Change your mind

Regain your control and Never let your eating disorder steal your I

Has anybody ever said to you-JUST STOP IT! JUST EAT! JUST STOP EXERCISING!

To which you angrily replied-I CANT! IT'S NOT THAT SIMPLE! I CANT CONTROL IT!

Im going to let you in on a little secret. 

You can stop it, it is not that easy, but it is that simple and whether you want to believe this or not-You can control it.

So often I would feel powerless in my eating disorder behaviours, compelled to do them, no choice but to do them. Despite knowing that they werent good for me and at times not even wanting to do them. I still felt that I had to engage in them. I had to go for a walk, I had to leave food on my plate, I had to avoid social eating.

The reality is-I didnt have to engage in any of them. I didnt. After a few years in therapy and gaining knowledge of how my disordered behaviours were not working for me and building resentment towards them, I still felt compelled to do them. I couldnt understand why I felt the need to keep them in my life when logically, I knew they werent good for me and I didnt want them.

It took me years and years (and I am saying this to you in the hope of saving you wasting the time I did), it took me years to see that the having the knowledge that ed behaviours werent good for me, wasnt enough to stop my compulsion to do them. There were a few other elements I had to get a handle on in order to help me to stop doing the behaviours and to calm my compulsions.

1. Facing the feelings that would arise from not doing the behaviours (this was probably the scariest thing I had to face). I was afraid of emotions and doing the behaviours ensured for me that I would feel (or not feel) a certain way. They blocked an anxiety, they were my 'fix'. Obviously taking away that false 'fix' and making way for real emotions was a terrifying concept. Me?emotions?eating? all combined?
2. Being scared and not wanting to normalise my eating and exercising behaviours, does not mean I dont have to do it. As humans we are programmed to not do things we dont want to do (example being-it is very hard to get a child to go to bed when they dont want to, even though we know that they need the sleep).We have all heard the saying 'Feel the fear and do it anyway?!' If you are trying to recover from your eating disorder, I want you to really experience the resistance that comes with your attempts at changing your behaviours to more postitive, healthy behaviours and then break through it. And remember-just becasue you dont want to do the right thing, doesnt mean you dont need to. Want -vs- Need. Sometimes what we need is not what we want and sometimes what we want is not what we need.
3. Activation preceeds motivation. You need to DO the behaviours to WANT to do the behaviours. There is no point in saying 'I know eating carbohydrates is good for me' and then not actually eating them. This, my friends, is called 'talking the talk and not walking the walk'. I have been an absolute terror with this for a long long time. On first meeting with me, many people couldnt understand how I wasnt recovered because I knew it all! But I, like many others, was a talker not a do-er. So in order to recover, you have to actually DO WHAT YOU KNOW!!
4.  Perserverance is key. So you have eaten a good breakfast-pat on the back and go you! You feel like crap after it. So you contemplate skimping on lunch. Does that sound familiar? Does it sound useful? or does it sound a bit silly? You haev really tried hard to eat well at breakfast and then you are going to compensate for it by eating a smaller lunch. I know, trust me, I know, that it is not easy to keep going, one meal is hard enough as it is, but three? every day?-it is very very hard, but its not impossible. The only way to get through it and to get used to doing it is to keep doing, keep doing it, keep doing it. No, its not nice all the time! But if you keep taking one step forwad and two steps back...you are never going to get anywhere. If you choose to compensate (yes, you choose it) you will constantly end up coming up against a barrier, overcoming, stepping back over the barrier and maybe the one you hurdled before that and then having to jump over all those barriers again. Tiring? YES! It is easier in the longrun to just keep on going with positive normalising eating behaviours.

Moving on to the topic of YOU -VS- I

When you say I cant eat X

It is actually your eating disorder saying You cant have X

When you feel compelled to go for a run or to purge

That is actually your eating disorder saying 'You have to go for a run, you have to purge'

Now, I dont know about you, but I have always been quite a stubborn girl who doesnt like being told what to do. Yet, I have been letting my eating disorder tell me what to do for years. A helpful trick for me was and is, to talk back to my eating disorder. Whenever ed says 'Dont eat X' I ask him 'Why?' and I listen to his irrrational babble and then try to come up with a more rational perspective on the bulls*&T he is trying to tell me. Talking back to anorexia/ed/mia (whatever you call your eating disorder!), is a necessity in learning to make healthy decisions for yourself based on your needs and helpful towards YOUR life, rather than decisions influenced by the eating disorder who has been guiding you down a not so pretty path.