Can we chose to get well, chose to eat enough?

When we are narrowminded and destructive we don't feel we have a choice, because we feel trapped with no freedom to chose. Its when we want to get out of our prison we search outside and can find the freedom to chose. But first we have to understand we have put ourselves in a prison. When we deny we have a problem, we think we are more free than others because we are proud that we can chose not to eat, and we think others are like animals eating with no self control (no freedom).

I see anorexia as being possessed by a little devil that takes over our mind and body. We can chose to find the loving voice inside of us buried underneath all the blackness from the little anorexia devil we usually listen to and act according to. When I found the love I was surprised to see how much of me was the devil. We can choose love and freedom and refuse to listen to negative and destructive thoughts. When I started to look for the love inside it grew. The more I wanted to listen to that instead of the devil it took up more and more space and soon the devil disappeared because it did not like the light.

Its hard to chose to not be afraid. When we are afraid we get thoughts that are not worth listening to and we get so narrow minded it is hard to think outside the box. We can chose to look for people and an environment that can give us a sense of acceptance, freedom and love , though, so it is easier to let go of the negativity and take a chance on love.

Enough food = Happiness.

When we get enough food into our bodies it is so much easier to be happy. We don't need a reason to be happy. If we just stop looking for something about ourselves to criticise, but rather be happy about how things are instead, there is room for happiness to take place. I am gaining these days and I see I am getting fat on my stomach and hips, but my mood is great so i can actually find the fat making my body look charming. In my last recovery attempt I knew I would gain a lot and i did, but my fear of getting that big had nothing to do with reality. I did not get humiliated in public and no one said anything negative about my weight. I was still me, just in a bigger body. And a bigger size frightened me earlier. I was afraid of being more visible and possibly a target for attack, but I am stronger now and enough food makes me strong enough to deal with it. What will I be attacked for? What I say that can be offensive, right? I will use my self control to control what comes out of my mouth rather than the amount of food that comes in. If I can take responsibility for everything about me nothing will be perceived as an attack.

What you can expect in recovery from an eating disorder

People who recover from an eating disorder may soon go back to old habits unless they get knowledge about what to expect in the recovery process. Many are surprised that they get less energy instead of more when they eat more. They don't understand that the body wants to rest to be able to heal the damage the body hasn't been able to heal the time it did not get enough energy for the job. They don't even think damage has been done. In the beginning of the healing process many experience edema. Many freak out and think they rapidly gain fat, but that is not possible. Read about edema here:https://www.acute.org/blog/edema-eating-disorder-recovery-causes-prevention-and-treatment

Many also get surprised when they get extreme hunger and can eat ten thousand calories in a day, forgetting the body has been starved and need extra food. When this happens many are afraid they have just switched from anorexia to binge eating disorder and are not getting well at all, but this is a misunderstanding. A restrictive person do not become a binge eater. The extreme hunger will only last until the body has got the energy it needs to heal from starvation. Do not stop eating a lot just because you think you have reached a high enough weight. It is up to the body to decide when you have gained enough. After a period of extreme hunger the hunger will normalize and the weight gain will stop.

At this point it is important to continue eating enough food. Read the recommended amounts at the ED institute https://edinstitute.org/blog/2011/9/14/i-need-how-many-calories. Don't compare your own food intake with others, but eat when hungry till you are satisfied all day every day. Respect the bodys signals and eat. You need a lot of food. Do not trust a calculator online to tell you how many calories your body needs. The body will tell you that more precisely. 

Do not restrict even the slightest to lose weight or you may very soon go back to restricting more and more. No more restriction! No more starving! If you overshot your set point weight you will lose excess water and fat naturally if you continue eating enough and avoid purging and exercising. The body needs the food and weight gain to rebuild the muscle mass and heal the metabolism. You don't need to do strength training to rebuild the muscles, you need enough food and rest. The body gain water first, then fat, then muscle mass. So be patient.

To weigh yourself, track calories, look in the mirror and wear tight clothes can all make it harder to recover.

How to prevent eating disorders in children in a few words.

I think young people get vulnerable for this disorder if they experience that they don't get enough attention on how they feel, what they think and what they want and are critized for how they express themselves. It is also important that the parents don't say in some way or another that one bodyshape is better than another. Most importantly is perhaps that the parents are good role models for how to cope with emotions.

Pride

Pride

​I felt pride because I was thin,
as if I didn't need anything.
But I was just pretending
to not need food, not need loving.


Why be ashamed of gaining weight, no longer be skinny,
as if giving our bodies what it needs is something wrong?
We say: I am not worth it, but we are not the body we feed.


Now I take care of my own needs.
I no longer wait for others to give and guess what they are.
I ask for what I need. I say what I want to say and eat without hesitation,


because I listen to my body now,
not my mother, father or others who put limitations on me.

Insecure about self worth

I used to eat just tiny amounts of food when i was at my dads house and get very hungry and throwing up at my mums house. My father made me feel worthless, so i think that is why. I needed my mum, was hungry for her attention and support, so I ate a lot to compensate for it, but because i never got her attention, I threw the food up again as if I did not deserve it. At times it felt good to throw up because it was like I threw up negative energies from my mum, all her criticism and hate towards me. When I no longer let my parents decide how I felt about my self I took control of my eating and let my self eat without throwing up afterwards. I was no longer insecure about my worth. Thanks to God.

We have to tell people how we feel in words, not body language, because some people don't understand metaphors.

But also show our gratitude for being wanted in this world, by eating every day.

How do I know what is the ED voice and what is me?

I think we share many thoughts with people who do not have an eating disorder, that are superficial and destructive/mean. The thoughts themselves is not a proof someone is having an eating disorder. Everyone has some kind of demon on their shoulder telling them things according to that particular persons goal to help them reach it. If you want to get skinny the angel on the other side will never tell you to eat less than the body needs, will never tell you to not relax when that is what you need, will not deny you a snack between meals or to sleep as much us you need on a sunday. All those limitations are spoken by the ED-voice.

The bodys needs and your interests may be in conflict with the goal of becoming skinny. So when you fear that one of these these needs or interests may threaten your goal of being thin, you may get thoughts that are trying to convince you to not eat enough, sleep enough etc. As long as to be thin is your goal the destructive voice will be there. Because it is your goal that is bad, the voice is only there trying to serve you.

If you live in fear of gaining weight you will have destructive thoughts. If you live in love you will have good thoughts. You are in charge. None of the thoughts are you. You are the one choosing what you want to agree to.

Replace the thoughts

Always replace the stupid thoughts with smart ones, the unhealthy with the healthy and the hateful with the loving. We did not learn to think the right thoughts from our culture, so we must teach ourselves and replace what we learned with something we find better.

Stand up for our actions

I have had anorexia for so long I feel bad thinking it may be a whole lot of things i have said and done that may have been harmful to others. If we know about some obvious things we could talk to those affected by it, say sorry and explain. We are not less responsible for our actions just because we have a disorder and hopefully people don't think that either and avoid confronting us about our behaviour. Remember: If someone feel a grudge towards you they are the ones responsible to tell you. I know for sure if someone tell me I have hurt them in any way I would be happy to say I am sorry and explain myself so they could understand and forgive.

What is the ED voice?

The ED voice wants the body to die, so it does not like it when we want to relax the body, when we want to sleep and eat enough or just enjoy ourselves. It criticise us to make sure we limit this. The ED voice is the voice of death and destruction. When we want something unnatural like losing weight in an unhealthy weight, we don't get help from divine forces, but evil ones. As soon as we want to be natural, healthy and good to ourselves, the voice and forces disappear as we no longer want to listen to it. It is all up to us what we want. Do we want to treat our body good or bad?

Cool recovery comments I have found online

I have a friend who is a dietician. In her facility, she has a device that determines your metabolic rate by analyzing your breath for 10 - 20 minutes. (You breath into a tube through your mouth with a clip on your nose.) I decided it might be interesting to do a "before and after," so I asked her if I could use the machine.
Anyway, I took a measurement the day before I started eating a minimum of 2700 calories a day. (I'm a 5'9 28-year-old female.) The result was that my resting metabolic rate was about 1350 calories, meaning that, with activities of daily living and no deliberate exercise, I would maintain my weight on about 1800 calories a day. This is obviously far less than the Minnie Maud recommendations.
But that's not the whole story. I retested myself today - I've been eating at least 2700 calories (usually more) a day for about a month. I knew there would be a difference - my body temperature has gone up three degrees and I soak my sheets with sweat at night - but I was shocked by how big it was. My resting metabolic rate was about 2100 calories, meaning that (again, with just normal daily activities), I have to eat about 2700 calories to maintain my weight.
Hmm...2700 calories. Does anyone recognize that number? Oh, right, it's EXACTLY the number that the Minnie Maud guidelines predicted. :-)

Malnutrition distorts body image and perception, I believe the Minnesota Starvation Experiment showed that ED thoughts are really to a large extent a product of starvation, rather than the cause. At the beginning i would only put myself down for eating 'naughty foods', but by the end i would be feeling extreme feelings of guilt and shame for eating something like a banana.

Genetics creates the blue print
Familial/childhood environment fashions the gun
(At some point) a chronic or acute stressor pulls the trigge.

My new mantra became "I release the need to be thin so that I can trust the process so that I can become Real".

Its ironic that, for me, the ED is both born from fear and dies at the hand of fear.

I do the body check thing too! Sitting, walking past mirrors, etc. Something that has kind of helped me--kind of because I'm still making a habit of it--is to pretend my body belongs to somebody else. Sounds weird, but it helps me to be more objective and less critical. If I catch myself staring at my stomach or thighs or whatever unflattering feature, I imagine myself doing the same thing to somebody else and realize what a rude thing it is I'm doing. Same with weighing and measuring; if some random person came up to me and started measuring me or weighing me for the sole purpose of tearing me apart in their mind I would be pissed, so why is it okay to do to myself?
It helps. Don't like to be rude!

To be healthy is to stop manipulating our body.

When we focus on how we appear in others eyes its hard to let go of control of our body. We may be afraid something bad will happen to us, sexual abuse, rejection, uncontrolled behaviour, emotional outbursts..., and have buildt an identity to protect us from that. 

We starve our difficult emotions and the needs that are hard to fulfill. We feel we have to stand up for the body and defend it in a culture where everybody "should" look a certain way, where people try to exploit you and talk about your food choices and bodyshape. 

As a healthy person we have to change our main focus from how we appear in others eyes to how our body feels, what it wants and how well it works and accept that it looks the way it does when it is fed what it needs. We must start wanting to look like the body wants to look instead of a image in our head. We must get real.

You must never begin restricting after being weight restored. I ate 2500 calories as weight restored 1,5 years ago and felt fantastic, like a kid, but i was impatient to lose weight after overshooting my set point weight so i just thought i would push the process a bit by eating less calories without feeling too hungry. I reduced to 2000 first, then to 1700 and then to 1500. By that time I had forgot that my intention was to just reduce to a number where I did not starve. 

Now I must go back to where I was 1,5 years ago and eat 2500 and gain back the weight i could not accept at the time. Why should we starve our whole life? Its crazy. We deserve to feel satisfied. We dont have to live up to any idea of how to be and how to look. To be free from eating disorder we must stop manipulating our body. We must respect it, how much food, rest and activity it wants. I know its easy to say and I find it hard to accept that my body isn't as skinny naturally as i wish it could be, but I will try to love it anyway and as the time goes by I think I know I will get used to it. I will focus on enjoying the fact that it is working better and feels better to live in. For me restricting calories has also restricted my life. If I want to do something important in the future I will now have a body that is strong enough to participate.

I do no longer feel proud of how I look, but that is not a bad thing to let go of either, is it? :) 

I am back. Healing the rest of my anorexia.

My weight was restored 1,5 years ago and I thought I would finally be healed from anorexia, but I hindered that from truly happening long term. It was my impatience and the fact that I still was obsessed about counting calories that did it. When my body got weight restored and the appetite decreased (after extreme hunger) I lost weight (because i had overshot my set point a lot). At that time I ate 2500 calories. My impatience and myself thought that I could try to eat just 2000 and see if I felt satisfied also then and probably lose some more, more quicky. So I did. And after a while I went down to 1800 calories, then 1700 and at last 1500 calories. I did not fully heal because of this. I have headaches again, not much energy and I understand I am not healed from anorexia as long as I count my calories and starve every evening. When I am more active than usual I get headaches. To me that is a sign that I am not healed and don't eat and rest enough. When I restricted before my attempt on recovery my headaches was bad, I had to be in bed for days. This has happened to me many times after I started taking control over my calorie intake. I feel I can't do much when I have these headaches. I feel I am not well. I want to get well.

My fear now is that I have to overshoot my set point again to heal. I think and hope that I will not get extreme hunger this time and not gain a crazy amount of weight because I have not restricted that much and not for very long. I understand now that I was not fully ready to heal from anorexia, but I will really try this time. I understand the importance of eating enough and that I must trust my body. Many girls are eating a lot and are still lean because their metabolism is healed and they eat right. (High carb and low fat whole foods).

I feel vulnerable when I am not in control, following my rules and starving my body and emotions together with it. Anorexia was my armor. Now i am not defending myself with it anymore, but actually taking care of my body. That is the opposite behavior and attitude. When you take care of your body you are more receptive to your body signals and signals from other people. I feel a lot of fear because I must let go of my old rules. How am I going to defend myself now if someone questions how much I eat or how well fed I look? Instead of making sure questions like that never come up by following anorexia rules, i must now stand up for my self and say, think and mean that I eat what my body needs and the body looks like it wants to look. It is not up to me to change nature.