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