw skinny or fat I get.
    Yesterday and I say this publicly, my boyfriend left the house. He packed a huge suitcase and he left, saying that he could no longer withstand living both with me and my anxiety, having “no room in the bed” for himself. Since last night, I’ve come to realise how empty I really feel and how I use food as a distractiom or cover up for it. Since he left I haven’t done anything but eating. I can’t entertain myself with anything or feel deeply his absense.
    Today I realised finally, that I have to start filling up my own voids with me – finding things I’m good at, that I take interest in, I enjoy doing and redescovering who I am…

    So I guess that we all have out mechanism broken Anita, and we might all work in different levels. What is important is that the solution you find fits you 🙂 and truly helps you in pursuit of who you are!

    Mary K x

    #110992
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Mary K:

    I am sorry you are in distress, that a relationship has ended. When we are in distress, what is our go-to- pattern? For many of us it is food. How to feel distress and not go to food, is the question. It is a well worn path: distress-> food. Eating and obsessing and compensating, not much different, is it, from a street drug addict, life becomes consumed with getting the next dose, life becomes centered around that.

    The two angle approach then is to calm ourselves as much as possible, manage and heal anxiety and when distressed … endure the distress without automatically reacting to it. I just had lunch, could have gone without it since I had a big breakfast and will have dinner, but had it anyway. Then thought to myself (the well worn thought pattern): since I ate this, why not eat that?

    But I didn’t. And now, I am about to take a long walk, not so to burn the calories but to reduce my distress.

    Let’s keep this thread going.

    anita

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