Eating Disorder Part 8- You Choose

As therapy went on I learned a lot about what the words eating disorder encompass. Most people {myself included} think of anorexia or bulimia when we hear the words eating disorder but really eating disorders can be characterized by eating patterns that disrupt a person’s mental, physical, and emotional health. This may be from eating too much, like bulimia nervosa and binge eating, or restrictive eating, such as anorexia nervosa. If you switch the words around to say disordered eating it helps my brain wrap around it and understand it all a little better. When your eating habits revolve around your emotional or mental state it is disordered eating. At the Center for Change they use the model of Intuitive Eating. Intuitive Eating is learning to listen to your body and what it is telling you to do. It is the belief that your body was born with intuition when it comes to food. This way of thinking challenges you to put the diet pills away and the weight loss books down and learn to listen to your body and it’s natural hunger cues. As children we are born with this. If you watch children eat, they eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full. They do not have food fears but as time goes on and our society and cultural influences come into play, we are fed full of myths and lies about body image and dieting. Over time we stop listening to those hunger cues which can then mess up our inborn hunger cues. {If you want to learn more about Intuitive Eating you can find more about it here: .

I had to learn to make peace with food. Food was not my enemy…my head and thoughts about food were. One of the things that helped me get over my food fears was documenting it. Whenever I ate I kept a log of what it was I ate and how I was feeling when I ate it. Once I started recognizing the emotions and fear associated with food I could then use the tools I was learning to change my thought patterns about food and eating in general. I could recognize that it was my emotions causing the fear not the actual food. Once I made peace with food I could then start tackling my body image issues.

People always comment ”You are gorgeous. How could you ever feel ugly?” when they see me. The truth is I have always looked this way but I have never seen what others see. When I look in the mirror I see all the things that are wrong with me and not all the the things that are right. I see stretch marks and cottage cheese. I see rolls and love handles. I see a big nose and thinning hair. I see chipmunk cheeks and double chins. What I would see in the mirror is totally different then what you see. This is called Body Dysmorphic Disorder and so many women suffer from this. If I have learned anything on this journey it is our minds are sooo powerful and we can use that power to build ourselves or destroy ourselves. We can let our minds fill up with lies or we can fill them with truth. When it comes to ourselves, I think we tend to look at the lies. Spending too much time focusing on the things we are not, instead of the things that we in fact are. As time goes on and we keep engaging in these destructive thoughts they become our truth. These lies become who we are. Let me make one thing very clear….I DO NOT blame my eating disorder on anyone but myself. Yes, it started with someone making fun of me but everyday after that I chose to let that define who I was. I chose every single day to look in the mirror and see everything that I wasn’t and not everything that I was. If you keep telling yourself that you are not enough, you are ugly, you have no worth, no talents or value, that you are not loveable, it will become your truth.

You will become those things.

You become a lie.

I had no idea that the way I was handling all my feelings was so destructive. I had no clue that there are ways to deal with hard things that are healthy and productive instead of repressive and destructive. I have learned that no matter the trial we are going through there is a process we need to go through in order to heal properly. We have to let ourselves feel all those things even when we are going through it and are just trying to survive by burying the things that hurt to much to face. Suffering in silence not knowing or understanding that we are the ones who are holding ourselves back from overcoming our struggles. We are the ones standing in our own way. People always ask what could have been done different to prevent what happened to me. I have thought a lot about this and I think what would have helped me the most was realizing there was help. That my thought patterns and behavior was not normal. So, my answer would be this educate yourself. Reach out for help if you need it. Don’t suffer in silence because I promise there is someone out there who struggles with the same feelings you have and there is help and hope for positive change. If I would have known 18 years ago what I know now ED would not be apart of my life but I didn’t know. I didn’t know I needed help. I just didn’t know and not knowing robbed me of a lot of the joy in my life.

If I could go back I would remind myself that you ALWAYS have a choice! You always have a choice in how you react in any situation. With everything that is thrown at you in life you can choose if it will make or break you. You can choose to be a builder or a destroyer. You choose whether you hold yourself back or spread your wings and fly. I chose to hold myself back. I chose to destroy myself. I chose to become broken.

The bottom line is this- You can choose to be ugly. You can choose to be beautiful. You can choose to be amazing. You can choose to live in fear. You can choose to hate yourself. You can choose to love yourself. But at the end of the day YOU decide. Who you are and what you can do is your choice. You have that power in how you choose to let your mind work.