Tiny Buddha

Tag: anorexia

  • How I Finally Starved the Disorder That Was Eating Me Alive

    How I Finally Starved the Disorder That Was Eating Me Alive

    “If we are ready to tear down the walls that confine us, break the cage that imprisons us, we will discover what our wings are for.” ~Michael Meegan

    It’s weird, isn’t it? One day you’re playing hide and seek with friends without a worry beyond the playdate you’re having or dinner options for that night. But in a blink, those carefree days vanish. That’s what happened to me, and my teenage years started ticking away right in front of my eyes. Eleven, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen…

    And a realization hit me: “It’s still eating me alive.”

    Maybe it wasn’t as severe as it was before, and I wasn’t underweight anymore, but I still needed control.

    Let me give you a little background about myself to provide you with some context. At the age of ten, I moved to the United States with my family. These big changes caused a lot of insecurity, impostor syndrome, and anxiety within me. I needed a way to become “better,” to “fit in,” and to control what was happening.

    It was impossible for me to suddenly turn into a cute, fun, skinny, blonde cheerleader. So I innocently turned to something that made me feel in control. If I could start “eating healthier” and “becoming the best version of myself,” I thought, I would finally fit in. Little did I know that this decision would haunt me for a long time to come.

    I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at twelve. I turned thirteen in the hospital. I even refused to eat my own birthday cake. I moved on to residential treatment, a partial hospitalization program, and then outpatient.

    After a year of treatment, I had checked all the boxes and jumped through all the hoops, and I was finally “recovered.”

    On the outside, I was a success story—weight restored, eating again, and out of treatment. But inside, the disorder still maintained a relentless grip in subtle ways I couldn’t ignore.

    No, I wasn’t crying over a handful of cashews, but I was counting exactly how many went into my mouth. I would go on midnight ice cream runs with my friends, but quickly search for nutritional information and get the flavor with the lowest calories.

    Even though I didn’t want sorbet, I got it. Even though I wanted a medium, I got a small. Even though I wanted sprinkles like everyone else, I wouldn’t get them.

    You get the point. The carefree joy of picking a flavor based on taste and intuition was gone.

    At times I’d think that maybe I was still not fully recovered… then a voice would interrupt, “SNAP OUT OF IT. You are fine. You ate ice cream, so you couldn’t possibly be sick. You are just practicing self-control.”

    And just like that, I’d be back in this hypnotic state. I’d repeat the cycle over and over again. Once again, the disorder would take a bite into my enjoyment and precious memories.

    I eventually realized that this disorder doesn’t care about what type of hold it has on you. As long as it is still alive and gripping onto you in some manner, it is happy.

    Every single time I give in, YOU give in, the disorder is fed and empowered.

    Whether that means not putting on the extra bit of sauce you want because it “isn’t necessary” or intermittent fasting because of “digestive issues,” it doesn’t care.

    I believe there are so many relapses in recovery for this exact reason. Because it is hard to completely let go.

    In time, I became aware of all the different little ways the disorder could manifest itself. I realized that this disease I thought had lasted five years was still present and would continue leeching off me for life if I didn’t do something about it.

    I’m going to share with you the process that helped me starve my eating disorder and loosen its grip on every aspect of my life.

    If we don’t fully let go and don’t resist all those little temptations we give in to, they start compounding and, like a virus, the disorder spreads and grows.

    So how did I finally starve it?

    This is the process I followed daily.

    1. Reflect

    Take time to reflect on your past and recognize all the small ways the disorder has shown up in your life. I suggest writing everything that comes to mind. You’ll likely identify scenarios you hadn’t thought twice about at the moment and in hindsight realize the disorder was controlling you. Identifying all the ways it sneaks in will help you recognize the patterns while they are happening.

    Write everything down. Even if it seems insignificant. From not adding extra cheese to your spaghetti to ignoring hunger in the morning, write it all down.

    One thing that helped me was comparing my present behaviors to my younger self’s. “Would younger Sophi add extra cheese to her pasta?” If she would, then so do I. Sounds silly, but try it out.

    Also, reflect on times you may have used food restriction or bingeing behaviors to avoid or “stuff down” difficult emotions like loneliness, anxiety, shame, or disappointment. Instead of facing those feelings, the disorder offered an unhealthy coping mechanism. Now that you have awareness, you can work on identifying the core issues or needs beneath those emotions so you can address them in a healthy manner. Rather than stuffing feelings down or starving yourself, get to the root and nurture yourself properly.

    2. Redirect

    Now that you are conscious of the behaviors, I want you to do something. Each time you recognize the disorder sneaking in, ask yourself “Am I going to feed it? Or myself?” You can’t do both. They are literal opposites.

    If you ask this question, it creates friction. Friction gives you the chance to decide consciously rather than engaging in the automatic behavior you are used to.

    Keep in mind that feeding yourself may be in a physical and literal way. But other times it simply means choosing to feed a hobby you enjoy, a relationship you want to develop, or a goal you want to achieve. This disorder drains your energy and sucks the life out of you. Energy and life you could be pouring into YOURSELF.

    You get to choose. Are you going to engage in conversations with your loved ones? Or think about how you are going to compensate for the dinner you ate?

    3. Repeat

    As much as I would love to tell you this is a one-time thing, it isn’t. You have to constantly repeat this process and not beat yourself up because of slip-ups.

    This is like any other habit. If you have been practicing it for years, it is a neuropathway in your brain. So you have to forge another healthy and helpful pathway, which is done through repetition and consistency. Years of reinforcing behavior will take time to change, so be kind to yourself.

    While completely eliminating behaviors associated with your disorder may seem impossible, consistently choosing recovery over disorder is the goal. Even if you experience setbacks, make the choice to feed your true self rather than the disorder as often as possible. Keep being resilient and trying again. With time and practice, choosing yourself will become more natural. But you have to keep making that choice, even when it’s difficult. Feed your spirit, feed your dreams, feed your life.

    Just like one of my dietitians told me, “Your eating disorder will stay alive as long as you let it.” I know it doesn’t seem like it sometimes, but you are actively choosing. I invite you to choose FULL recovery and destruction of your eating disorder.

    I don’t mean to learn how to function and co-exist with it, but to destroy it.

    Enjoying every ice cream outing with friends, saying yes to a coffee run, and letting yourself be intuitive and authentic.

    I knew a friend years ago whose mom struggled with an eating disorder when she was younger. At the time, the family felt she was recovered like she had overcome the beast. Looking back now, I realize the eating disorder still gripped her life in subtle ways.

    She skipped family dinners because cooking made her “full.” She viewed extreme dieting as a hobby, not the unhealthy compulsion it was. All this to say, now I realize, years later, she was still controlled.

    Without intentional healing, those ingrained patterns persisted, slowly impacting her family as well.

    For example, her daughter began mimicking her mother’s disordered eating habits and extreme dieting rules, developing body image issues and an unhealthy relationship with food at a young age. The mother’s fixation on calorie counting and skipping family meals also disrupted bonding time, as she isolated herself and couldn’t enjoy family dinners or holidays.

    I encourage you to write your “why” lists. Why is recovery worth fighting for? What makes you want this? Is it your future family or your goals, or are you simply sick of living under the rules of the disorder?

    It takes energy and strength to constantly fight it, but the less you feed it, the weaker it becomes. The weaker it gets, the fuller your life becomes and the stronger and happier you get. You deserve to live freely and fully, without shame or restrictions holding you back.

    I believe in you!

  • Thinner is Not Better – Healthy, Connected, and Happy Is

    Thinner is Not Better – Healthy, Connected, and Happy Is

    “Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don’t match our own beliefs about how we should look.” ~Martha Beck

    I have so many women around me right now—friends, mothers, clients that are on a diet—constantly talking about their weight and how their bodies look, struggling with body image.

    I am profoundly sad about the frequency and theme of those discussions.

    At the same time, I deeply get it; it is hard to detach from our conditioning.

    I too struggled with body image at one point in my life, and for a very long time. I suffered from anorexia in my late teens and early twenties. I was skinny as a rail and thought I was not thin enough. I hated the way I looked. I was never perfect enough.

    I controlled my food intake as a way to regain control over my life, as a way to maybe one day be perfect enough that I might feel loved. I almost ended up in the hospital, as my weight impacted my health, physically and mentally. I had no period, no healthy bowel movement. I was so unhappy and depressed. I had no energy.

    The messed-up thing is that the skinnier I looked, the more compliments I received from a lot of people, from family to friends: “You are so slim and gorgeous.” To me, this just validated the way I treated my body—and myself—with control, self-criticism, and harshness.

    Then there were the magazines, showing skinny models, getting so much positive attention. I was obsessed. The more my body looked like those magazine pictures, the better; though I could never quite get to a point where I looked at myself in the mirror and liked what I saw. It was an endless circle of judgment, control, and unhappiness. 

    It took me many years to change the way I saw my body and debunk the standards created by “society” for women.

    For many years I bit my tongue each time I would hear other women around me comparing and judging their body size and shape, repeating the same narrative of needing to lose weight. These conversations felt like an unbearable ringing in my ears, a knot in my stomach, the story in my head of “I am not good enough.”

    I was in the process of creating a new set of standards for myself, of what it was to be a woman in this world, but the old stories were hard to escape and easier to follow because they were the gold standard. I did not have any role models of women out there, younger or older, loving their body just the way it was.

    There was a point, though, when it was just too draining. I noticed that it was not the striving to get to a perfect body that brought me love. What brought me love was being vulnerable, authentic, sharing my inner life, supporting others, having deep talks, being kind with myself and others, and doing the things I loved.

    From then on, I started to soften and release all those standards that had been gifted to me. I allowed myself to be okay with how my body looked, to enjoy food, to enjoy movement, to enjoy my body. I learned to truly love my body, and with that came a different type of respect: I learned to rest when my body was tired. I learned to eat really nourishing food. I learned to move every day in a way that was respectful to my body and that I enjoyed.

    Thinner is not better. Healthy, connected, and happy is.

    Practicing yoga helped me so much in embodying this new belief, and studying neuro-linguistic programming as well.

    The truth is we are “society”—all of us, women and men—which means we are the agents of change. So let’s pause, reflect, and choose new standards. Is this constant need to lose weight healthy or serving anyone?

    There are a few different things to separate and highlight here.

    If your weight negatively impacts your health or your life, if you feel heavy in an unhealthy way and can’t do the activities you’d like to do, that is a different story; and yes, please, take care of your body, through what you think will work best for you: exercise, nutrition, mindset, support.

    Your body is your vessel to experience life, so finding your way to a healthy body is a worthwhile investment. And daily movement and good nutrition will have such a positive impact on your vitality and health, physical and mental, so yes, go for it, with love, softness and kindness—no control, judgment, or harshness.

    But if you feel that your body is strong and healthy, but you don’t like the way it looks… I feel you. I was there. I felt the shame, the discomfort, the sadness, the feeling of not being good enough. Allow yourself to feel this pain. It is okay, and human nature, to feel concerned about your appearance. We all want to be part of the tribe, to be loved and admired.

    But then, ask yourself, is it me that does not like the way my body looks, or is it because of society’s beauty standards? Is it because of all the noise from my friends, constantly talking about weight and looks? Do I want to transmit those standards to the next generation? To my sons? To my daughters? Is it really the most important thing for us women, to look thin and good? Is this story serving us all? Is it love?

    No, it is not love, and it serves no one. Not the women suffering in silence because they believe their body is not slim enough. Not the partners of those women who can’t appreciate their true beauty and fullness. Not the daughters that will believe the same messages and suffer as well. Not the sons that will not know how to recognize beauty in its diverse shapes and forms. Not society as a whole, which will be robbed of having a happy, compassionate, loving, self-confident population.

    So let’s choose differently. Let’s celebrate our different body shapes and weights and strength. Let’s feel good and enjoy life, movement, and food without counting and restricting and denying love to our bodies and selves.

    Let’s stop talking about our weight constantly and find other ways to connect.

    Some might say that I am too slim to really speak about this subject, that I have it easy. This is not quite true. My body has changed so much throughout the years. I went from an ultra-skinny teenager and twenty-year-old with anorexia, to a healthy weight in my thirties, to ups and downs with weight throughout my two pregnancies and breastfeeding journeys. I have seen my body change quite a lot and have been judged for how I looked oh so many times. I have been judged for being skinny, or envied for being slim, and I have been judged for gaining weight.

    Today I am forty-three. My body is not as slim as it used to be. I have a bit of fat around my belly, and my breasts are not as round and firm as they once were, but I feel strong and healthy. And I am SO grateful for my body for enabling me to experience life so far, and for creating life and feeding life, that I don’t want to ever criticize or shame my body again.

    I have learned to love every scar, my stretch marks, my extra skin, because they are the witness of my life, my loves, my years.

    So thank you, body, for everything you allow me to experience.

    The alternative to loving my body—the constant internal criticism and self-doubt—is too draining.

    We, as humans, are society, so let’s change this conditioning. Let’s never transmit this idea of what a woman’s body should look like to our daughters, to our sons. Let’s invent a world where it does not matter what you weigh as long as you feel healthy and good within. Let’s change the chattering from what diet we are on to how our heart is feeling.

    Let’s celebrate bodies, in their diverse beauty and forms.

  • Abandonment Wounds: How to Heal Them and Feel More at Ease in Relationships

    Abandonment Wounds: How to Heal Them and Feel More at Ease in Relationships

    “I always wondered why it was so easy for people to leave. What I should have questioned was why I wanted so badly for them to stay.” ~Samantha King

    Do you feel afraid to speak your truth or ask for what you want?

    Do you tend to neglect your needs and people-please?

    Do you have a hard time being alone?

    Have you ever felt panic and/or anxiety when someone significant to you left your life or you felt like they were going to?

    If so, please don’t blame yourself for being this way. Most likely it’s coming from an abandonment wound—some type of trauma that happened when you were a child.

    Even though relationships can be painful and challenging at times, your difficult feelings likely stem from something deeper; it’s like a part of you got “frozen in time” when you were first wounded and still feels and acts the same way.

    When we have abandonment wounds, we may have consistent challenges in relationships, especially significant ones. We may be afraid of conflict, rejection, or being unwanted; because of this, we people-please and self-abandon as a survival strategy.

    When we’re in a situation that activates an abandonment wound, we’re not able to think clearly; our fearful and painful emotions flood our system and filter our perceptions, and our old narratives start playing and dictate how we act. We may feel panic, or we may kick, cry, or scream or hold in our feelings like we needed to do when we were children.

    When our abandonment wound gets triggered, we automatically fall into a regression, back to the original hurt/wound and ways of reacting, thinking, and feeling. We also default to the meanings we created at the time, when we formed a belief that we weren’t safe if love was taken away.

    Abandonment wounds from childhood can stem from physical or emotional abandonment, being ignored or given the silent treatment, having emotionally unavailable parents, or being screamed at or punished for no reason.

    When we have abandonment wounds, we may feel that we need to earn love and approval; we may not feel good enough; and we may have our walls up and be unable to receive love because we don’t trust it, which keeps us from being intimate.

    We may try to numb our hurt and pain with drugs, alcohol, overeating, or workaholism. We may also hide certain aspects of ourselves that weren’t acceptable when we were young, which creates inner conflict.

    So how do our abandonment wounds get started? Let me paint a picture from my personal experience.

    When I was in third grade a lady came into our classroom to check our hair for lice. When she entered, my heart raced, and I went into a panic because I was afraid that if I had it and I got sent home, I would be screamed at and punished.

    Where did this fear come from? My father would get mad at me if I cried, got angry, got hurt and needed to go to the doctor, or if I accidentally broke anything in the house. Did I do it purposely? No, but I was punished, screamed at, and sent to my room many times, which made me feel abandoned, hurt, and unloved.

    When I was ten years old, my parents sent me away to summer camp. I kicked and screamed and told them I didn’t want to go. I was terrified of being away from them.

    When I got there, I cried all night and got into fights with the other girls. My third day there, I woke up early and ran away. My counselor found me and tried to hold me, but I kicked, hit her, and tried to get away from her.

    I was sent to the director’s office, and he got mad at me. He picked me up, took me out of his office, and put me in front of a flagpole, where I had to stay for six hours until my parents came to get me. When they got there, they put me in the car, screamed at me, and punished me for the rest of the week.

    When I was fifteen, I was diagnosed with anorexia, depression, and anxiety and put in my first treatment center.

    When my parents dropped me off, I was in a panic. I was so afraid, and I cried for days. Then, my worst nightmare came true—my doctor told me he was putting me on separation from my parents. I wasn’t allowed to talk to them or see them for a month. All I could think about was how I could get out of there and get home to be with them.

    I didn’t understand what was happening. I just wanted my parents to love me, to want to be with me, to treat me like I mattered, but instead I was sent away and locked up.

    I started to believe there was something wrong with me, that I was a worthless human being, and I felt a lot of shame. These experiences and many others created a negative self-image and fears of being abandoned.

    For over twenty-three years I was in and out of hospitals and treatment centers. I was acting in self-destructive ways and living in a hypervigilant, anxious state. I was constantly focused on what other people thought about me. I replayed conversations in my mind and noticed when someone’s emotional state changed, which made me afraid.

    It was a very exhausting way to be. I was depressed, lonely, confused, and suicidal.

    There are many experiences that trigger our abandonment wounds, but the one that I’ve found to be the most activating is a breakup.

    When we’re in a relationship with someone, we invest part of ourselves in them. When they leave, we feel like that part of ourselves is gone/abandoned. So the real pain is a part of us that’s “missing.” We may believe they’re the source of our love, and when they’re gone, we feel that we lost it.

    So the real abandonment wound stems from a disconnection from the love within, which most likely happened when we abandoned ourselves as children attempting to get love and attention from our parents and/or when our parents abandoned us.

    When I went through a breakup with someone I was really in love with, it was intense. I went into a panic. I was emotionally attached, and I did everything I could to try to get her back. When she left, I was devastated. I cried for weeks. There were days when I didn’t even get out of bed.

    Instead of trying to change how I was feeling, I allowed myself to feel it. I recognized that the feelings were intense not because of the situation only, but because it activated my deeper wounding from childhood. Even though I’ve done years of healing, there were more layers and more parts of me to be seen, heard, cared for, and loved.

    The “triggering event” of the breakup wasn’t easy, but it was necessary for me to experience a deeper healing and a deeper and more loving connection with myself.

    When we’re caught in a trauma response, like I was, there is no logic. We’re flooded with intense emotions. Sure, we can do deep breathing, and that may help us feel better and relax our nervous system in the moment. But we need to address the original source of our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in order to experience a sense of ease internally and a new way of seeing and being.

    Healing our abandonment wound is noticing how the past may still be playing in our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It’s noticing the narratives and patterns that make us want to protect, defend, or run away. It’s helping our inner child feel acknowledged, seen, heard, safe, and loved.

    Healing the abandonment wound is not a quick fix; it does take self-awareness and lots of compassion and love. It’s a process of finding and embracing our authenticity, experiencing a sense of ease, and coming home.

    Healing doesn’t mean we’ll never be triggered. In fact, our triggers help us see what inside is asking for our love and attention. When we’re triggered, we need to take the focus off the other person or situation and notice what’s going on internally. This helps us understand the beliefs that are creating our feelings.

    Beliefs like: I don’t matter, I’m unlovable, I’m afraid, I don’t feel important. These underlying beliefs get masked when we focus on our anger toward the person or what’s happening. By bringing to the light how we’re truly feeling, we can then start working with these parts and help them feel loved and safe.

    Those of us with abandonment wounds often become people-pleasers, and some people may say people-pleasing is manipulation. Can we have a little more compassion? People-pleasing is a survival mechanism; it’s something we felt we needed to do as children in order to be loved and safe, and it’s not such an easy pattern to break.

    Our system gets “trained,” and when we try to do something new, like honoring our needs or speaking our truth, that fearful part inside gets afraid and puts on the brakes.

    Healing is a process of kindness and compassion. Our parts that have been hurt and traumatized, they’re fragile; they need to be cared for, loved, and nurtured.

    Healing is also about allowing ourselves to have fun, create from our authentic expression, follow what feels right to us, honor our heartfelt desires and needs, and find and do what makes us happy.

    There are many paths to healing. Find what works for you. For me, talk therapy and cognitive work never helped because the energy of anxiety and abandonment was held in my body.

    I was only able to heal my deepest wound when I began working with my inner child and helping the parts of myself that were in conflict for survival reasons make peace with each other. As a result, I became more kind, compassionate, and loving and started to feel at peace internally.

    Healing takes time, and you are so worth it, but please know that you are beautiful, valuable, and lovable as you are, even with your wounds and scars.

  • How I Learned the Power of Letting Go After My Father Developed Dementia

    How I Learned the Power of Letting Go After My Father Developed Dementia

    “There is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.” ~Helen Keller

    When I was eleven years old, I would force myself to stay awake until the wee hours of the morning.

    I was severely anorexic at a time when eating disorders were considered an “inconvenience” you brought on yourself. Anorexia was dismissed as a rich, white girl’s disease (although we were certainly not rich)—a disease that was easily curable with a prescription for a chocolate cake.

    Although my emaciated body was a dead giveaway of my condition, it was school that noticed the change in me first. My once stellar grades began to slip, and I was falling behind in the advanced academic and art program I was a part of.

    “Just eat already,” my teachers would tell me, and when I tossed my lunch into the garbage, I’d be sent to the nurse’s office to watch The Best Little Girl in the World. Again.

    At home, grape-flavored bubble gum and bouillon cubes were my foods of choice. I did toe-touches, crunches, and jogged at least four times a day, passed out some mornings, and hid my body under layers of flannel shirts on the hottest August days. But even as my disease raged, home was still my refuge, a place where my eating disorder could take its hair down and run wild.

    Thankfully, both my parents worked full-time and often through dinner, so mealtimes weren’t much of a struggle. And when we did eat together, I became as much of a master at hiding my food as I was at hiding my body.

    I was also smart. Or maybe conniving is a better word. A weekly trip to Friendly’s for ice cream (the irony of that name!) fooled my overworked parents into believing that I was fine.

    Puberty had simply shaved off any “baby fat” I had, they reasoned. What they didn’t know was that puberty never had a chance with me. No sooner did my period appear, I starved it away.

    But even with the ice cream trips and their growing awareness, I still felt fairly safe at home.

    Until that one moment that changed everything.

    On a sunny, unremarkable fall day (Isn’t that what Joan Didion tells us? We are most surprised by those tragedies and traumas that happen on “normal” and “beautiful” days…?), my father surprised me by picking me up early from school.

    Hurrying to the office for dismissal, there was a tiny, naive part of my eleven-year-old self that thought maybe he was surprising me with a trip to Disney World.

    That’s what happened to my friend, Mary, the previous year. When she returned from her impromptu trip, she was sporting tanned skin and a perpetual grin. She then spent most of our fifth-grade year with mouse ears glued to the top of her head.

    But there was no Magic Kingdom for me. Instead, without so much as an inkling as to where we were going, my father hustled me into his car, and we drove away. Sitting next to my father, a man who held all the power over me, my stomach ached as I wondered what was about to happen.

    My weak heart pounded in my chest, and as we drove, I prayed it wouldn’t give out. Catching a glimpse of my ashen skin and white, cracked lips in the rearview, I knew that I was nothing more than a stray dog in a shelter, ripped from my cage by a complete stranger, wondering if I was about to be put down, thrown into a fight, or worse.

    Finally, we arrived at our destination, a medical center in a strip mall. As soon as we walked through the front door, I gagged on the thick scent of medicine and grape lollipops that hung in the air. Without a second to catch my breath, I was whisked into a doctor’s office and onto a scale.

    Looking down her nose at me, the doctor snapped, “You’re too skinny. You need to gain weight.” While I stood there on the scale, she turned to my father and diagnosed anorexia nervosa.

    Then she looked at me. “If you don’t eat,” she warned in a sharp tone, “we’ll have you put in a place for ‘girls like you’.” She then informed me that once I was locked in that wretched prison of force-feedings and shackles (as I imagined it), I wouldn’t see my family again until I was “fixed.”

    When we returned to the car, my father spoke the first words he had said to me all day: “So? Will you gain weight?”

    “Yes,” I answered, too frightened to fight. Too scared to advocate for myself. Too terrified to tell him that this wasn’t a choice. I wasn’t choosing to starve myself; I was sick.

    But even if I had spoken, he wouldn’t have understood. No one did.

    From that moment on, I knew that I was completely alone. That’s when I began to stay up way past midnight, quietly jogging in place. I’d stop only to press an ear to the door, straining to hear what my parents were saying. Would they send me away? To that place?

    “I’ll never let it happen,” I assured myself. I would die before I’d go to a place where I was literally stripped of myself.

    For the next few years, the games continued, and although there were always doctors and threats, I kept myself just alive enough to stay out of that particular treatment center.

    ****

    Flash-forward almost forty years, and today, my father is an old man with dementia.

    As the Universe sometimes works in strange ways, I am now one of his primary caretakers. Although our relationship was strained for many years and I missed out on the experience of having a strong male figure in my life that I could trust, he did walk me down the aisle, and I am here for him now that he needs help.

    My father doesn’t remember that day that will forever be burned into my brain. He doesn’t remember the hell I went through the years that followed—the fear, the insecurities, the isolation, and the self-inflicted bruises I sported because I hated myself so very much. More than anything, he was, and is, clueless of the real battle scars—the ones that lay deep inside.

    He doesn’t know that that one “unremarkable fall day” when he pulled me from school started a negative spiral in my life, a time when I began aligning with damaging beliefs and inflicting self-harm.

    All he knows now is what his dementia allows him to—if the sun is out, if the squirrels ate the peanuts he tossed to them, and whether or not I am there to help him; to deliver his groceries, to take him out on drives, and to care for him.

    Yes, this could easily be the ultimate story of revenge, but years of teaching and practicing yoga have brought me down a different path.

    The path I have chosen is the path of letting go.

    Truthfully, my father’s dementia has left me no choice but to let go, at least of some parts of my life. I’ve needed to let go of expectations, of attachments to the outcome, and even, sometimes, like in those moments when he calls me “Sally,” my own name and identity.

    But in letting go, I have found that his disease has brought some gifts as well. I’ve learned to slow down and appreciate the daisy he wants to admire, the flock of chickadees darting in and out of a bush he’s watching, and the feel of the cool fall air on my face as I help him to and from a doctor’s appointment.

    Letting go has allowed me to experience all those things that I was previously too busy to appreciate. As Helen Keller said, “There is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.”

    But letting go because of his dementia wasn’t enough.

    I had to let go for me, too.

    To let go of the toxic weight from the past, I released that moment when everything changed, all those years ago.

    How? By simply deciding to put the weight down—and not just with regard to that event, but in all aspects of my life.

    Was it easy? No. But it was doable.

    In letting go, I didn’t worry about forgiving (although it is an important step for healing), or seeing someone else’s perspective. I simply unhanded my tight grip on all the “wrongs” I had endured and still carried with me, as well as all those things for which I blamed myself.

    Every one of us will live through events, some that we consider positive, and others, not. The only control we have is in how we deal with the circumstances we’ve been given.

    We can choose not to shoulder the burden, and to unpack those weights we’ve been carrying. We can close our eyes, breathe deeply, and tell ourselves, “I will put that weight down.”

    That’s where our true power lies.

    Have I forgotten my past? Of course not. But I have let it go, and in letting go, I have reclaimed an important relationship with my father, and more importantly, with myself.

    By letting go, I have released my suffocating grip on life, and reclaimed my personal power.

  • How to Protect Our Kids from a Lifetime of Food, Weight, and Body Image Issues

    How to Protect Our Kids from a Lifetime of Food, Weight, and Body Image Issues

    I went on my first diet when I was around fourteen or so because, as they often do in growing teens, my jeans started getting tight.

    And because I grew up in the same anti-fat culture we all have, I hated myself for it.

    Around the same time, an adult in my life who was always obsessed with “eating healthy” gave me a copy of the new book she was reading outlining the healthiest way to eat.

    It was a book on the Atkins/low-carb diet.

    The author spent the bulk of the book demonizing carbs, explaining in convincing-sounding detail all the science he supposedly had about not only how harmful carbs were but how they were the cause of weight gain.

    Three things happened from reading that book.

    1. I became scared of eating carbs and started trying to eliminate them because, while of course I wanted to be healthy, I was terrified of gaining weight.

    2. Instead of losing the five pounds or so that I wanted to lose, I gained about five pounds and a slow progression of weight gain continued for years. Because the harder I tried to eliminate the carbs, the more I craved and obsessed over them; always eventually caving, eating them, and then hating myself for it and promising to start “being good tomorrow.

    Eventually the caving led to overeating them because “as long as I was being bad anyway, I may as well eat them all and get them out of the house so I won’t be tempted when I start being good again.”

    3. An almost three-decades-long war with my weight, my body, myself, and food began. A war that resulted in a hospitalization in my early thirties, after my first foray into the world of “it’s not a diet; it’s clean, healthy eating,” for bulimia so severe I often felt like I was going to eat myself to death.

    And the whole time, I blamed myself for it. I believed I was stupid, weak, pathetic, a pig who needed to try harder to control myself.

    So I kept trying. For more than half my life I tried, and it almost killed me.

    I’ve been working with women around the whole weight and food thing in one form or another for over fifteen years now. I started sharing my story because after listening to other women describe their histories with food and weight, I realized that my story is not unique.

    Varying degrees of my story are the norm, and they all start in basically the same seemingly innocent ways.

    We want to lose weight or “eat healthier,” so we do what we’re taught we’re supposed to.

    We start a diet or “healthy eating plan” of some sort that tells us what we “should” and “shouldn’t be” eating. This leads to a lifetime of trying to control our intake and our bodies, which results in disordered eating patterns, weight cycling, and self-loathing.

    I regularly hear from women in their seventies or eighties who have spent their entire lives fighting this losing battle with themselves to “eat right” and lose weight.

    In one survey of US women a few years ago, 75% reported disordered eating behaviors or symptoms consistent with eating disorders.

    My recovery didn’t start until I realized a few basic truths.

    First, if I had any hope of healing, I had to figure out what was causing my eating issues. Ultimately, it came down to my conditioning: patterns of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that had developed over the course of my life as a result of many different things, not the least of which being:

    1. The stories I had learned to believe about bodies and the people in them: Big ones are bad, unhealthy, undisciplined, and lazy. Small ones are good, healthy, and disciplined, and they work hard.

    These misguided beliefs taught me not only to live in fear of weight gain and the harsh judgment of others if I gained weight, but also to judge myself and my body harshly when I did so. This contributed to not only the decades of weight gain and disordered eating but ultimately the eating disorder.

    2. The stories I’d learned about food: These are the good foods, the healthy foods, the foods you should be eating, and those are the bad foods, the unhealthy ones, the ones that cause all manner of disease, poor health, and weight gain. Those are the foods you have to give up forever, or only allow in moderation.

    These misguided beliefs taught me to live in fear of food and my body becoming unhealthy or fat if I dared to eat the “wrong” thing. This created the never-ending pattern of promising myself I was going to “be good” only to end up craving, caving, hating myself, and starting over that I felt trapped in for so many years.

    3. Disconnection with myself, my body, and my own needs: As long as I was trying to make myself eat or do the things I thought I “should” do in order to control my body and my food intake, I was stuck in my head. Stuck in fear. Disconnected from myself, my body, and even the decision-making part of my brain. Ruminating, promising, obsessing, hating.

    In that state, I had no ability to understand the messages my body was constantly sending me about what it needed, nor did I have any concept that my body was something that could be trusted to tell me that. I saw it as an enemy to be ruled over, controlled, and beaten into submission… rather than the ally, healer, and communicator that it is.

    4. Self-loathing: I didn’t like, love, trust, or value myself, so my entire self-worth and relationship with myself relied on what my body looked like and my need to control how others saw me.

    The second truth I had to realize: if I had any hope of recovering and making peace with myself, my body, and food, I had to change the things that were causing the war.

    That meant giving up the obsession with my weight and eating or looking perfect.

    I had to recognize those things for what they were—distractions that kept me from dealing with the issues that were causing the problems in the first place and were making matters worse.

    So I put all my energy into changing the causes.

    It didn’t happen overnight, but one day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d engaged in compensatory behaviors. The binges were getting fewer and farther between.

    And then I couldn’t remember the last time I binged or even overate, and I couldn’t even imagine ever doing it again.

    It’s been many years since those things were my daily reality, and I’m thrilled to say they simply don’t exist in me anymore because I changed the conditioning that was causing them. I learned to reconnect with and trust my body when it tells me what it needs or wants, and I learned to value myself enough that I cannot imagine treating myself or my body poorly anymore.

    Recovery and peace are blessings that I don’t take for granted for a second and I’m still grateful for every minute of the day.

    But disordered eating and eating disorder recovery are unbelievably difficult, prone to multiple relapses, and many aren’t so lucky.

    This brings me to my main points because the simplest solution to disordered eating or eating disorder recovery is to prevent those things from ever starting in the first place.

    That’s my dream, to save future generations from growing up with the disordered eating patterns/eating disorders and horrible body/self-images that ours has grown up with.

    It starts with us, as parents.

    What I Wish Parents Understood

    Living with disordered eating patterns or an eating disorder is a special kind of hell that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

    It’s like living with the meanest, most self-destructive monster in your head one can imagine.

    You know the things you’re thinking and the choices you’re making are harming you, you know they’re making you miserable, you’re desperate to stop, and yet… no matter how hard you try, you can’t.

    You feel powerless. Hopeless. Helpless. Trapped.

    Recovery was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life—and I’ve not had an easy life, so that says a lot.

    Given this, it’s my view that in addition to helping those struggling recover, prevention at an early age needs to be a top priority.

    And parents, I’m not trying to place blame, but after fifteen years of hearing women talk about their struggles, I’ve come to realize that we are often a big part of the cause, although not purposely of course.

    We all have our kids’ best interests in mind.

    We want our kids to be the healthiest, most confident versions of themselves, and we’re all doing the best we can to help them get there.

    We want them to maintain healthy bodies and eat nutritious foods. Nobody doubts that we all want the best for our children and are doing our best.

    But the way we’re approaching it is almost guaranteeing that our kids are going to struggle with the same food issues, eating disorders, or a lifetime of disordered eating and failed diet attempts that so many in our generation have.

    They’re learning to fight the same wars we have in the same ways we learned to fight them.

    All the things we typically do to try to help encourage health (restricting “bad” foods, teaching them that some are “good” and some are “bad,” encouraging them to lose weight or even acknowledging their weight) are among the worst things we can do for the health of our children.

    It’s difficult to overstate the damage that weight and food shame does to adults, and that damage is worse in children.

    We also have to remember that they learn from us. If your kids watch you struggle with food and your weight, if they see you tie your mood and your self-worth to your scale, they are going to be at a significantly higher risk for developing an eating disorder or living with those same struggles themselves.

    So this is what I want parents everywhere to know: encouraging weight loss, labeling or restricting their food intake (good vs bad, allowed vs not allowed), discussing weight, restricting foods, and dieting yourself—all of those things that millions of us are doing every single day that diet and healthy eating cultures have taught us is expected or accepted—they’re putting our children at risk.

    Research has shown that the younger girls are when they go on their first diet, the more likely they are to engage in extreme weight control behaviors like vomiting and laxatives (that’s an eating disorder), abusing drugs and alcohol, and becoming overweight by the time they reach their thirties.

    One out of four dieters will develop some type of eating disorder. That’s a number that’s doubled in the last twenty years. And the majority of the rest develop very disordered eating patterns.

    Eating disorders are widely recognized to have the highest mortality rate of all mental illness, while also being among the most underdiagnosed and under/poorly treated.

    Not even to mention the levels of anxiety, depression, and self-loathing that typically come from years of living with disordered eating and battling with our weight.

    There is a better way.

    Encouraging Healthy Choices Without the Risk

    DON’Ts

    Don’t discuss weight, size, or bodies—not yours, not theirs, not anyone else’s.

    Don’t let other people discuss their weight in front of them—not their doctor, not relatives, no one.

    Don’t label foods—no good, no bad, no healthy, no unhealthy… no food labels. At all. Binary food labels can cause shame, create self-punishing behaviors, destroy our relationship with food, and contribute to overeat/binge/restrict cycles that can take years to heal.

    Don’t tell them they are what they eat—our food choices don’t determine our worth.

    Don’t restrict foods—let them eat what they want. Restriction leads to guilt, shame, overeating, or bingeing and fuels disconnection.

    Don’t force exercise or “burning off calories”—encouraging exercise as a means of weight loss is setting them up for trouble.

    DOs

    Do encourage them to consider how their food choices make their body feel. How does that big mac and fries make their body feel when they’re done eating? What about the candy for breakfast? Do they feel good when they’re done eating? Or do they feel sick? Would they rather feel good, or sick? How does skipping a meal make their body feel? Do they want to feel that way? Do they really want to ignore their body’s most basic human needs with restriction? Why?

    Do encourage them to consider why they’re eating. Are they physically hungry? No? Are they emotionally hungry? Teach them the difference and help them learn to accept, honor, and express the emotions they’re trying to feed or soothe rather than ignore or numb them.

    Do teach them the value of understanding the why behind the choices they’re making and how their choices are often a result of their relationship with themselves.

    Do teach them that the relationships they have with themselves, food, and their bodies are the most important relationships they’ll ever have in their lives and to protect and nurture them.

    Do lift them up, teach them to value themselves exactly as they are, for who they are, not what they look like, weigh, or how they eat. Teach them to value and respect others, no matter what size they are.

    Do teach them about self-acceptance, kindness, authenticity, self-compassion, and the power of mindful living.

    Do teach them to appreciate the wonder and magic of their bodies, no matter what size they are. Teach them how to stay present in the moment and in their bodies, so they learn to listen to and trust their own bodies.

    Do teach them humans come in all shapes and sizes—and that no one shape or size is any better than another.

    Teach them that they are enough, exactly as they are, and that neither their bodies nor their food choices define their worth.

    And that will all be way easier if you learn it for yourself first.

  • The Childhood Wounds We All Carry and How to Heal Our Pain

    The Childhood Wounds We All Carry and How to Heal Our Pain

    “As traumatized children, we always dreamed that someone would come and save us. We never dreamed that it would, in fact, be ourselves as adults.” ~Alice Little

    Like most people, I used to run away from my pain.

    I did it in lots of different and creative ways.

    I would starve myself and only focus on what I could and couldn’t eat based on calories.

    I would make bad choices for myself and then struggle with the consequences, not realizing that I had made any choice at all. It all just seemed like bad luck. Really bad luck.

    Or I would stay in unhealthy relationships of any kind and endure the stress that was causing. Again, I didn’t see what I was contributing or how I was not only keeping my pain going but actually adding to it.

    These are just a few examples of the many ways I ran away from my pain. The real pain. The one below it all. The one that started it all. The core wound.

    The wound of unworthiness and unlovability.

    The wound that stems from my childhood.

    And my parents’ childhoods.

    And their parents’ childhoods.

    But this is not a piece on how it all got started or who is to blame.

    No. This is about me wanting to share how I got rid of my pain.

    Because discovering how to do that changed my life in ways I never thought possible.

    It is something I would love for you to experience too because life can be beautiful no matter what has happened in the past. I don’t want you to miss out on this opportunity. Especially because I know it is possible for you too.

    Hands on the table, I am a psychotherapist and I have been for almost ten years. I also train and supervise other psychotherapists, so I should know what I’m talking about.

    But, let me fill you in on this: There are plenty of professionals who haven’t done ‘the work’ on themselves. I know, I’ve met them.

    And I have met hundreds of people who don’t have any qualifications, but they have done the work on themselves. I know, I’ve felt them.

    Doing the work, in the shortest possible summary, is all about facing your pain. It’s when you stop—or when you’re forced to stop, which is so often the case—and you’re done with running away from it.

    It’s when you finally give up.

    Sounds like a bad thing, right? But it isn’t.

    To heal, you have to see the pain.

    We all think we see it or feel it or know it, but we don’t.

    We know what it feels like to run away from it and the pain and stress that causes. The constant anxiety, the pressure, the breathlessness, the numbness. That’s what we know.

    But that’s not the pain, not the pain of the core wound. Those are the symptoms of not dealing with the wound, of not healing it because you’re too afraid to even look.

    It’s fear that stops us from healing.

    It’s not the process of healing itself that scares us; it’s what we imagine healing means. And it usually is nothing like we imagine it to be!

    Healing just means facing the pain.

    Let me try to make it more practical:

    Do you remember a time when you were very little, maybe three or five, or maybe a little older?

    Do you remember, in your body, how it felt to be misunderstood? How to want something and then not get it? How to be punished for something you didn’t do? How to be shouted at for no reason at all just because someone else was stressed out and couldn’t control themselves?

    Do you remember how that felt?

    I do.

    That’s the origin. All those little incidents when we were too young to understand what was going on, but we made it mean something negative about ourselves.

    Because what was reflected back to us by the world, by the people we loved the most, was that something was wrong with us, that in some way we were flawed, wrong, or bad.

    Our brains were too young to take a different perspective, to defend ourselves from unfair judgments and punishments, and so we took it all in.

    And believing something horrible about yourself that isn’t true hurts. Believing that you’re not good enough hurts. Believing that you’re unlovable hurts.

    It also scares us, and so we no longer feel safe.

    Safe to be ourselves. Safe to love. Safe to be loved.

    We start to hide from ourselves and our pain. We start to hide our truth and inhibit the great humans that we actually are.

    Because in those moments, those moments of misunderstanding, we receive the wrong message—that we are not worthy of being heard, trusted, held, or loved.

    We are pushed away, through being ignored, threatened, or punished.

    And then we start doing that to ourselves.

    We want or need something—just like we needed it then when it was inconvenient to a parent who shouted at us and invalidated what we wanted or needed—and we deny it or minimize it.

    We want to say “enough” and set a boundary with someone—just like we wanted to when we were little but were told we didn’t know what was good for us—but we don’t do it.

    We want to choose what we like or are excited by—just like we tried to when we were young but were told we were being stupid, childish, or silly—but then go for the boring, reasonable option instead.

    We carry the pain on.

    We don’t stop to ask ourselves whether that’s actually what we should be doing.

    We try to avoid re-experiencing the pain from our childhood by treating ourselves in exactly the same ways as we were treated back then.

    We don’t realize that we’re keeping that usually unconscious pattern going.

    The most obvious example I can give you from my life is that I didn’t grow up surrounded by emotionally available adults. So obviously I didn’t become one either. I wasn’t emotionally available to myself, and I didn’t choose emotionally available partners in my relationships.

    As a result, I got to relive my childhood experiences over and over again while not understanding why I kept feeling so depressed, unloved, and worthless.

    I kept the pain going by being closed off to how I was feeling and by choosing partners who would shame, reject, or ignore me and my feelings the same way my parents had.

    But I broke that cycle.

    I broke it when I faced my pain.

    I broke it when I stayed within myself when I felt something, no matter what it was.

    When I felt disappointed that I didn’t get the grade I wanted on an important university assignment, I stayed with that disappointment.

    I didn’t talk myself out of it. I didn’t talk down to myself and tell myself what a useless waste of space I was. I didn’t pity myself or blame my lecturer. I didn’t numb myself by binge-watching Netflix and eating chocolate.

    No, I stayed with the disappointment.

    It was like I was sitting opposite my disappointed three-year-old self, and I stayed with her.

    I didn’t shout, mock her, invalidate her, leave her, or make her wrong for feeling how she was feeling.

    I stayed with her. I saw her disappointment. I saw her pain. I knew what she was making it mean and I stayed with her.

    I didn’t push her away. I didn’t push the pain away.

    And guess what happened?

    It started to speak to me! And it made sense!

    It wasn’t scary or weird or awkward or crazy! It made complete sense.

    And it needed me to hear it, to understand it, and to parent it.

    Just like I parent my children.

    “Of course, you feel disappointed. You have put so much work into this, and you didn’t get the result you wanted. I get it. I’m here to listen to you. I want to understand you.”

    Do you know what that does? It calms you down. Truly.

    It calms you down. It’s such a relief!

    Finally, someone wants to listen! Finally, someone doesn’t turn away from me like I am the biggest threat they have ever encountered. Finally, someone looks at me with understanding and compassion.

    This is what I do with all of my feelings.

    If there is jealousy, I am there for it. I’m not shaming it, not judging it—I’m just here to listen, to soothe, to understand, and to act on it if it feels like that’s what it needs.

    So I turn toward the pain, the feeling; I try to understand what it’s all about and see if there is anything it needs from me, something more practical.

    Does my disappointment need me to ask my lecturer for feedback to improve my work for the next assessment?

    Does my jealousy need me to remind myself how worthy and lovable I am? Or does it need me to choose something beautiful for me to wear because I’ve not really paid that much attention to my appearance recently? Or does it need to speak to my partner because he’s much friendlier with other women than he is with me?

    A lot of the time the pain tries to alert us to doing something we need to do for ourselves.

    By not facing the pain, by not tending to it, we can’t know what it is that it needs us to do—and it’s always something that’s good for us.

    And so we go without what we want and need, and the pain only grows bigger and louder like the tantruming toddler that is only trying to express herself in an attempt to be heard, held, soothed, and taken care of by their parent.

    It’s time to stop doing that to ourselves.

    I did many years ago, and I feel like a different person. The way I live my life is different. The way I feel about myself is different. I no longer go without what I want and need.

    That can’t happen as long as you use up all your energy to run away from the pain.

    The pain is your invitation to do the healing work. It invites you to stay and listen, to find out what’s really going on below all distractions and symptoms.

    What is the feeling that needs to be felt?

    What is the pain that needs to be witnessed and understood?

    And what does it need you to do for it so the core wound can finally heal?

    You have the power to heal it. You are the only one you need to heal it. But you have got to stay and learn to be there for it, learn to be there for yourself.

    That’s it.

    Unlike other people, you don’t walk away. You don’t say no to yourself. You don’t go against yourself and make yourself wrong.

    You stay. You feel it. You give it what it needs.

    And that’s when it heals.

  • The Unconscious Vows We Make to Ourselves So the World Can’t Hurt Us

    The Unconscious Vows We Make to Ourselves So the World Can’t Hurt Us

    “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” ~Jonathan Safron Foer

    Are you aware that we all make unconscious vows early on, and they become our internal blueprint for life? These vows dictate who we can be and are often deeply engrained.

    Our vows are attached to a deeper need we’re trying to meet—the need for love, acceptance, safety, connection, and security. They’re not bad or wrong, and neither are we for having them; they come from a smart part of us that’s trying to help us feel safe.

    Vows are more than a belief; vows are a “never again” thing or “this is the only way to be because my survival is at stake.” 

    What is a vow, you may ask? Well, let me paint a picture for you.

    When I was a little girl, I was teased for being fat, stupid, and ugly. Soon enough, I started blaming my body for being hurt and teased. I thought that because I was “fat, stupid, and ugly” there was something wrong with me, and that was why I didn’t have any friends.

    At age thirteen my doctor told me to go on a diet, and that’s when I started to believe that I was a “defect” because I was fat. At that point I made a vow: “I will never be fat again.”

    I started cutting back on my food, I became a maniac exerciser, and being thin became the only thing that mattered

    Then, at age fifteen, I entered my first hospital for anorexia, and for over twenty-three years I was in therapy and numerous hospitals and treatment centers. No matter how much weight I gained in these programs, when I left, I went right back to losing weight by limiting my food intake and exercising excessively because I’d vowed to myself “I’ll never be fat again.”

    The process of gaining weight only added to the trauma and fears I was already experiencing. Instead of being compassionate and understanding and helping me offer love to the parts of myself that were hurting, staffers “punished” me when I didn’t eat my whole tray of food by taking away my privileges and upping my meds.

    When we experience trauma like I did as a child, it’s not what happened to us that stays with us; it’s the vows we made and what we concluded it meant about ourselves, others, and life in general that stay.

    We concluded who we needed to be in order to be loved and accepted by our family, and that became our unconscious blueprint that started dictating our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

    “I will never be fat again because if I am I won’t be loved and accepted” was a trauma response, which turned into a vow that carried a lot of fear and anxiety. I used undereating and compulsive exercising as survival tools, and I would not let go of this pattern no matter how much anyone told me I needed to.

    If I couldn’t exercise, especially after I ate, my heart would race and I would panic, sweat, and shake. Those symptoms were my body signaling to me that I needed to exercise so I wouldn’t get fat

    This was the only way I knew how to be. I was living in a trance, an automatic conditioned response. And no matter how much conscious effort I exerted to change my habitual ways, something inside would bring me back to limiting my food intake and exercising excessively.

    When we’re forced to let go of our survival mechanisms without healing the inner affliction, it feels like jumping out of an airplane with no parachute; it’s scary and overwhelming. This was why I became suicidal, too, especially when I perceived I was getting fat again; I would rather leave my body than be traumatized and teased.

    Eating disorders, addictions, depression, anxiety, pain, or illness are often symptoms showing us where our energy is frozen in time, where we’re carrying deep wounds and holding onto vows we made from traumatic or painful experiences.

    When someone is anxious or depressed, it may be because they’re not living their truth, and this may be because they feel they’re not allowed to. They may think they need to meet everyone else’s expectations, because if they don’t, they may be punished and/or abandoned. 

    They may use food, drugs, smoking, or drinking as a way to find ease with what they’re feeling and experiencing. They may be using a substance to numb the pain stemming from traumatic experiences or from the idea of not being “perfect” or not feeling “good enough.”

    Why is it hard for some people to love themselves and ask for what they want and need? Because, if you’re like me, you may have been screamed at or called selfish for doing these things when you were a child, so you may have made the unconscious vow “I’m not allowed to ask for anything or take care of or love myself.”

    The habits and behaviors we can’t stop engaging in, no matter how hard we try and how destructive or limiting they may be, are meeting a need. The goal isn’t to override our impulses and change the behavior; instead, a better approach is to understand why they exist in the first place and help that part of ourselves feel loved and safe.

    No matter how many affirmations we say or how much mindset work we do, our survival mechanisms and vows are more powerful, so a part of us will resist change even if it’s healthy.

    Often, when I’m working with a client who struggles with addiction, anxiety, depression, and/or loving themselves and allowing themselves to have fun, when we go inside and find the root cause, it’s because of a vow they made when they were little, when they were either being screamed at, teased, left alone, or punished.

    They concluded that they were bad or wrong for being true to themselves, asking for things, or wanting to be held and loved. They learned that having needs and acting naturally wasn’t okay, so they started suppressing that energy, which created their symptoms as adults.

    “I don’t need anyone; I’m fine alone” may be a vow and a way to protect ourselves from being hurt again. The challenge with this is that, as humans, we need approval and validation; we need love and caring. This is healthy and what helps us thrive and survive as human beings.

    When trauma gets stored in our body, we feel unsafe. Until we resolve it and reconnect with a feeling of safety in the area(s) where we were traumatized, we’ll remain in a constant state of fight/flight/freeze, be hypersensitive and overreactive, take everything personally, and seek potential threats, which makes it difficult to move on from the initial occurrence.

    So, how do we see what vows are dictating our life journey?

    We can notice our unconscious vows by being with the parts of ourselves that are afraid. They often come as feelings or symptoms in the body. For instance, I would panic, sweat, and shake if I couldn’t exercise, especially after I ate.

    When I sat with this part of myself with unconditional love and acceptance and a desire to understand where it originated, instead of using exercise to run away, it communicated to me why it was afraid. It brought me back to where it all began and said, “If I’m fat I’ll be teased, abandoned, and rejected, and I want to be loved and accepted.”

    Healing is about releasing that pent up energy that’s stored in the body and making peace with ourselves and our traumas.

    Healing is about reminding our bodies that the painful/traumatic event(s) are no longer happening; it’s learning how to comfort ourselves when we’re afraid and learning emotional regulation.

    Healing is about getting clear about where the hurt is coming from; otherwise, we’ll spend our time going over the details and continuously get triggered because we never get to the real source.

    Healing is not about forcing; it’s about accepting what’s happening. It’s a kind, gentle, and loving approach. We’re working with tender parts that have been traumatized and hurt. These parts don’t need to be pushed or told how to be. They need compassion; they need to be seen, heard, loved, and accepted; they need our loving attention so they can feel safe and at ease.

    They’ve been hiding; in a sense they’ve been disconnected. When we acknowledge them and bring them into our hearts, we experience a loving integration. When we experience a loving integration we experience a true homecoming, and in that we experience a sense of inner peace. Then we more naturally start taking loving care of ourselves and making healthy choices.

  • Obsessed with Healthy Eating? 9 Things I’ve Learned Since Recovering from Orthorexia

    Obsessed with Healthy Eating? 9 Things I’ve Learned Since Recovering from Orthorexia

    “Sending love to everyone who’s doing their best to heal from things they don’t discuss.” ~Unknown

    I used to obsess over healthy eating, and I mean OB-SESSSSS. I spent virtually every waking moment thinking about food. What should I eat today? Is there too much sugar in that? What will I eat when we go out next week? Should I claim that I’m allergic to gluten?

    Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was suffering from orthorexia (that is, an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating). Yes, I fully agree that eating nutritious food is good for you—there’s few who would deny that—but when you are thinking about food non-stop, something has definitely gone awry.

    It all started innocently enough. My daughter (who’s my youngest) was about a year old, and I was ready to “get back in shape” and reclaim my pre-pregnancy weight. However, since I was against the idea of fad diets, I was looking for something else.

    That “something else” turned out to be wellness culture, and I absorbed it all. I followed several influencers who said we must eat in a certain way for ideal health, which often meant organic, gluten-free, dairy-free, and absolutely no sugar. The influencers also used a lot of pseudoscience to support their ideas, and I totally fell for it.

    With the idea of eating in a certain way for optimum health swirling round my brain, I decided to follow a thirty-day kick-starter healthy eating plan. It was all about focusing on health (and not weight loss). Easy enough, hey?

    There was no counting calories, macros, or weighing food. No points. It was just about eating nutritious, wholesome food and having a protein shake for breakfast. What could be the harm in that?

    Well, it was probably the long list of “not allowed” foods that you cut for thirty days (such as sugar, dairy, gluten, and soy)—essentially an elimination diet. The idea being that after thirty days you reintroduce the foods to help you identify your food intolerances. See? It’s all for health! Or so I thought…

    And, as my “clean eating” regime was underway, I started to get a lot of positive feedback.

    You’re so disciplined! How do you eat so healthy? Wow, you look really well.

    It was alluring.

    This was my slippery slope and the beginning of an unhealthy obsession with food.

    Three years in, my life looked something like this: I claimed a gluten and dairy intolerance and was experimenting with being vegan, all for the sake of my health. Unfortunately, there’s not much food left to eat on this kind of restrictive diet.

    Every few months I would follow an elimination diet (again) and would cut out all sugar, alcohol, caffeine, and soy (alongside the dairy and gluten that I was no longer eating). I started avoiding social events because the list of “safe foods” was getting so complicated; it often seemed easier to stay home.

    All of this in the name of “health.” Except that it wasn’t healthy.

    I was missing social events and avoided spending time with friends, my mental health was suffering, and I was developing an extremely disordered relationship with food.

    While orthorexia isn’t classified as an eating disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, some healthcare professionals believe that it should be. And, personally speaking, my relationship with food was starting to remind me of the time when I’d suffered from an eating disorder back in my twenties.

    I had a series of aha moments that finally woke me up to the fact that my behavior was not at all healthy and my extreme approach to food was doing me more harm than good.

    It was when I started feeling embarrassed going to someone’s house for dinner and sending a long list of foods I couldn’t eat.

    It was when I started to notice bingeing behavior: I’d binge on five sweet potato brownies because they were supposedly “healthy.” I’m sure that if I’d just had access to a chocolate brownie, I might have only eaten one

    It was when I was doing my elimination diet so frequently, I had to make lots of excuses about why I couldn’t join evenings out.

    Eventually I realized that my old eating disorder had morphed into orthorexia.

    Thankfully, I had the resources to make a quick recovery, and my relationship with food has done a full 180 turn… In hindsight I can see clearly how very disordered my thinking, feelings, and behavior were.

    With that in mind, here are nine lessons I learnt from my brush with orthorexia. My hope is that if you question some of your own food behaviors, you seek help before too much damage is done.

    #1 There is no need to restrict food groups from your diet.

    Unless you have a medical reason to do so (like coeliac disease), restricting food groups from your diet is unnecessary. Nope, you don’t need to be carb free; in fact, research shows that in the long term, a low-carb diet is actually bad for you.

    #2 A flexible approach to eating is best.

    You just don’t need overly rigid food rules. My food rules were too rigid, and I tried to eat perfectly all the time. Perfectly to me was organic, gluten-free, dairy-free, and absolutely no processed sugar. Alongside that, I stopped eating fruit because it has sugar in it. So, for a while, the only fruits I would eat were berries. Bananas, red apples, grapes, and tropical fruits were totally out of the question.

    The problem with rigid rules is that all the fun things in life become stressful, like holidays, eating out, and going to a friend’s house, so flexibility is key.

    #3 If you get overly upset when food rules are broken, something’s wrong.

    I felt compelled to stick to my food rules, and I would feel emotional, distraught, and upset if I broke them. Like I had failed. I remember once crying in a French supermarket on holiday because I couldn’t buy the organic and gluten-free versions of food I wanted. It’s kind of missing the point of a holiday, isn’t it?

    #4 Food is NOT just fuel.

    Have you heard the quote “food is fuel”? It’s bandied around everywhere in the wellness and fitness spheres. But food isn’t just fuel. It’s about so much more, and this kind of thinking limits our potential to enjoy food to its fullest potential.

    Food can be comforting; it can be a time to connect with friends and family. It’s nourishing for our bodies, and also nourishing for our souls; it can be nostalgic or related to our culture. A cup of tea and a biscuit can remind you of your granny, while a single meal can take you back to your childhood.

    #5 All foods can fit in a balanced diet.

    Yes, even sweets, chocolate, and pastries. It’s totally unsustainable to cut out “bad” foods for the rest of your life. I’ve also found that you’re more likely to crave these “bad” foods if you tell yourself you can never eat them again. When all foods fit, the ice cream comes off the pedestal and you can keep it in the house without bingeing. It’s a total revelation.

    #6 It’s worse for your health to stress about sugar in food than to actually eat a damn cookie.

    I used to stress about the sugar in food constantly. I would read every food label when shopping; I would calculate grams of sugar in things like raisins; I would only eat a green apple and not a red apple (too much sugar, apparently). Yup, I was one of those mums who cooked gluten-free, dairy-free, and sugar-free cakes for the kids’ birthdays. Yuk! Poor kids.

    I’ve learned the stress of worrying about food is way worse than just eating the food itself. So relax, and enjoy that cookie.

    #7 “Health” is more than just the food we eat.

    Health is not just about what we eat; it’s way more than that. It’s about your genetics and your access to nutritious food and decent healthcare, which means it’s associated with your income level.

    Also, what you consider “healthy” is different to what I consider “healthy.” Maybe my “health” is about being able to run around after my kids without feeling breathless, or improving my flexibility to keep my body feeling supple.

    Your health might be about improving stamina and strength to run a marathon, or about sleeping seven to eight hours a night.

    #8 Social events shouldn’t be awkward.

    Quite the opposite. Social events should be fun, or relaxing and enjoyable. Not fraught and stressful. I had many an awkward conversation with hosts about things that I couldn’t eat.

    I would avoid events when doing my cleanse, or re-arrange things around these months. And if I did venture out, I would endlessly worry about what I’d eat, sometimes calling the restaurant ahead to see what they had on the menu to fit my rigid rules. Or I would claim allergies so I could work out what was gluten-free and dairy-free. #awkward

    And finally, if you are a parent…

    #9 Your kids are watching you.

    You might not say anything to your kids, but they are watching you. They notice what you do, reading those labels, and how you talk about food. They see when you skip the fun meals or cook something separate for yourself. They see when you are down on yourself and your body.

    They are watching. Everything.

    If I’m truly honest, this was the biggest driver for me to heal my relationship with food. The last thing I wanted to do was pass my disordered eating down to my kids.

    Finding food freedom was the best thing that happened to me. I no longer fall to pieces in a restaurant or on holiday. Eating is no longer a stressful experience. I love food for all the things the eating experience gives us—connection, chats, family, and friends. I hope you can too.

  • Disordered Eating: What We Need to Understand and How to Heal

    Disordered Eating: What We Need to Understand and How to Heal

    “Food can distract you from your pain but food cannot take away your pain.” ~Karen Salmansohn

    Long before I was watching The Biggest Loser (a popular weight loss reality TV series) and trying to look like a swimsuit model, I was hiding in my closet eating candy, fiercely addicted to sugar.

    I remember feeling completely out of control over my cravings for all things sweet, and I didn’t know how to stop myself from eating until I felt sick. Food played a bigger role in my life than simply to support the processes in my body that lead to optimal health. To my “child self,” who wasn’t sure the world was a safe and welcoming place, food was a lifeboat.

    No little kid imagines, “Oh, it would be fun to starve myself and see what happens!” Or enjoys waking up in the middle of the night to work out for hours for the reward of being “loved” by those around them. But when faced with adversity in childhood, our number one goal is to survive, and in order to do so, we look for ways to reassure ourselves that we have some element of control.

    I grasped for anything I could to create a sense of agency and stability in my life, but at the cost of disconnecting from my inner wisdom and abandoning the core of who I was created to be. I was trying to survive by becoming less. Less of myself, less visible to the world around me, while at the same time crying out to be seen.

    As you consider your own childhood experiences with food, notice any emotions that come forward. How old were you? What was the backdrop in which these early experiences with food occurred?

    As I reflect on my own food story, I see how my emotional pain and a complicated relationship with food became intertwined. It was one of the only levers I could pull to manage the chaos both in my home and within myself.

    What appeared on the surface as a “fear of food” was in truth a fear of feeling. Feeling meant facing the ache of growing up in a home where strong emotions were suppressed, intuition ignored, and many conversations critical for the healthy maturation process of an adolescent, avoided.

    For example, any discussion around the topic of sexuality and what it meant to embody and express mine, was considered “taboo,” and shameful in the highly religious culture of my upbringing. Therefore, it is no coincidence my disordered eating patterns surfaced in tandem with my body’s transition into puberty.

    The changes in my body, at that time, felt terrifying, and the disordered eating served as an attempt to shut down the process of sexual maturation—a means to avoid the shame of being “sexual.”

    In my rehabilitation process from anorexia, bulimia, and orthorexia I found again and again that behind a binge, purge, or restrictive behavior was often a deep emotional pain I felt ill-equipped to meet and care for in a healing manner.

    Disordered eating was “pain-management.” Albeit not the most effective strategy for coping with distress, but it was the one I knew inside and out.

    The first time I recall recognizing disordered eating as a way to handle emotional turmoil, I was sitting in therapy feeling guarded and hesitant to believe that the healing answers lived anywhere in that room. I didn’t fully understand why I was there, aside from being told it was the “right” thing to do to get professional help.

    The therapist looked at me with concern in her eyes and asked, as if the answer should be simple, “Why are you so afraid of food? Why the eating disorder?”

    Now, I’d been asked that question by many well-meaning, worried adults before, but on this day, I felt an unexpected flood of emotion rise within, and fighting back tears, I replied,

    “I’m not afraid of food. I’m afraid my parents will divorce.”

    The moment the words left my mouth, I realized the question my heart had been desiring for someone to ask all along was: “Why the pain?”

    Think back to your childhood home and the role food played, beyond physical sustenance.

    Was food a reward for good behavior?

    Did food cause fights between your parents (i.e., one parent burns dinner, and the other explodes in anger)?

    Was food used as a way to “regulate” you—help you “calm down,” feel comforted when you were sad, or numb pain?

    When you faced challenges, was food more available than the ears of the adults in your life?

    Did you feel safe in your childhood home to express internal pain?

    Furthermore, if you grew up in an intense emotional climate, and your primary caregivers lacked the level of consciousness, and resources, to support you in learning healthy emotional regulation, food might have been the only “state-changer” (the only thing to take the edge off painful experiences) available. Food was your therapy.

    Emotions ended up being “fed” instead of felt. Eating became a way to cope with the feelings that seemed out of control in your life. Instead of fueling your body with the building blocks required for healing, you ate to numb your pain.

    Hear me when I say, there is no shame if you find yourself here—if you’re still stuck in the cycle of using food to survive your own emotional experience. You’re worthy of self-compassion—to be able to look back at your younger self and appreciate the ways you managed the pain you faced, with the resources you had. Whole-body rehabilitation starts by offering gentleness toward oneself.

    Another critical component of healing is giving yourself permission to have the conversations with yourself that, as a child, you didn’t or couldn’t have with others, but longed to. Doing so aids in establishing a “safe” environment within yourself for healing to flow. Set yourself free to explore any and every question that feels important to you.

    As I mentioned earlier, for me one such conversation was around what it meant to be a sexual being. For you this might mean exploring the confusion you felt when your parents split and the challenges you faced adjusting to new blended family dynamics, the loneliness you experienced as a child because it was hard for you to make friends, or a sense of shame about your family’s socioeconomic status.

    And if it was normal in your family of origin to bury and suppress half of the emotional spectrum, as it was in mine, especially the feelings that are uncomfortable, that require deeper self-inquiry, think about whether this culture aligns with your core values, now.

    What culture do you desire to cultivate for your future self around navigating emotional pain? This is your opportunity to excavate a new tunnel from which to travel from emotional pain to healing, for you and generations after you!

    Right now, you have an opportunity to build trust with yourself by committing to allowing every emotion to be experienced. What is one emotion that you believed as a child was “off limits?” What would change today if you allowed yourself to experience that emotion—to permit its flow through you?

    Listen to the little voice within you, with your heart wide open. Witness yourself. Be the listening ear you longed for when things first got “complicated” with food. Only then can you ask your younger self if they’re ready to entertain some alternative strategies, besides food, to help scary emotions move through the body.

    And when you are ready, here are some of the beautiful practices I have found on my own healing journey, that aid in building a space where the body feels free to release big feelings:

    1. Jin Shin Jyutsu- Finger Holding Practice

    This Japanese healing technique works to calm your energetic body. The practice involves holding each finger for one to three minutes on one hand, then repeating on the other hand. Each finger represents a different emotion:

    Thumb- Worry

    Pointer Finger- Fear

    Middle Finger- Anger

    Ring Finger- Insecurity and grief

    Pinkie- Self-confidence

    2. The 4-7-8 Breath or “Relaxing Breath”

    One benefit of this breath practice is its ability to strengthen “vagal tone.” The Vagus Nerve is the longest group of nerves in the body, running from your brain to your gut, and it is a key component in the activation of your parasympathetic nervous system—the branch of the autonomic nervous system that promotes the resting, digesting, and repairing in the body. Improving vagal tone can play a role in reducing stress and anxiety as well as:

    • Improve digestive health
    • Increase HRV (Heart Rate Variability)
    • And lower levels of inflammation in the body

    3. Walking outside barefoot

    Reconnecting to our roots, putting feet to earth, and absorbing the healing nutrients it has to offer can do a world of healing. When you put your bare feet on the earth, the electrical current coming from the ground contains an abundance of negative ions that are then absorbed by your skin and dispersed throughout the body. These negatively charged ions have been shown in clinical research to promote greater physical and psychological well-being.

    Try one or all of the techniques listed above to reconnect to your emotional body, ground yourself, and release stuck feelings. Notice any shifts you experience as a result.

    The goal is to start to create an environment of safety for your inner child to explore the previously forbidden emotions, without fear of abandonment or shame.

    No different from any other coping strategy, disordered eating can be a means to try to create the safety within that we lacked in our outside world early on in life. But there are other interventions, such as the ones mentioned above, that can offer a sense of safety without harm.

    Recovering from disordered eating comes back to finding healing ways to be there for your emotions, rather than numb them with food restriction, binging, or purging. Because it’s really not about the food at all. It’s about becoming the friend your body longed for in your most painful moments.

    Give your body a safe place to express, let go, and experience, without judgment, the total expanse of feelings that come with being human, and watch your relationship with food transform as a side effect.

  • The Surprising Strategy I Used to Stop Bingeing (and Why It Worked)

    The Surprising Strategy I Used to Stop Bingeing (and Why It Worked)

    “Sometimes the thing you’re most afraid of doing, is the very thing that will set you free.” ~Robert Tew

    I recovered from binge eating and bulimia by giving myself permission to binge. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

    My decades-long weight and food war started in my teens, immediately after reading my first diet book, about Atkins, to be exact. I spent the following two decades trying to lose weight (only to keep gaining) and struggling with food.

    By my early thirties, I’d finally managed to lose weight, but it hadn’t end the war, it had just started a new one. The war to try to keep the weight off and transform my body even further.

    Thus began the decade of my “fitness journey.” I became an award-winning personal trainer and nutrition wellness coach and even a nationally qualified, champion figure athlete.

    The weight and food war continued through it all.

    I was introduced to clean eating by a trainer I hired before I became one myself. Four days into my first attempt at clean eating, I was bulimic—bingeing out of control then starving myself and over-exercising to try to compensate. Within eight months, I was officially diagnosed.

    Bingeing to the point of feeling like I may die in my sleep became common, and I realized I had two choices: potentially eat myself to death or heal. I chose the latter.

    I sensed that understanding what was driving those behaviors was the key to learning to change it all, so I decided to get busy learning just that.

    And I recognized that meant I had to stop obsessing over (and hating myself for) my food choices. They were not the problem; they were the symptom of whatever was going on in me that was driving those behaviors.

    So I gave myself full permission to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.

    I even gave myself permission to binge as much as I wanted.

    And I slowly started bingeing less and less. Now it’s been years since I have—the drive is just completely gone.

    I know permission to binge sounds crazy, but has trying to force yourself not to binge or eat “bad things” been working? Is trying to judge, control, criticize, restrict, and shame your way to “eating right” and/or health and happiness working?

    If so, carry on. But if what you’ve been doing hasn’t been working, stay with me while I explain two reasons why permission is so vital, and the helpful versus unhelpful way to practice it.

    Why Is Permission So Vital?

    Permission to eat whatever we want helps reverse two of the biggest reasons we eat self-destructively: restrictions and self-punishment.

    Food restriction (the rules around what we think we should or shouldn’t be eating) caused my cravings, overeating, and even bingeing.

    Science has shown that food scarcity/restriction activates a millennia’s old survival instinct in our brains that triggers cravings, compulsions, and even food obsessions until we “cave.”

    Self-punishment contributes to bingeing because we treat ourselves how we believe we deserve to be treated.

    We’ve been taught that certain foods are good and create “good” bodies, and that certain foods are bad and create “bad” ones. We’re taught that we are what we eat, and to judge weight gain or eating “bad” things as failure, that we are good or bad depending on what we eat and what size we are.

    We punish ourselves by trying to restrict even more, or we go in the other direction and overeat the things we keep telling ourselves we’re not supposed to have, which fuels the cycle.

    How can you want to make nurturing or nourishing choices for yourself when you’re hating, judging, shaming, and criticizing yourself? You can’t.

    That thought, “Oh well, you already screwed up, you may as well eat the rest and start again tomorrow”—that all or nothing thinking, the bingeing, the self-sabotaging—it’s being driven in large part by those two things: restriction and self-punishment.

    Full permission, even to binge, helps start to shift both.

    It stops the feelings of scarcity around certain foods (so they lose their allure), and it helps improve the relationship you have with yourself (so you’re no longer judging and berating yourself for eating “bad things”).

    Now, you may be thinking, but Roni, eating whatever I want got me into this mess. I can’t be trusted to just eat whatever I want.

    Here’s where the biggest lie of all has steered us in such a toxic direction: the idea that our natural compulsion is to “be bad” and eat all that bad stuff is bull.

    We’re not born into bodies that naturally want to eat in ways that make them feel like garbage. We’re not even born into bodies that are “too lazy to exercise.” I call bull on all that too.

    We’re born into bodies that know how to eat and naturally want to move. We’re born into bodies that want to feel good and are actively working to try to keep us healthy 24/7.

    But we’re actively taught to ignore or disconnect from them, and we get so good at ignoring and disconnecting from our bodies’ natural cues that we can’t even hear them anymore.

    We learn patterns of thinking and behaving that get programmed into our brains and end up driving our choices, rather than the natural instincts we were born with.

    It’s not your natural instinct to chow down on a whole bag of potato chips just because they’re there. Nor is it your natural instinct to ignore your body’s cry for some movement. Those are learned behaviors.

    By the time we get to adulthood, the ways we eat, think, and live just become learned patterns of behavior—that can be changed when you stop trying to follow other people’s rules and start understanding how you got where you are.

    When you spend your life stuck in that “on track” versus “off track” cycle you’re completely disconnected from yourself, your body, and what you actually want and need.

    The two things that are driving you and your choices when you live in that place are either:

    1) learned patterns of thoughts and behaviors from old programming (when you’re “off track”)

    or

    2) fear and other people’s rules about what you think you should be doing (when you’re “on track”)

    Neither have anything to do with you—with what you, at your core, actually need or want.

    By giving yourself full permission to eat what you want, when you want (yes, even permission to binge) you’re given space to reconnect with yourself and what’s best for you.

    What You Think Permission Is Vs. What It Actually Is

    There are two ways to do this whole permission thing: the way you think you’re doing it when you’re “off track” and the helpful way.

    Typically, when we “fall off track” or binge, we start “allowing ourselves” all the foods we can’t have when we’re on track, but the whole time we keep telling ourselves it’s okay because when we get back on track, we won’t have it anymore. Then we feel bad and guilty the whole time.

    That’s not permission, it’s a clear example of the food restriction/self-punishment cycle that fuels feeling out of control around food/overeating or bingeing.

    How? It’s restrictive and punishing. We know at some point we won’t be “allowed” to have it anymore—ya know, when we start “being good”—and since we’re already “being bad” we may as well just eat all of it, then we end up not feeling great.

    That’s a food restriction/punishment fueled diet mindset that perpetuates those old patterns.

    True permission means losing all the food rules and judgments. I know it sounds scary and wrong, but it really is key to learning to want to eat in ways that serve you and hearing your body when it tells you what makes you feel your best.

    Begin noticing the things you’re saying to yourself around your food choices and start noticing how the foods you’re eating make you feel after you eat them.

    Do you feel energetic and good when you eat that thing, or do you feel bloaty, lethargic, and sick? How do you want to feel?

    If you’re eating lots of things that are making you feel the latter, just notice that, get curious about why, and most importantly, extend yourself compassion and kindness.

    The next time you’re about to eat something that you know makes you feel terrible, remember how it made you feel last time and ask yourself, do you really want to feel that way right now?

    If you think, I don’t care, ask why? Why do you not care about treating yourself and your body well? Don’t you want to feel good? If you keep hearing, I don’t care, that’s a sign more digging is likely required, but permission is still where you start.

    Notice how often through the day you judge yourself for eating something you think you shouldn’t. How does that judgment affect the choices you make next?

    Remind yourself that what you eat doesn’t determine your worth, and you’re an adult. You’re allowed to eat whatever you want.

    Giving myself permission to eat whatever I wanted, even to binge, was the first step toward a binge-free life because it helped me learn to change the biggest reasons I was bingeing in the first place: destructive thoughts, habits, and behaviors that were caused by food restriction and self-punishment.

    It’s how you start learning to end the food war, to trust yourself and your body, to stop feeling out of control around food, and to start making choices that make you feel your best, because you deserve to feel your best.

  • Freedom from Food – This Time for Good!

    Freedom from Food – This Time for Good!

    “Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.” ~Eckhart Tolle

    I cannot say that I didn’t struggle in my life. But there’s one area in which I have overcome the challenges I was facing with hardly an effort: letting go of the eating disorder I was suffering from, getting rid of the extra weight I was carrying, and maintaining the results easily for twenty-eight years.

    How Did I Do That?

    In a minute I’ll tell you exactly how I did that and how you can do it too. But first let me take a moment to explain what exactly I was dealing with.

    As a child I always loved to eat and ate quite a lot, but though I wasn’t skinny I was always thin.

    At around fifteen I developed an eating disorder. I usually say that I suffered from bulimia, but when I read the symptoms, I’ve realized it might have been a binge eating disorder.

    I would eat a huge amount of food one day in a short period of time, and the next day I would start an extreme diet plan that I never managed to maintain for long. On one occasion I managed to maintain such a diet plan for several months until my period stopped and my hair started falling out.

    I would rarely vomit. Firstly, because it took a couple of years until I found out it was possible, and secondly, because it made my eyes red and swollen.

    But I think the exact diagnosis is not that important. In any case, I was suffering. And I’m sure you can relate, because even if you are not diagnosed with an eating disorder, you might still be struggling with endless cycles of dieting and overeating.

    (You may not be calling your eating plan “a diet,” since today it’s fashionable to say “I simply eat healthy” instead. But all those healthy *and strict* eating plans are ultimately diets, and like any diet, they eventually drive us to binge eating.)

    Why Did This Happen to Me?

    Concurrent with the development of my eating disorder I struggled as a teenager with bullying for six years.

    As an adult, when thinking about what happened, I used to say that eating was a distraction from my feelings. This is not entirely wrong; however, over time I’ve realized that this was not the main cause of my problem.

    My mother struggled most of her life with obesity and for years she tried all sorts of diets, without success.

    When I was in the seventh grade, she became concerned that I was eating too much. “If you keep eating so much, you’ll end up being fat like me,” she repeatedly told me.

    As a consequence, I came to believe that I inherited her tendency to be overweight and thus shouldn’t eat certain kinds of food. And because I had a hard time resisting the temptation, I started eating in secret and eventually developed an eating disorder and gained weight.

    The Big Shift

    Toward the age of twenty-three I woke up one morning with the understanding that not only did I think about food all day long, my efforts to overcome my weight problem didn’t get me anywhere.

    That morning I decided I would never diet again, even if it meant being overweight my entire life. I also decided that the foods that made me break my diet time and time again would become an integral part of my menu.

    For instance, from that day on, for many years my breakfast consisted of coffee and cookies (and that wasn’t the only sweet thing I ate that day).

    Once the burden of dieting was removed from my life, I no longer felt the irresistible urge to finish a whole block of chocolate like before. I knew I could eat chocolate today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and so on; and thus, I got to the point where I had chocolate at home and didn’t touch it—something I couldn’t imagine before.

    During the following year my weight has balanced and to this day, twenty-eight years later, I am thin and maintaining a stable body weight.

    I still think quite a lot about food, but not obsessively, only because I enjoy it so much. I also eat quite a lot, by estimation between 1700-2000 calories a day (I don’t count). I love healthy food but also enjoy unhealthy foods, and I never feel guilty for something I ate; in the worst-case scenario I suffer from a stomachache or nausea.

    The Principles That Gained Me My Freedom

    1. No food is the enemy.

    Contrary to popular belief, no food by itself has the power to create addiction, ruin your health (unless you are suffering from a specific medical condition), or make you instantly fat. However, many people have gotten extremely rich by convincing you otherwise.

    Obviously, the main part of your diet should be healthy, yet the bigger problem than eating unhealthy food is stressing, obsessing, and loathing yourself for doing so!

    If you can’t control yourself in front of a certain food, allow yourself to eat it only when you are outside or buy it in small packages.

    2. No food is strictly forbidden.

    When we forbid ourselves from a certain food, we inevitably develop an uncontrollable desire for it, and eventually find ourselves helplessly bingeing it.

    When we allow ourselves to eat whatever we crave, as I did with sweets, the day that we don’t feel like eating the food we couldn’t resist before, or desire it only once in a while, will surely come.

    The reason why this idea seems so unrealistic to most people is due to what I’ll describe next.

    3. Give yourself permission.

    The secret of my success was that I really allowed myself to eat whatever I want for the rest of my life.

    While people sometimes say that they give themselves permission to eat certain foods, they are still driven by fear of these foods and by the belief that they shouldn’t be eating them.

    While “enjoying” their freedom, in their minds they say to themselves, “tomorrow I’ll get back on track.” (Tomorrow, in this context, can mean the next day or “as soon as I can.”)

    And as long as this is their state of mind, they’ll be impelled to eat as much as possible of the forbidden food today.

    4. Stop treating yourself as an emotional eater.

    According to the urban legend about emotional eating, a “normal” person should only eat when they are hungry, only healthy food, never eat for pleasure only, and never reach a sense of fullness.

    Anything but this is emotional eating.

    But this is a complete deception, and if you hold onto it, you’ll forever be dieting and bingeing and will always feel that something is wrong with you.

    I often eat a bit too much or things that are not so healthy. I eat not only according to my needs but also for pleasure. And if I overdo it, nausea, stomachache, and a feeling of heaviness remind me that I need to regain balance.

    I’m not saying that overeating has no emotional motive; I’m just saying that this idea has gone way too far.

    5. Follow your own guidance.

    I can promise you that as long as you eat according to someone else’s plan, or according to any strict plan, over time your efforts will be futile.

    Rules such as “You must eat breakfast,” “three (or six) meals a day,” “Chew each bite thirty times,” “Never eat in front of the TV,” or, “Don’t eat after 7pm,” will only stand between you and your natural instincts and enhance fear and self-judgment.

    I eat fast, mainly in front of the TV, I eat small portions every one to three hours, I eat late at night—and that’s fine for me.

    So listen to yourself and learn through trial and error what works best for your body.

    6. Be honest with yourself.

    Often people say things like, “I’ve forgotten to eat,” “I’m never hungry before 4pm,” or, “one modest meal a day totally satisfies me.”

    They insist so strongly it’s the truth that they manage to deceive even themselves. But only for a while. Eventually their natural hunger and satisfy mechanisms reveal the truth, and again they find themselves bingeing.

    So don’t play games with yourself. It might work in the short term, but it keeps you in the loop of weight fluctuations and obsessive thinking about food in the long term.

    7. Do not waste calories on something you don’t like.

    If you insist on eating something you don’t want to, you’ll find yourself craving what you really desired and eventually eating it in addition to what you already ate.

    8. Be physically active.

    Being physically active boosts your metabolism and immune system and supports your emotional and physical well-being.

    Sometimes, however, people set a trap for themselves when they push themselves too far with exercising, and thus, after a while they can’t endure it anymore and ultimately quit.

    Instead, be as active as you can and in the way that best suits you. That will serve you much better in the long term.

    9. Focus on reaching a balance.

    Your ideal body weight might be a bit higher than the one you desire. But remember, insisting on reaching a certain body weight that is beyond your natural balance will cost you your freedom and keep you in the vicious circle of dieting and bingeing.

    Last but Not Least…

    The concept I’ve offered here won’t make you lose weight overnight. It took me a year to lose the excess twenty-two pounds I was carrying. And if you have more weight to lose it might take a bit longer.

    But if you feed it well, without driving it crazy with constant fluctuations between starvations and overeating, over time your body will relax and balance itself, this time for good.

  • How to Befriend Our Unhealthy Survival Mechanisms

    How to Befriend Our Unhealthy Survival Mechanisms

    “Wounded children have a rage, a sense of failed justice that burns in their souls. What do they do with that rage? Since they would never harm another, they turn that rage inward. They become the target of their own rage.” ~Woody Haiken

    Survival mechanisms are ways of being that we picked up along the way to help us cope with what was happening in our reality.

    Getting mad at ourselves for doing what we do only promotes self-hate. We’re not bad or wrong; in fact, we’re pretty damn intelligent. We found ways to help us soothe our traumas, hurt, and pain and perhaps get love and attention. That’s pretty intelligent, wouldn’t you say?

    I should just stop eating so much, drinking alcohol, smoking, exhausting myself through compulsive exercise, being busy, procrastinating, people-pleasing, etc. Easy peasy—just stop, right? Not when we have an “internal fight.”

    What do I mean? Part of us believes it needs to do these things in order to feel safe or be loved and accepted by others. That’s why they’re called “survival mechanisms.” That part of us doesn’t understand logic and reason; it understands emotions and feelings.

    It has a need to be loved and feel protected and safe, and it uses these things to get these needs met. Letting go is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. Pretty damn scary, eh?

    That’s what happens internally: the fear of letting go consumes us, and most often appears as an anxious feeling; then we pick up our survival mechanism again to soothe that feeling. It’s like running on a hamster wheel but not really getting anywhere.

    When I was little, I used food to cope with the environment I was living in. I was constantly told I was bad and wrong, and food helped soothe my feelings of insecurity. It actually became an obsession and the only thing I cared about.

    My whole focus in life became how I could get food to comfort me. I was teased for being fat from the popular girls, and I heard it at home from my father calling me “fatty, fatty two by four.”

    I didn’t know what was going on at the time; all I knew was that eating was all I wanted to do. Then, when I was thirteen, my doctor told me to go on a diet, and at age fifteen I entered my first hospital for anorexia.

    For the next twenty-three years of my life, anorexia, my coping mechanism, became the only thing I cared about, and I also had sub-symptoms like anxiety, cutting, and depression.

    I was existing but not living. My days and nights were consumed by trying to cope with life through eating and exercise. What a life, eh?

    I thought I was protecting myself, but really, I was living in a prison; I was the prison guard and the prisoner of my own creation. But I couldn’t stop; it was like this ‘thing’ had a hold on me.

    I cried and cried for it to go away, but it took control of my life every day. I wanted someone to save me from this thing, but the more I tried to let go, the more it had a hold.

    Even after twenty-three years of therapy and hospitals and treatment centers, it was still my savior.

    So, how did it finally let go? I took my healing into my own hands. I was determined to experience happiness, love, and inner peace.

    This was a process, not an overnight fix, but I started healing the unresolved issues that caused me to not feel safe, understanding my survival mechanisms’ purpose for me, and loving and accepting myself unconditionally. By doing so, the anorexia, anxiety, cutting, and depression no longer needed my attention, and I released those symptoms. 

    You see, that thing that had a hold on me, it was really my friend; it was my protector, and it worked until it no longer did. So instead of trying to get rid of it, I integrated it. Now it didn’t need to pick up another survival mechanism; instead, we became loving friends.

    Unhealthy coping mechanisms don’t free us; they’re just a way to numb our trauma, hurt, and pain, but they also keep us from truly living.

    By understanding what we’re trying to cope with instead of running or numbing, we’re able to see what we really need, get those needs met, and experience inner peace. This is called loving re-parenting. Because that’s what loving parenting looks like: offering kindness, understanding, compassion, and caring instead of judgment, criticism, and abandonment.

    Trying to get rid of a symptom—like overeating, cutting, or smoking—is fighting against our own biology. By making peace with it, by listening with compassion and understanding, we can help that part of ourselves get its needs met, and most often the symptom naturally goes away.

    This is how I’ve been able to free myself from the symptoms that had a hold on me, and here’s a way for you to get started today, if this resonates.

    1. Move into acceptance of who you are and what you’re experiencing. Replace judgment with compassion, knowing that you’re doing the best you can with what you know today, and you’re learning and growing as you go.

    2. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and imagine you’re talking with your unhealthy survival mechanism.

    3. Ask it, “Why are you here? What’s your purpose?”

    4. Ask it what it needs so it no longer has to get your attention through the symptoms you’re having.

    For example, the part of you that’s binge eating may let you know it needs a safe place to process and express your feelings, somewhere that you’re seen, heard, loved, and accepted unconditionally. It may also let you know that it’s time to learn how to set healthy boundaries.

    Or the part of you that’s experiencing depression may let you know that it’s tired of trying so hard to meet other people‘s expectations of how you should be, and it’s time for you to honor yourself and find ways to get your needs met so you don’t feel so powerless.

    For any “symptom,” it may also be helpful to understand secondary gain. Ask yourself, “How is being this way getting me love, attention, and someone to take care of me so I don’t have to take personal responsibility or fail as a human being?”

    5. Find ways to get your needs met. Tell yourself, “I give myself permission to take loving care of myself and do good things for my body and health. I am loved. I am safe.”

    6. Practice consciousness, which is becoming aware of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. This allows us to see what’s really going on internally that may be asking for compassion, love, healing, and a new understanding.

    When we ask ourselves, “Why am I thinking, feeling, and acting this way?” we may become aware of core beliefs like “I’m unlovable” or “I’m unworthy.” It’s because of these core beliefs that we’re feeling, thinking, acting, and perceiving the ways we are. Of course we’d treat ourselves badly if we believe we’re fundamentally bad.

    When we understand what the driver really is, we can start healing the childhood wounds that created those beliefs and then shift how we see ourselves. By doing so, we naturally start to think, feel, and act differently.

    —

    This is a process, and it’s different for everybody. The key is to be compassionate and loving with whatever you’re experiencing and to remember that there’s nothing wrong with you. Even if you’re experiencing “symptoms” that seem unacceptable to society, the truth is you’re a beautiful, valuable, lovable being who deserves to heal and is worthy of a wonderful and fulfilling life journey.

  • Overcoming a Negative Body Image: 4 Things to Remember

    Overcoming a Negative Body Image: 4 Things to Remember

    TRIGGER WARNING: This post deals with an account of anorexia and may be triggering to some people.

    “You will never be free until you free yourself from the prison of your own false thoughts.” ~Philip Arnold

    I really don’t remember my life before anorexia. I think back to my early teenage years when I ate peanut butter sandwiches and drank hot chocolate without a single thought of how many calories I had consumed. There was no guilt, no worry, no need for perfection. How I wish I could get those carefree moments back.

    A few years ago anorexia completely distorted my perception of myself. All it took was one seemingly innocent comment from my classmate: Haven’t you gained weight recently? From that moment on, I no longer saw a healthy, fit person when I looked into the mirror. All I saw was an imperfect body.

    Meticulous calorie counting, diet restriction, and exercise time logging began to fill day after day. I wasn’t living as a human, but rather as an engineer treating my body as a machine. I loved myself for every pound I lost, every piece of clothing that felt a bit looser, and every little bit of food I managed to leave on my plate.

    I felt like a crazy person because my reasonable self knew that I shouldn’t be starving myself and exercising ridiculous number of hours every single day. I knew exactly what was wrong with me except there was nothing wrong.

    Somewhere in the evolution of the illness, I lost control. I ate one apple a day, drank only water, ran ten miles every morning, did squats and push-ups while studying, and paced in my room instead of sleeping. Nobody asked any questions, so I didn’t provide any answers.

    And then one day I was finally rewarded with my target weight glowing on the scale. I had done it! The hard work had paid off and I was free. Or so I thought. The control I now had over my body was deceiving. Once I reached my target weight, I couldn’t stop. The rush was too inviting. Every extra pound lost felt like a victory.

    You Don’t Notice You’re Losing Control Until It’s Lost

    When I looked into the mirror, I saw my ribs with their thinly stretched coating of papery skin, and every single hump of the spine as I bent over. People began to whisper. The doctors told me that I wouldn’t survive if I didn’t start eating. But I was proud. Every comment about how skinny I was felt like an accomplishment. My insecure self was at rest only when I met all so high standards I set for myself. It felt like a prison I couldn’t get out of.

    The prison was in my head. If at some point I was controlling everything related to food and body image, now I had lost control and the illness controlled me.

    I was hungry, cold, tired, and unable to pick myself up. The voice inside my head was telling me that nothing I did was good enough. If I ate a salad, I shouldn’t have had it. If I went for a walk, I hadn’t walked far enough. I pushed my body to the point that I collapsed.

    Since I’m at a healthy weight now, people ask me how I overcame anorexia. The truth is that the recovery didn’t happen overnight, and not without relapses. It took a lot of tears and struggling, but eventually I stopped drowning. I chose to step out of my self-imposed prison, with the help of friends, family, and a counselor.

    I was fortunate enough to have the support of loving parents who were there when things were hard, when I wanted to give up because I felt too fat, when I needed somebody to remind me that recovery was worth it. And more importantly, that I was worth it.

    It was a taxing mental battle that still at times rages within me. The old eating disorder voice creeps up sometimes, but I now recognize that voice as irrational and destructive. I’m learning to ignore it. I’m learning to quit running away from myself.

    4 Things to Remember When You’re Under the Spell of a Negative Body Image

    Negative thoughts about your body consume you. They take and take and take. To recover, you essentially have to figure out who you are again. You have to build yourself up from the smallest bits of what you know of yourself. You have to differentiate yourself from the condemning voice. Here are some of the things I learned (and had to embrace) on my way to recovery.

    1. Not all thoughts are facts.

    The problem with a negative self-image is that it feels like a fact. You can easily convince yourself of something that is not true. Even at 5’7” and my lowest weight (ninety pounds), I believed that I needed to be thinner.

    I felt that my waist wasn’t slim enough, my arms weren’t toned enough, and my thighs weren’t narrow enough. My mind was a very thorough liar, and there was nothing anyone could say to convince me otherwise.

    If I hadn’t learned about these lies and how to discern them, I would probably never have gotten out of that vicious cycle.

    You might have a hard time discerning truth from lies in the beginning, so instead of questioning whether your thoughts are facts, ask yourself which ones serve you and which do not.

    Growing up with an athletic sister, most of my negative thoughts evolved around my body. I could objectively say that although I was very thin, I wasn’t particularly lean. So I signed up for a gym membership and started lifting weights.

    However, what was initially a constructive thought—that it would serve me to build muscle—turned into an obsession within a few months.

    I remember standing in a basement gym, pushing a heavy barbell above my head, when I realized I was crying. I let my tears roll down my cheeks and focused back on the barbell. I had to finish my workout. I was exhausted and hungry from all the workouts I put my body through every single day, but all I could think of were toned arms and washboard abs.

    I think I knew long before that day that my desire for a lean body was no longer serving me. However, I couldn’t stop exercising. I had to sweat. I had to feel my heart race. My life revolved around my fitness routines.

    I knew then I needed to challenge the thoughts that told me I wasn’t lean or fit enough, and adjust accordingly.

    That isn’t to say that I stopped working out altogether. There are days I still experience anxiety when I know I won’t be able to get to the gym. But any time a destructive thought about my not-so-toned body pops up, I remind myself this doesn’t serve me and do my best to let it go and focus on something more positive. I may not have the leanest body, but I am more than just my physique.

    2. Absolute control is an illusion.

    Eating disorders are all about control. Control issues with what goes into your body and what comes out of your body. It’s about exerting control over at least one aspect of your life. However, it’s an illusion. In fact, you may feel in control, but be very out of control. The more successful you are at exerting control over how much food you take in, the less control you actually have. The eating disorder and twisted ideals are controlling you.

    Right before I hit rock bottom, I was paralyzed with fear and crippled with anxiety. I needed the eating disorder. I needed the identity and illusionary control it gave me. If I felt I got everything under perfect control, I felt strong. Paradoxically, that’s when I ended up under the doctors’ and my parents’ supervision, with no control over my food intake.

    Letting go of control was the hardest part. I would be lying if I said I no longer struggle. However, I’m much better at reminding myself that the greatest control is in letting go of the need for it.

    3. Perfectionism is unattainable.

    Perfectionism goes beyond doing your best. It’s about setting extremely high standards that are unrealistic. In my perpetual quest for perfection, I believed I could meet those high standards. I strived for perfection in my studies, relationships, cleanliness, exercise, and diet. Mediocrity was unsatisfactory. It was all or nothing.

    Perfection is so addictive because it locks you into thinking that if you do everything perfectly, you can minimize the feelings of pain and judgment. But the truth is, you can’t. There will always be people in your life who judge you no matter what you do or what you say.

    The one thing you can do is to surrender. Accept that you are work in progress. Embrace all parts of yourself, even those that seem “imperfect” to you. Practice forgiveness and self-compassion. And most importantly, be patient. Adopting new patterns of thinking takes time, but the work is worth it.

    4. Food isn’t the enemy.

    The difficulty with negative body image is that it’s closely tied to weight (and therefore, food). But unlike a drug addict, you can’t avoid the trigger. You can’t simply avoid food for the rest of your life, although it is very tempting to adopt the mindset that the fewer calories you eat, the better.

    In that sense, healthy eating literally saved my life. Fueling my body with simple whole foods shifted my focus from calorie counting to nourishment. Instead of weighing myself several times a day, I focused on my health.

    At times, I still pay attention to how my clothes fit and how I look in the mirror, but food is no longer the enemy. It’s the means to achieve the good health we all find so radiantly beautiful—glowing skin, shiny hair, and a fit, strong body.

    Silencing the Voice

    Do I still struggle at times? Yes. However, when my negative thoughts and struggles reappear, I no longer let them run my life. I recognize them as something I must overcome. There are days that I have to make a conscious effort to eat and not panic when the scale shows an increase. But thankfully, I know the price of letting fear take over my life.

    I know that one day I’ll be able to step on the scale and not cringe at the numbers that appear in front of me. One day, I’ll be able to eat a meal without thinking about calories. One day, my mind will be completely free. Until that day, I keep silencing that voice.

  • Why We Can’t Have Healthy, Happy Relationships Without Self-Love

    Why We Can’t Have Healthy, Happy Relationships Without Self-Love

    Happy Couple

    “Worry about loving yourself instead of loving the idea of other people loving you.” ~Unknown

    Body image and self-love have been my biggest struggles. They’ve affected every area of my life, including relationships.

    I developed anorexia in high school after experiencing a number of losses in a short period of time.

    During my high school years I didn’t date much. I had a few boyfriends, but the relationships never progressed because I was afraid of intimacy, due to the fact that I was uncomfortable in my skin and didn’t like my body.

    I had body dysmorphia, thinking I was overweight when I wasn’t.

    Shortly after high school, I fell into the cycle of restricting and binge eating and used excessive exercise to purge my binges. I hated my body and was obsessed with making it smaller.

    About a year after graduating from high school, I entered a relationship with a guy who was very pushy and persistent.

    I now know that I never would have entered that relationship had I loved myself.

    I remember thinking he wasn’t my type, because he seemed cocky and consumed with his own looks, which actually made me feel uncomfortable. That turned into a five-year relationship.

    I looked to this guy for happiness but never got it. I remember so many days and nights of anger, unhappiness, and complete distress. I ignored my inner voice for a long time. I now know that true happiness comes from within, and no one outside yourself has the power to dictate how you feel.

    I remember when I first realized I was still struggling with disordered eating, and that binge eating was something others struggled with too. I started seeing a psychologist and I would lie to her about our relationship, as well.

    I stayed for too long because I didn’t have any self-esteem, and didn’t know where I would go or what I could do if I left. I didn’t love him. I don’t feel he loved me either, but I did love the idea of him loving me.

    I remember the first point at which I thought maybe I could live without him. From there, it took another year for me to leave.

    Once I did leave, I knew that I needed to work on myself before I could even think of entering another relationship. I needed to discover who I was, work on improving my body image, and learn to love myself.

    I stayed single for three years, which were filled with ups and downs. I eventually hit rock bottom with my disordered eating. That actually gave me the strength to pull myself out of that vicious cycle and helped me realize I needed to change my thoughts and mindset around my body and food.

    Over time, I learned to love and accept myself as I was. I practiced authenticity and vulnerability with others and eventually met the man of my dreams.

    You see, to be able to attract another emotionally healthy person, I had to first become emotionally healthy myself.

    Lack of self-love doesn’t only show up in people with eating disorders, either. Others may have different unhealthy coping mechanisms like drinking, drugs, social media, or a shopping addiction.

    The important part to understand is that if you struggle with loving yourself like I was, you won’t be able to have a healthy relationship until you can build one with yourself.

    So many people feel as though they are running out of time to meet the “one,” but it’s important to take the time to work on yourself instead of focusing on filling the void with another person. If not, you may fall into the trap of settling for less than you deserve, like I did.

    So how can we develop self-love?

    First, become aware of the thoughts and words you speak that are demeaning toward yourself.

    Next, focus on shifting those negative thoughts to a positive thought you can believe. Affirmations are great, but they won’t help if you don’t actually believe them. You can make the new thoughts progressive if you struggle with believing them.

    For example; instead of saying, “I love my body,” say, “I am working toward accepting, loving, and honoring my body.” It’s much easier to believe this when you are in the process of getting there.

    (For more helping taming your inner critic, check out this post, Create a Kinder Mind.)

    Also, try being vulnerable with others and share your imperfections. You will quickly realize that everyone goes through tough times and you are not alone, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of.

    Just be careful of sharing with the wrong people. Some people don’t get personal growth, or maybe your particular struggle, and they may say the wrong things or judge you.

    If this happens, just understand that they aren’t in the same place as you, and don’t let that stop you from being authentic with others. It will help you connect on a deeper level and find the people you want to surround yourself with in life.

    Take the time to figure out what your passions are and what lights you up in life. This will help you realize your worth comes from what’s on the inside, rather than what you look like or how much money you make.

    Once you start to change your thoughts, it’s much easier to make healthy lifestyle choices from a place of self-love.

    It’s easier to eat in a way that nourishes your body and soul.

    It’s easier to want to fit daily movement into your life, because it makes you feel good, not because you hate your body and you’re trying to change it.

    It’s easier to get to bed on time and get enough sleep every night.

    It’s also easier to choose which relationships benefit you and which ones do not.

    Self-love cascades into every area of your life, just like self-hatred does. You can choose which way to live, but I can guarantee the challenge of building self-love is well worth it.

  • What You Need to Do If You’re Struggling with an Eating Disorder

    What You Need to Do If You’re Struggling with an Eating Disorder

    “The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it.” ~C. C. Scott

    It starts accidentally.

    Addicts don’t plan to become addicted to a substance or behavior. It’s an invisible progression, a newly discovered way to feel peace, trust, and control.

    You don’t remember the day you became addicted—the day your addiction became your identity.

    You do, however, remember the relief of the first time your addiction helped you cope.

    Many bulimics remember in vivid detail the day their eating disorders started. Up until that moment, they suffered with chaotic home environments, low self-esteem, the inability to accept themselves, pressure, and feelings of powerlessness, confusion, and distrust.

    And then one day they throw up, without any intention of becoming eating disordered, or losing weight. They just did it.

    The instant after the purge is complete, a sense of peace and wholeness overcomes you. You feel powerful and in control. It results in a perverse but intense high and satisfaction.

    You decide maybe you’ll do it again. What’s one more time? It was so easy the first time anyway.

    And that’s how your addiction begins to infiltrate your mind, body, and spirit.

    Low self-esteem, suffering, and the inability to cope effectively are at the heart of all addictions.

    People with eating disorders also struggle with their identity—with establishing who they are and how that relates to what they want and the world outside.

    The addiction is an effective way to cope with life when you don’t understand your emotions; you have only a limited capacity for self-respect, and you don’t have healthy relationships with people.

    I was fourteen years old when I threw up on purpose for the first time. It was so easy. Too easy.

    It continued to be easy for a while. I lost thirty pounds in two months. I finally felt like I was popular, and I could eat anything I wanted and not get fat. I felt powerful. Stopping was out of the question.

    It was something predictable and comforting. It was dependable. It was my friend. (more…)