Tiny Buddha

Tag: eating disorder

  • How I Healed from an Eating Disorder and Stopped Hating Myself and My Body

    How I Healed from an Eating Disorder and Stopped Hating Myself and My Body

    “Quiet the voice telling you to do more and be more, and trust that in this moment, who you are, where you are at, and what you are doing is enough. You will get to where you need to be in your own time. Until then, breathe. Breathe and be patient with yourself and your process. You are doing the best you can to cope and survive amid your struggles, and that’s all you can ask of yourself. It’s enough. You are enough.” ~Daniell Koepke

    I remember looking at the nutrition information on the bag of jujubes I had just eaten and feeling utterly and completely disgusted with myself.

    That was my first binge. Little did I know how much worse it would get.

    It was four days in to the first official diet that I had somehow managed to stay on for more than one day.

    I had dieted on and off most of my life, but any time I tried a diet that told me what I was and wasn’t allowed to eat (Atkins was the first of many), I never managed to last longer than a day or two before I’d “blow it” and give up.

    Prior to the day of my first binge, I had actually lost a lot of weight on my own, simply by counting calories, but I hired a trainer because, while I reached my goal weight on my own, I still hated my body and wasn’t happy.

    So, I did the only thing I knew to do at the time—pay someone else to tell me what to eat so I could have a perfect body and finally be happy.

    Ha.

    I white knuckled my way through four whole days before I found myself at the grocery store feeling much like I’d imagine a junkie feels as their high begins to wear off. I needed a fix and was jonesing bad.

    The next day, I barely ate anything and ran for about two hours to punish myself for being such a pig the day prior.

    Within a few months, I was sitting in a therapist’s office hearing him call me bulimic while I bawled hysterically and begged him to tell me how to stop feeling so completely out of control with food.

    The harder I tried to control my intake, the more out of control I became.

    The more out of control I felt, the worse I felt about myself and treated my body.

    Depression, panic attacks, bingeing, and restricting/over exercising (those were my compensatory behaviors) took over my world.

    What was wrong with me? I wanted a perfect body so desperately; why couldn’t I just eat what I was supposed to eat?!

    I spent a lot of time with my therapist, and he never really gave me answer for what was wrong with me (beyond the eating disorder) or how to fix it.

    It just kept getting worse.

    My body would shake and I’d be so desperate to get into whatever food I had as fast as humanly possible that I’d usually end up eating an entire large bag of candy on the drive home before continuing to eat until I was sick once I got home.

    After awhile I started noticing that it literally felt like a hole in the center of my being that I was frantically trying to fill—unsuccessfully. No matter how much I stuffed in there, it just never ever felt full.

    What started with one small bag of candy turned into a monster inside me that I could not control. It morphed from a bag of candy to eating myself sick and ultimately feeling like I was killing myself with food. At my worst, there were nights when I had eaten so much I was legitimately scared I was going to have a heart attack in my sleep and wondered if I should go to ER.

    So I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I was desperate—desperate to not eat myself to death, but also desperate to find a way to stop so I could just have that perfect body and finally be happy.

    But as I read, I came to realize that my bingeing wasn’t about the food. The over exercising and starving myself to compensate for the bingeing, none of it was about the food or exercise.

    And my desperate need to have a perfect body, in order to be happy, wasn’t even about my body.

    It all had everything to do with how I felt about myself and my worth as a person.

    I hated myself and felt worthless.

    I didn’t think I was good enough for anything.

    And in that one moment of awakening, everything that was wrong in my life made complete sense.

    I finally knew why I was angry all the time—I was in pain.

    The starving, restricting, bingeing, and over exercising made sense—I was punishing myself.

    The obsessive ways I dove into everything, including food and exercise, were attempts to keep myself numb and not address the pain.

    I knew that if I ever had any hope of changing anything, I had to stop chasing the perfect body and start learning to love and value myself, which meant figuring out where the self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy were coming from.

    The first thing I had to do in my process of healing, recovery, and growth was to start learning to be forgiving of myself and treat myself with compassion. I had been living with excruciating emotional pain my entire life that I never allowed myself to even acknowledge, never mind deal with.

    My constant anger didn’t make me a b*tch or a horrible person; it was a symptom of someone who was hurting deeply.

    The initial weight problem that morphed into dieting/disordered eating and ultimately bulimia didn’t make me disgusting or weak; it was a symptom of someone who hated herself so badly she was punishing herself every day.

    Those realizations allowed me to start extending myself compassion for those things in me that I wasn’t proud of. They allowed me the space to start healing. Because you cannot change while you believe you deserve to be punished.

    I gave myself permission to eat whatever I wanted.

    I even gave myself permission to binge, and the weirdest thing happened—I began to do it less and less. Now I cannot remember the last time I binged. It’s been years.

    It sounds crazy, like the opposite of what we should do. Permission to binge?!

    But when I realized the purpose it was serving and stopped judging myself for it so I could work on actually healing the need it was filling, it all changed.

    You see, as long as we’re judging and hating ourselves, we’ll always feel like we’re bad and deserve to be punished. And as long as we believe we’re bad and deserve to be punished, we’ll never stop punishing ourselves.

    It came down to five basic mindset switches for me: permission, acceptance, compassion, kindness, and curiosity.

    Permission: It’s okay because I’m doing the best I can with what I know right now. When I learn how to better handle these feelings, I’ll make more loving choices for myself.

    Acceptance: It sucks pretty bad, but it’s my journey. For whatever reason, whatever I’m supposed to learn from this, this is the journey I’m supposed to be on.

    Compassion: How would I speak to a friend or client going through this? That’s how I started trying to speak to myself.

    Kindness: The worse I felt, the kinder I was to myself.

    Curiosity: I couldn’t just blindly give myself permission to binge forever without actively getting curious about why I was doing it. So, every time it would happen, I’d spend a lot of time asking myself why. How was I feeling? What feelings was I trying to keep myself from feeling? Was there a better way I could manage those feelings?

    Alongside making those changes I also worked on learning to love and value myself and change the stories I had been telling myself about who I was and what I was worth my whole life.

    So, dieting may have made me bulimic, but my obsession with finding happiness and self-acceptance by building a perfect body led me down a path of learning to love myself and create happiness from within.

    I am enough.

    And so are you. So give yourself permission, acceptance, compassion, and kindness, and get curious about why you do the things you do. Perhaps, like me, you’ll find this is the key to your healing.

  • 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.

  • 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…)