Disorder Eating Part 1: Based on the book "Surviving Disordered Eating"
Mindful Awareness: One of the hallmarks of disordered eating is eating while distracted, or eating to numb difficult or intense emotions. Eating is transformed from a physiological necessity rich with cultural and social meaning to a psychological coping mechanism with many negative side effects, including mindlessness. The most powerful way to get out of the mindless eating trap is to start paying attention to what, when, where, why, and how you eat. Mindful eating is a skill you can relearn. Following are some strategies to help you do so. Some of them involve food, and some of them do not, but the awareness you gain from any one of them will help with mindful eating. Mindful eating might very well be the most important skill presented in this blog. It will allow you to remember the purpose and meaning of eating: to nourish your body so that you can live your life. Disordered eaters can get so lost in their fear and worries about food, or in the numbing out trance induced by bingeing, that they forget all they were born knowing about how to eat: eat when you’re hungry and stop when you are satisfied. Relearning your innate sense of how to eat requires that you slow down, notice what you’re eating, notice how it feels in your body, and take special care to calm any anxieties or worries that arise. Following is how it is done: Gather your food. Take a moment to be grateful; think of something positive in your life. Have one to three bites of your food. Put your food and utensils down. Touch your napkin to calm anxiety. Take a sip of liquid; let it soothe you. Breathe more than once. Check in to see if you are stressed. If you feel stressed, take some more deep breaths and tell the stress it is not invited to this meal. Tune in to your body’s deep awareness of its needs: are you hungry, satisfied, or full? Turn your attention to a card or uplifting picture, if you are alone. In a social eating setting, express the need for kind conversation if topics turn negative. Enjoy more bites! Repeat, repeat, and repeat this mindful eating rhythm. Notice the negative judgments and harsh thoughts regarding food and your body that arise when you are eating. Choose to change those thoughts so that you can nourish yourself well. During mealtimes, be sure to eat while listening closely to your hunger, satiety, and fullness cues. If you have eaten mindfully, and find that you have truly had enough, but there is still some food on your plate, please remember: you don’t need to be a member of the clean-plate club if your body is telling you something different. You can either throw the food away, or put it in a container to save for another meal, if that is a safe recovery behavior for you. Either way, you do not have to eat it!
Self Care: For some reason, many people with eating disordered habits have learned to place everyone else’s care and needs ahead of their own, and then they end up depleted of energy, health, and peace. This empty, tired feeling can send them into disordered eating thinking and behaviors, hoping to feel replenished by them. Instead, they feel more drained. If this sounds like you, then it is time to put into place a good self-care routine. Doing so will actually allow you to be more effective in helping others because you’ll feel better yourself. One of the most difficult aspects of healing from disordered eating may be developing positive feelings about your body and its appearance. The normal, healthy connection between mind and body can be lost when you become so focused on calories in and out. The stress that develops, or that was there to begin with, interrupts your body’s inherent communication system, and can result in feelings of dissatisfaction, disgust, or even hatred. Trying to heal a body toward which you feel hate and anger will not work. Bodies—especially women’s bodies—can vary in how they feel and look over the course of a week, a month, a year, or a lifetime. Rather than cultivate feelings of anger and frustration about these inevitable changes, try learning to accommodate them with a more accepting attitude and actions. Mirrors can be tools for recovery or sabotage, depending upon your attitude when you look in one. You can focus on what you perceive to be the negative and set yourself up to turn to disordered eating behaviors, hoping they’ll change your perceptions. Or, you can choose to gaze at yourself with a different mindset, and loosen negative body image’s hold on your emotions and actions. Whenever you look at your reflection in a mirror or window, try saying one of these kind expressions to yourself, or out loud: “Okay, fine!” This phrase can help signify to yourself that you are okay, you are fine, and you are moving forward in your life regardless of what you see in the mirror. If you catch an unexpected glimpse of yourself in a mirror or other reflective surface and it surprises you in an uncomfortable way, use this phrase to move forward in your day and let it go. “Good to go!” This phrase is something you can think to yourself when you need to check to see that your clothes are clean and straightened, hair is fixed, face is washed, and teeth are clean. It is a statement of gentle appraisal and acceptance and tells you that you are ready to face the event, the day, and the life that is waiting for you. Even if you feel afraid to do so, get clothes that fit your body now, and don’t look back. By all means, get rid of the old clothes because they are not supposed to fit anymore. The person they fit before was dying from disordered eating and its deadly grasp. The sooner you get rid of the past and the clothes that represent the sickness and danger of it, the sooner you will be able to embrace and celebrate the new you! Often, the messages are specifically designed to increase your dissatisfaction with how you look so that you will want to go on a diet, buy cosmetics, purchase a magazine or book, watch a TV show, or visit a website. These messages, and their products, are not designed to help you love yourself or your life, even if they say they are. Their main purpose is to make money for someone, somewhere. And many of the images of the people featured in these messages have been digitally altered to impossible human proportions. This constant barrage of false beauty standards can have a toxic effect, and they are hard to escape. Often, however, far too much emphasis is placed on a particular number as being an “ideal” weight to strive toward. It will be important for your recovery efforts to create and maintain a new attitude about what you weigh, and what significance you place on that number. It is not easy to change a lifetime of messages you have received and believed about weight, but it is possible and worth the effort, if you want to break free from weight obsessions. If you have an eating disorder, or suffer from any type of disordered eating, it is likely that negative thoughts about yourself circulate through your brain nearly all the time. If you were to stop and really notice what that voice is saying, perhaps write it down or say it out loud, there is a good chance you’d be shocked by how mean, pushy, and critical that voice is.
