Are you the driven type? The person who does NOT have time for drama, ego cases, or divas (men or women)? I ran into a situation just yesterday that opened my eyes to a connection I have with my patients struggling with eating disorder recovery. Some of them have the same tendency I do to believe life is too short to keep people in their lives that feel toxic. You know the type. The ones who simply don’t get it. They have zero humility, egoes they will never earn, and no openness to feedback.
I also know what you’re thinking, too…
Why even ATTEMPT to continue communicating with them? Don’t I have WAY more important things to do? The answer is a definite YES. You don’t owe them anything, especially the reason you are cutting them out of your life.
Dude, I SO get you. This has become a pattern of mine in order to keep the pace of my life going at the velocity it does, but it never really felt quite right. It felt righteous, but not peaceful, if that makes any sense. I am so not ashamed to admit, that even though I cut a person out of my life, they seem to pervade my thoughts, as I think about how awful and wrong they are. So what’s the answer? How do I drop my own ego and embrace grace to ACTUALLY move on?
Below are some steps that have worked well for me:
1. Realize you’re bothered because at one time you were where they are.
I know it sounds weird, but no one would invade your thoughts or mind the way sticky people do if you didn’t share something in common with them. You either once shared the exact trait that bugs the Sh*t out of you, or your ego about “cutting them out” is WAY too similar to holding a grudge if you can’t actually let them go from your thoughts. This is where we have to back our little butts up, and “be humble, sit down.”
2. Think like a consultant.
If they were paying us to give them professional feedback, we’d most likely avoid the phrases, you’re a giant a$$hole with an ego the size of Texas. You’d actually think about HOW to present the real issues.
“Your communication style comes off as demeaning to others, and blinds others from seeing the big picture or intention they’d love people to see.”
“When you give directions without getting to know the other cohorts, it could lose you the deal, no matter how advantageous the proposal is.”
Think about professional feedback and articulate it in bullet points on a piece of paper before contacting them.
3. Understand you OWE it to them, because you owe it to yourself.
I know what you’re thinking. I don’t owe this piece of work ANYTHING! But you do. If you don’t get your thoughts gracefully off your chest, that person will stay with you indefinitely. The other side of this grace coin is that you were once in a place you could’ve used constructive professional feedback from someone who would be willing to deliver it in grace. Either someone did go out of their way to give you career saving feedback, or you sure wish they had in hindsight. The issue is that your own problem child probably only subconsciously knows there is a problem, and we all have issues we can’t see, that others do. Like spinach in your teeth, it can be uncomfortable to talk about, but in the end we are grateful someone was brave enough to tell us.
4. Talk to them.
As awesomely passive aggressive (and fun) as text is, grace does not live there. Pick up the phone and ask for a time you can actually talk to them about some issues you feel they could benefit from hearing about. Do this over the phone or in person, as text ALWAYS includes their worst fear that we are criticizing them. Your voice will show you care and that you do want to help them.
In conclusion if there is someone you THOUGHT you cut out of your life, but they still live in your mind, chances, you have too big of an ego to let them go without punishment, even if it’s just in your mind. The grace comes in the honest and genuine attempt to HELP someone the way you’d want to be helped. Be kind, be gentle, and understand, the absolute truth, set in professional terms is the only way, to allow them through your mind unharmed.
*If you need support NOW, BOOK a phone session with me!
Email me at: SRO@ScarlettRameyOfficial.com Or text me at: (206) 910-8690
If you are looking for more support in Recovery and Life, I would be honored if you became a Ramey Nutrition Insider.
You’ll find fun fun support tools and freebies in my first email!
If you’re into it, feel free to share this with any other people in your support circle that you KNOW need to hear these words!
Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️
Can you hold this for me? It’s a question children seem to ask ALL the time, and we as women tend to oblige, holding whatever it is, but as we get older, people don’t seem to have the same consideration as our kiddos. We get into lunches with girlfriends who just DUMP all over us, “expecting” us to hold their struggles and drama. All of a sudden, it becomes too much. How does this accidentally happen without us even noticing? Think about it, though, all the different things we “hold,” both literally and figuratively.
We hold our kids, we hold the worries and dreams of our loved ones, our partner’s stress, our parents’ fears. We hold the nagging voice that tells us we must always push harder and take on more responsibility. We hold giant issues such as how we can eat organic, while saving the planet, quit smoking and have that third child my partner wants. Is this only a woman thing? No, but I think we tend to take on more without consideration of our health and well being, on almost a default setting. Also, is this even dangerous? When we get to our breaking point we will just stop, right? Wrong! This is where the real problem lies.
As we hold our work schedules, the doctor appointments and extracurriculars, the volunteering and playdates and birthday parties, we get USED TO IT. We try and maintain this level of what has become normal and build on it. The real problem is that others now hold you to the same standard. Holding things that become too heavy eventually becomes your identity. You are now expected by yourself and the world to now hold all of this as well as your own shifting hormones, the sudden rages and sinking moods, the health scares and financial fears. The list never ends.
This also gets dangerous when we avoid asking for help. There is an assumption that everyone else we know is holding this much, too—if they’re not lugging even heavier loads. Then we pride ourselves for our own good fortune, for our immense privilege. “It could be so much worse,” we tell ourselves.
“Then why does it still feel so hard?” A small voices whispers back.
Wasn’t this the life you wanted? The life you chose: mom, wife, writer, friend?. Social media has lent itself to showing that everyone else is contentedly juggling all of this and more, while also trotting off on exotic vacations and making their families well-rounded, sustainably sourced meals, you get the picture. So what are you to do, and how do we reframe this feeling.
The easiest way to get a grip on how much help you could use and how unnatural it truly is to carry all that you’re carrying is to look at the children in your life, and imagine them having to carry all you’re expected to carry. Their light would suddenly dim and dull under the pressure. This helps put in perspective the enormity of all you’re carrying and can easily help you grasp why you too are dimming and dulling under the weight.
We easily teach young people around us how to say, “No,” and yet, have the most difficult time when it comes to ourselves. Self-care is such a buzz right now with yoga, massage, and “treat yoself.” Maybe we can get to the root of self care with getting real about what we can—and want to—hold, and what we need to set down. About the true size of our own mental arms.
Not everyone can take a hiatus from work, but we can say no to volunteering at our kids’ school, or to social media, or taking on that extra project at work that makes our chests constrict. Or better yet make it a logical exercise:
1. Make a list of all the things you feel you carry.
2. Cross out, 2 by 2, everything you don’t need to do.
3. Circle everything you could hand off to someone else if you needed to.
4. Underline the things that give you joy.
5. Give up 5 things you KNOW you don’t have to do, and, more importantly don’t WANT to do.
6. Repeat this exercise every week until you feel you’re carrying the things that give you vitality, energy, joy, and overall peace.
7. Repeat this exercise every week even AFTER that point.
*If you need support NOW, BOOK a phone session with me!
Email me at: SRO@ScarlettRameyOfficial.com Or text me at: (206) 910-8690
If you are looking for more support in Recovery and Life, I would be honored if you became a Ramey Nutrition Insider.
You’ll find fun fun support tools and freebies in my first email!
If you’re into it, feel free to share this with any other people in your support circle that you KNOW need to hear these words!
Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️
Binge eaters are known to hide their seemingly out-of-control eating because they fear what others will say. But it’s a myth that binge eating is simply a bad habit or evidence of poor self-control.
Recovered binge eater, Sunny Sea Gold, the author of “Food: The Good Girl’s Drug,” mentions some of the dangerous myths about a condition that affects a surprising number of people.
One of the biggest myths out there is that binge eating disorder (BED) is a fake disorder In fact, binge eating is a real disorder that’s listed (along with anorexia and bulimia) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the “bible” of mental illness.
Binge eating disorder (BED) finally has its own place in the DSM! It is widely known that binge eaters are highly successful people with plenty of drive and determination. Binge eating disorder actually compels people to eat – just as alcoholism compels people to drink. There’s now mounting evidence that, for binge eaters, eating activates specific regions of the brain in much the same way that using cocaine or heroin lights up specific brain regions in substance abusers. Some binge eaters are overweight, but not all. Many binge eaters use crash diets to maintain a normal weight – even though they might take in 2,000 or more excess calories on a daily basis. Some binge eaters are actually underweight. Eating disorders are more common in women, but men suffer too. Studies suggest that about 2% of American men have binge eating disorder, as compared to 3 to 5% of women. Roughly one in five eating disorders of any kind are diagnosed in men.
Binge eating behavior has also been seen in children as young as six. Any parent who suspects that a child is sneaking food, hiding food, or experiencing a loss of control around food should consult a child psychologist or psychiatrist with experience in treating eating disorders.
Some people think recovering from binge eating means avoiding certain trigger foods – the same way alcoholics generally must avoid alcohol for the rest of their lives. Sugary, fatty, or carbohydrate-rich foods can trigger binge eating in some people, and many people with the disorder choose to cut back on these foods for a while. But most people can safely eat these foods once they’ve recovered from binge eating disorder.
Gastric bypass and other forms of weight-loss (bariatric) surgery can sometimes eliminate diabetes and other physical problems caused by obesity. But it can’t eliminate the psychological disorder that causes people to binge-eat. Following weight-loss surgery, some former binge-eaters find they are unable to eat as much food as they once did – and so become heavy drinkers or compulsive shoppers as a result. The goal is to go within to see what’s actually happening. The issues, once are addressed, explored and healed can ameliorate binge eating compulsions. Please reach out if you have ANY questions!
*If you need support NOW, BOOK a phone session with me! Email me at: SRO@ScarlettRameyOfficial.com Or text me at: (206) 910-8690
If you are looking for more support in Recovery and Life, I would be honored if you became a Ramey Nutrition Insider.
You’ll find fun fun support tools and freebies in my first email!
If you’re into it, feel free to share this with any other people in your support circle that you KNOW need to hear these words!
Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️
Something I hear from a lot of people who are considering going into (or back into) an inpatient-type facility for their eating disorder is “What if I gain weight?” Now, for this blog I’m just going to address this question at its face-value and we won’t go into the fact that there’s probably a way deeper meaning to “gain weight” when people ask this. I went through several treatment centers throughout my recovery journey and trust me, I asked the same question, especially in the earlier days of my treatment. So, recovered person to prospective recovered person, here is my answer to this question, regardless of where you are in your own recovery journey:
Duh.
Now let’s elaborate on that highly articulated response. If you have an eating disorder, that means that in some way you are manipulating your food intake and hunger/fullness signals for a sense of safety, control, whatever it might be. And if you’re considering treatment, chances are you’ve been at it for a bit. That means that your body has developed some level of trust issues regarding whether or not it’s going to be getting what it needs on a regular basis. You’re also probably going to have some restoration that needs to happen, and on that note consider this:
“Weight” doesn not EQUAL fat, it INCLUDES it. Your weight includes your skin, skeleton, muscles, the glycogen stored in those muscles so they can function, organs (the average weight of intestines is about 7.5 pounds alone), your brain, and your hydration level.
When you restrict your nutrition in the way that is considered to be an eating disorder, ALL of those components of the body are being depleted. So when you begin restoring your body and learning and practicing how to eat enough to maintain yourself, yes, your weight is going to go up. That’s the point.
Now consider this: It isn’t going to matter outside of the fact that your body is going to be healthy and able to function the way it was meant to (unless there’s been some longer-term damage due to prolonged deficiencies, but in general your body will be functioning better). Eating disorders are a symptom of a deeper issue or issues, usually there’s trauma of some kind involved that triggered the “eating disorder gene” and so there is a lot more work to be done than just restoring the body. If you are doing your work as you go through this process of recovering from your eating disorder, processing through the pain, the weight gain won’t matter and you might even start to appreciate your physical body.
This is where you kind of have to start building some faith in yourself. Trust me, I know how scary it is to think about gaining weight and how uncomfortable it is when it starts to happen. Recovering is one of the bravest things you’ll do. But you’ll take one little step forward into the absolute darkness and scariness of the unknown, and somehow there will be a place for your foot. Then you’ll take another step and it will be just as scary or more so, but you’ll start finding that you are strong enough to go on this journey.
You will be able to trust yourself eventually, but be patient. It’s a practice, and with a lot of work and time, one day you’ll be like “Yeah, I weigh (blank), but check out what I’m doing with my new life as a recovered person!”
Lindsey H.
Please reach out if you have ANY questions!
*If you need support NOW, BOOK a phone session with me HERE!*
OR get in touch with me
SRO@ScarlettRameyOfficial.com (206) 910-8690
Wherever you are on your journey to RECOVERY, I’m with you all the way! Keep it up, sweet one!
If you are looking for more support in Recovery and Life, I would be honored if you became a Ramey Nutrition Insider.
You’ll find fun fun support tools and freebies in my first email!
If you’re into it, feel free to share this with any other people in your support circle that you KNOW need to hear these words!
Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️
“Finding Purpose-Driven Recovery,” Guest Blog by Lindsey Hayden
What is recovery? What are you recovering? Jump on your Google search engine and look up “recovery” and then click on the images tab. Ten thousand (at least) pictures of mostly nothing. So many ground-level road images where the road leads to seemingly nothing. Where DOES the road to recovery lead?
This was how I felt toward “recovery” when I started seeing someone for my eating disorder. Side note here, I didn’t actually want to see anyone for my disorder, I was doing it to prove to my untreated paranoid schizophrenic boyfriend that it was safe and we could “recover together.”
Yeah, that didn’t work out, but now you have some context about where my head was at when I started this journey. I would literally walk into my appointments and tell the provider we really didn’t need to say anything, just as long as my boyfriend knew I was here.So I was THE unwilling patient. But as I became more sick, was admitted to higher levels of care, and developed friendships with my fellow patients, some tiny little ember of what is ME started to glow a teeny bit little brighter.
I had weekly appointments with Scarlett Ramey at her Seattle clinic and she helped me fan that little ember even though I was still unaware of its existence. She saw it and she knew it would grow. But still, even with a desire to complete the journey to recovery I had absolutely no concept of what that meant, what it might hold for me, what it could feel like. I’d had an eating disorder for the vast majority of my life so I didn’t have memories to look back on of “those good times I had without it.”
The few people I met who had recovered didn’t seem to be more happy than me, more successful than anyone else, so what was it?The turning point in my recovery was finding my “why,” my reason for going through this raw, emotional and painful process. I know I had to get to a certain point in recovery to find what that was, there was hours and hours of work I had to do on myself to get to it. So part of the process is continuing to move forward and make the next good recovery decision completely on faith.
Your road might look like those Google images for a while. It might feel like you’re stepping out onto nothing at all and just hoping that road meets your foot and you don’t fall. But once you take one, and you don’t fall, you don’t get hurt, nothing gets taken away, the next step is just a tiny bit easier. You grew your faith in yourself and your journey just a little bit.
I’m now a yoga instructor and started my own company (Gro Yoga) using yoga as a tool to teach people this concept of building faith in themselves. Yoga calls on us to face ourselves in our strength and limitations we’re given ourselves. Eating disorders teach these same limitations. “I can’t eat that,” “if I eat that (Oreo cookie) I’ll gain 5 pounds,” I can’t speak up or I’ll lose someone.” It’s the same concept. We place these limitations on ourselves to keep us SAFE because at some point we made the connection that X plus Y equals Z.
The process of recovery is difficult, painful, all of it, but it’s a practice. We don’t wake up, decide to start doing yoga and are perfect at it, and the same goes for recovery. Take those little steps in the right direction and little by little you’ll build that trust in yourself again and then you’ll feel like taking bigger steps. Then you’ll start to find things along that road. Your “restoring Self” will begin to find meaning where you maybe couldn’t find it before. Bigger things will be revealed along the way, and then suddenly your Why will appear. That Why gives your recovery a purpose. There’s some line you cross where you’ve been pushing yourself forward by pure faith that it’ll be ok, and then you’re suddenly being pulled forward by your purpose.
Everything you do, every decision you make is suddenly so heavily meaningful because you know it’s bringing you closer to YOUR purpose. Your horizon is no longer empty.So yes, it does get easier. Where you’re at right now might be dark and feel hopeless, but if you just keep coming back to making the next right decision, it will get easier. It will get brighter. Remember this is a practice. You are practicing being a person recovered from an eating disorder and it’s ok to make mistakes, it’s ok if it’s hard. You have permission to start learning how to trust yourself again, and for it to be hard. You’ve got this. #GoGroYourself
Lindsey Hayden
Please reach out if you have ANY questions!
*If you need support NOW, BOOK a phone session with me HERE!*
OR get in touch with me
SRO@ScarlettRameyOfficial.com (206) 910-8690
Wherever you are on your journey to RECOVERY, I’m with you all the way! Keep it up, sweet one!
If you are looking for more support in Recovery and Life, I would be honored if you became a Ramey Nutrition Insider.
You’ll find fun fun support tools and freebies in my first email!
If you’re into it, feel free to share this with any other people in your support circle that you KNOW need to hear these words!
Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️
My patients teach me so much! Shame can feel so real in the moment, during the hard times we go through, but it can become the lesser of two evils when we choose it over an emotion too hard to feel. So I just got off the phone with one of my favorite patients (yes I have favorites), and she said she had been exploring shame, writing everything down that she feels shame about. She tells me she has read it over, and, as she is intelligent beyond anything you’ve ever seen, she calls herself on her own bullsh$t.
She knows her shame over running only 3 miles is crap, as she’s even telling me. She KNOWS:
1. She can run a longer time.
2. Others don’t run that in a week.
3. She actually feels completely out of control of her world situation, and wants something to fix.
She already knows her own defense mechanism. And here’s the funny thing. My patients totally know what they’re doing, when they’re doing it, and why. This is why I love this population. They are more self aware than anyone I’ve EVER met. The genius level in these self-punishing people is astounding if you listen. She told me EVERYTHING I needed to know to support her in the way she needed to feel support. Because I listened. Difficult but not complex, hard but simple. Just. Listen.
Please reach out if you have ANY questions!
*If you need support NOW, BOOK a phone session with me HERE!*
OR get in touch with me
SRO@ScarlettRameyOfficial.com (206) 910-8690
Wherever you are on your journey to RECOVERY, I’m with you all the way! Keep it up, sweet one!
If you are looking for more support in Recovery and Life, I would be honored if you became a Ramey Nutrition Insider.
You’ll find fun fun support tools and freebies in my first email!
If you’re into it, feel free to share this with any other people in your support circle that you KNOW need to hear these words!
Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️
We are so honored at Ramey Nutrition to share this blog, written by Emma Kerr.
14-05-18
A day I will never forget. It will forever be committed to memory; the day my world was turned upside down and my love, my forever, my life as I knew it gone. It took many months to pick myself up and dust myself down I think or I know I’m still doing it now BUT a year quickly passed; I knew I couldn’t let the day pass me by. It would be a day for me. Only me.
After my home changed and the dread of putting my key into a door each night began to settle, I took solace in what did wait for me in the darkness. Exercise kept me out the house for that little bit longer each day making the time I spent alone less; the weights the training took my body on a whole new journey. It became my staple along with the twitching noses of my pets and a steaming mug of coffee. At a time when I felt unloved and unable to face the world they remained my constant. Something I couldn’t get wrong. Something that wouldn’t leave. They gave noise to an empty house, feeling to a broken heart and a reason to get out of bed. While the coffee forced a fake smile, a temporary energy to help me through the day.
So my decision was made they would be forever inked on my body and on a day when it would matter the most. The process was a careful one, I knew which tattooist I wanted; my reasons were probably all wrong but on that day, I needed to feel closer to my past love and the pain itself couldn’t be any worse than how I felt on that fateful day.
Not being a natural artist my drawing was pretty awful but my idea would remain. A girl – me. Sitting on a barbell – something I was frequently using to make me stronger. With two cats – one laying down because he always sleeps but is equally ready to pounce, the other sitting with me as she always keeps watch; the protector. The rabbit – thumper who brought character, noise and a personality to a somewhat quiet house. Finally the coffee – my solace when sleep evaded me, when food was not my forte and when my words and tears were too much to contend with – an object to hide behind.
So here it is, my tattoo, my forever memory of how life can so drastically change when you least expect or want it to. Being loved was a huge part of my being but now I’m working on being strong enough to be alone.
Please reach out if you have ANY questions!
*If you need support NOW, BOOK a phone session with me HERE!*
OR get in touch with me
SRO@ScarlettRameyOfficial.com (206) 910-8690
Wherever you are on your journey to RECOVERY, I’m with you all the way! Keep it up, sweet one!
If you are looking for more support in Recovery and Life, I would be honored if you became a Ramey Nutrition Insider.
You’ll find fun fun support tools and freebies in my first email!
If you’re into it, feel free to share this with any other people in your support circle that you KNOW need to hear these words!
Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️
This is a real life story of Anorexia recovery written by “R.”
It was in the eighth grade — four years after my mother died — that I first remember becoming unhappy with my body. Every night, after brushing my teeth and squeezing some blackheads, I’d look in the mirror and pound on my abdomen with my fists. Although I know now that it was just an early sign of puberty, I was disgusted by the way my belly had begun to protrude under the band of my underwear. So I got the idea to make it disappear by losing five pounds, then 10, and then 15. Pretty soon I was addicted to losing.
It’s a control thing, doctors say, and in my case that was all too true: I needed to organize a world that had been thrown into chaos after my mother died. Her death had come as a complete shock to me; she’d never told me she had cancer, or that she was dying. And with her sudden disappearance, all the things that I’d trusted as absolutes — all the other foundations of my life — began to crumble.
I couldn’t believe in God anymore, not when I’d been such an incredibly dedicated little Catholic and all I got in return was a vicious punishment. What kind of system was that? I couldn’t believe in my earthly father, a construction-working Irish immigrant who’d become angry, depressed, and dysfunctional — a sad version of the charismatic and fun-loving dad I once knew. I couldn’t believe in my own worth anymore, either. Catholicism had set some deep grooves in my soul, and even if I’d rationally given up on God, it was impossible to free myself from the magical thinking that goes along with religious zealotry: Deep down, I thought I must be damned if my mother had been taken away from me. Flawed, cursed, worthless. That was me.
Dieting became a way of imposing an external value system on my flesh: If I could control myself enough to lose another pound, I was that much closer to good. I hoped I could redeem myself.
That Fall, I started my freshman year at an all-girls Catholic high school, and kept chiseling away at myself, trying to purify my soul through the transformation of my body. By October, I was subsisting on almost nothing — about 250 calories a day. I’m amazed I had the energy to get up and go to school every day, let alone keep up with varsity soccer practice. But despite how uncomfortable my body was — I was exhausted and freezing because I had no body fat — my mind felt better than ever. If dieting was my new religion, I was on my way to becoming a saint.
The skinnier I got, the harder it was to keep the adults around me from noticing, although I did everything I could to hide my body. I’d spend lunch hour in the library. I’d change for soccer practice in the bathroom, instead of in the locker room with everyone else. I’d wear extra layers under my school uniform and baggy clothes at home — not that they did much to quell my father’s growing suspicions.
He and I seemed to do nothing but scream at each other. Our fights almost always reduced me to sobs — which just induced him to get louder. “Why are you crying? I wish I could cry,” he’d taunt. “But what would happen to us if I lay down and cried? This family would fall apart!” I’d despise myself for being a baby, but the more I hated myself, the harder it was to stop my tears.
Our fights often began over the news headlines, like abortion and capital punishment. On the surface, those clashes were political: I was a budding liberal and he was a Reagan-loving Republican. But I think I was also arguing that I deserved to have control over my body, and by extension, my mind. I wanted to be free of that miserable house, and the deadly gloom that had descended on it, and my own depression.
As I continued to wither, my father kept on shouting, but he also began to cajole. “Please eat,” he’d say. “For me? A little food’s not going to hurt you.” As satisfying as it was to hear him plead, the better pleasure was knowing that I finally had the power I wanted — over my body, and over him.
So I stopped caring about what he thought, focusing instead on living up to my own standards of starvation. As long as I concentrated on them, I didn’t have time to dwell on anything else — not when my head was so full of caloric calculations, and my body so empty.
By November, things started happening that I couldn’t cover up with clothes or lies. My feet had gotten so thin that my soccer cleats had cut holes into the skin around my ankles; after several weeks, the resulting sores got so bad that I started to hobble. One day, when I could barely walk, my coach called me over. “You look terrible out there — like a drunk with two broken feet,” she said, forcing a laugh. “What’s going on?”
I made some excuse, but she had me sit out the rest of practice.
When I got home that afternoon, my coach had left a message for my father on our answering machine. “Could you please call me as soon as you can?” her recorded voice said. I erased it.
The next morning, when I tried to get up from my desk after Spanish class, I collapsed. The nun who was my teacher peeled me off the floor, and with her help, I was able to stand, then limp, but it seemed clear my left leg was paralyzed from the knee down. My father took me to my pediatrician, who told me I was so bony that I’d pinched an important nerve simply by crossing my right leg over the left. I’d probably be able to regain feeling — eventually — but only if I gained weight, he said.
As we drove home in my father’s red pickup truck, he cried in front of me for the first time since my mother’s funeral. He recounted a story about watching his 6-year-old brother die of lockjaw on Christmas Day, less than a week after stepping on a rusty nail. My father’s parents were so devastated, his mother barely got out of bed for a year. He’d worried his father would drown himself in the tide off the coast of western Ireland, where they lived. “I’m not sure I’d be able to live with it if I lost you too,” my father told me.
I felt sorry for him for going through all that as a little boy, and I knew he was only trying to get me to eat, but the way he put it annoyed me. He made it sound like my suffering was significant not because I was in pain, but because it made his life more miserable.
A couple of weeks later, my father took me to see a New York City eating-disorders specialist, Joseph Silverman. He was a bald man with a maroon silk bow tie that bloomed at the top of his lab coat. Sitting across from him in his fancy office, I felt underdressed in my school uniform, and embarrassed by my father in his jeans and work boots.
“You’re in terrible shape,” Silverman said after examining me. “I’ve seen a lot of bad patients, but never anyone whose leg has gone out like yours.” I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t notice how pleased I was. Being the worst patient meant I was the best at losing. It meant I was tough and in control.
“I’m sure you’re happy to hear you’re one of the worst cases,” he continued, like a mind reader. “But keep it up and more important parts of your body will give out. Your kidneys. Your heart. And I don’t have to tell you what happens to people whose hearts stop.”
“What — they have heart attacks?”
He nodded. “And some of them die.” Only when he said that did I realize death was what I’d been gunning for all along. Of course, the idea of not being alive was terrifying — but at the same time, I wasn’t sure I deserved to live.
Fat tears tripped down my face.
Silverman pushed a box of tissues toward me. “Your father is here today because he thinks I can save you,” he said. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my father pull himself forward toward the desk. “I’d give up my life for her, doctor. Whatever it takes.”
Silverman looked at me. “Do you want to get better?”
I paused. “I used to like what was happening to me,” I began shakily. “But now I’m scared I’ll never be able to stop until . . .” I couldn’t say it. “I do want to get better.”
After four months I was discharged from the children’s ward of Columbia Presbyterian. I weighed 100 pounds, and my leg had improved so much that you wouldn’t notice my limp unless you were looking for it.
But it was another 10 years before I got all the feeling back in my foot, and even today, I’m still waiting to emerge from the emotional numbness. Now I realize that, more than anything, losing weight was an attempt to starve certain feelings — of depression and abandonment and worthlessness — before they could destroy me. It was a way to train myself not to care much about anyone else — like my father, whose anger I didn’t have any power over, and my mother, who disappeared without giving me a chance to say good-bye — and to focus entirely on the one thing I could control: the size of my body. I became my own parent.
I’m grateful that my real parent, my father, came to my rescue. I wouldn’t have made it through without him. But our relationship still isn’t easy for me — no close relationship ever has been. Since I left home, I’ve never truly depended on anyone. I have a hard time staying with any boyfriend for more than three months: I refuse to get intimate with people I might end up losing. And although I don’t hide what I eat anymore, I do hide my emotional needs from the men I date.
It seems like there’s still so far to go before I’ll feel “normal.” I’m always worried that I’m not attractive enough, smart enough, young enough, successful enough for someone to love me. I will get there, and Scarlett has truly taught me to be accountable to myself, because I am an EXCELLENT reason to recover. I try every day to be scared, overwhelmed, and brave all at the same time, I’m getting there.
Please reach out if you have ANY questions!
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Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️
Research shows how neuroimaging can help improve our understanding of eating disorders. This article was written by Meghan Rosen.
In a spacious hotel room not far from the beach in La Jolla, Kelsey Heenan gripped her fiancé’s hand. Heenan, a 20-year-old anorexic woman, couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Walter Kaye, director of the eating disorders program at the University of California, San Diego, was telling a handful of rapt patients and their family members what the latest brain imaging research suggested about their disorder.
Studies of the brains of people with anorexia have revealed a number of complex brain circuits that show changes in activity compared with healthy people.
MEDICAL RF, ADAPTED BY M. ATAROD
Images of high-calorie foods (left) switched on a self-control center in the brains of anorexic women. Pictures of objects on plates kept the control center quiet.
COURTESY OF S. BROOKS
When an anorexic woman unexpectedly gets a taste of sugar (yellow) or misses out on it (blue), her brain’s reward circuitry shows more activity than a healthy-weight or obese woman’s. Anorexics’ reward-processing systems may be out of order.
G. FRANK ET AL/NEUROPSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY 2012
It’s not your fault, he told them.
Heenan had always assumed that she was to blame for her illness. Kaye’s data told a different story. He handed out a pile of black-and-white brain scans — some showed the brains of healthy people, others were from people with anorexia nervosa. The scans didn’t look the same. “People were shocked,” Heenan says. But above all, she remembers, the group seemed to sigh in relief, breathing out years of buried guilt about the disorder. “It’s something in the way I was wired — it’s something I didn’t choose to do,” Heenan says. “It was pretty freeing to know that there could be something else going on.”
Years of psychological and behavioral research have helped scientists better understand some signs and triggers of anorexia. But that knowledge hasn’t straightened out the disorder’s tangled roots, or pointed scientists to a therapy that works for everyone. “Anorexia has a high death rate, it’s expensive to treat and people are chronically ill,” says Kaye.
Kaye’s program uses a therapy called family-based treatment, or FBT, to teach adolescents and their families how to manage anorexia. A year after therapy, about half of the patients treated with FBT recover. In the world of eating disorders, that’s success: FBT is considered one of the very best treatments doctors have. To many scientists, that just highlights how much about anorexia remains unknown.
Kaye and others are looking to the brain for answers. Using brain imaging tools and other methods to explore what’s going on in patients’ minds, researchers have scraped together clues that suggest anorexics are wired differently than healthy people. The mental brakes people use to curb impulsive instincts, for example, might get jammed in people with anorexia. Some studies suggest that just a taste of sugar can send parts of the brain barrelling into overdrive. Other brain areas appear numb to tastes — and even sensations such as pain. For people with anorexia, a sharp pang of hunger might register instead as a dull thud.
The mishmash of different brain imaging data is just beginning to highlight the neural roots of anorexia, Kaye says. But because starvation physically changes the brain, researchers can run into trouble teasing out whether glitchy brain wiring causes anorexia, or vice versa. Still, Kaye thinks understanding what’s going on in the brain may spark new treatment ideas. It may also help the eating disorder shake off some of its noxious stereotypes.
“One of the biggest problems is that people do not take this disease seriously,” says James Lock, an eating disorders researcher at Stanford University who cowrote the book on family-based treatment. “No one gets upset at a child who has cancer,” he says. “If the treatment is hard, parents still do it because they know they need to do it to make their child well.”
Pop culture often paints anorexics as willful young women who go on diets to be beautiful, he says. But, “you can’t just choose to be anorexic,” Lock adds. “The brain data may help counteract some of the mythology.”
Beyond dieting
A society that glamorizes thinness can encourage unhealthy eating behaviors in kids, scientists have shown. A 2011 study of Minnesota high school students reported that more than half of girls had dieted within the past year. Just under a sixth had used diet pills, vomiting, laxatives or diuretics.
But a true eating disorder goes well beyond an unhealthy diet. Anorexia involves malnutrition, excessive weight loss and often faulty thinking about one of the body’s most basic drives: hunger. The disorder is also rare. Less than 1 percent of girls develop anorexia. The disease crops up in boys too, but adolescent girls — especially in wealthy countries such as the U.S., Australia and Japan — are most likely to suffer from the illness.
As the disease progresses, people with anorexia become intensely afraid of getting fat and stick to extreme diets or exercise schedules to drop pounds. They also misjudge their own weight. Beyond these diagnostic hallmarks, patients’ symptoms can vary. Some refuse to eat, others binge and purge. Some live for years with the illness, others yo-yo between weight gain and loss. Though most anorexics gain back some weight within five years of becoming ill, anorexia is the deadliest of all mental disorders.
Though anorexia tends to run in families, scientists haven’t yet hammered out the suite of genes at play. Some individuals are particularly vulnerable to developing an eating disorder. In these people, stressful life changes, such as heading off to college, can tip the mental scales toward anorexia.
For decades, scientists have known that anorexic children behave a little differently. In school and sports, anorexic kids strive for perfection. Though Heenan, a former college basketball player, didn’t notice her symptoms creeping in until the end of high school, she remembers initiating strict practice regimens as a child. Starting in second grade, Heenan spent hours perfecting her jump shot, shooting the ball again and again until she had the technique exactly right — until her form was flawless.
“It’s very rare for me to see a person with anorexia in my office who isn’t a straight-A student,” Lock says. Even at an early age, people who later develop the eating disorder tend to exert an almost superhuman ability to practice, focus or study. “They will work and work and work,” says Lock. “The problem is they don’t know when to stop.”
In fact, many scientists think anorexics’ brains might be wired for willpower, for good and ill. Using new imaging tools that let scientists watch as a person’s mental gears grind through different tasks, researchers are starting to pin down how anorexic brains work overtime.
Control signs
To glimpse the circuits that govern self-control, experimental neuropsychologist Samantha Brooks uses functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, a tool that measures and maps brain activity. Last year, she and colleagues scanned volunteers as they imagined eating high-calorie foods, such as chocolate cake and French fries, or using inedible objects such as clothespins piled on a plate. One result gave Brooks a jolt. A center of self-control in anorexics’ brains sprung to life when the volunteers thought about food — but only in the women who severely restricted their calories, her team reported March 2012 in PLOS ONE.
The control center, two golf ball–sized chunks of tissue called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC, helps stamp out primitive urges. “They put a brake on your impulsive behaviors,” says Brooks, now at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
For Brooks, discovering the DLPFC data was like finding a tiny vein of gold in a heap of granite. The control center could be the nugget that reveals how anorexics clamp down on their appetites. So she and her colleagues devised an experiment to test anorexics’ DLPFC. Using a memory task known to engage the brain region, the researchers quizzed volunteers while showing them subliminal images. The quizzes tested working memory, the mental tool that lets people hold phone numbers in their heads while hunting for a pen and paper. Compared with healthy people, anorexics tended to get more answers right, Brooks’ team wrote June 2012 in Consciousness and Cognition. “The patients were really good,” Brooks says. “They hardly made any mistakes.”
A turbocharged working memory could help anorexics hold on to rules they set for themselves about food. “It’s like saying ‘I will only eat a salad at noon, I will only eat a salad at noon,’ over and over in your mind,” says Brooks. These mantras may become so ingrained that an anorexic person can’t escape them.
But looking at subliminal images of food distracted anorexics from the memory task. “Then they did just as well as the healthy people,” Brooks says. The results suggest that anorexic people might tap into their DLPFC control circuits when faced with food.
James Lock has also seen signs of self-control circuits gone awry in people with eating disorders. In 2011, he and colleagues scanned the brains of teenagers with different eating disorders while signaling them to push a button. While volunteers lay inside the fMRI machine, researchers flashed pictures of different letters on an interior screen. For every letter but “X,” Lock’s group told the teens to push a button. During the task, anorexic teens who obsessively cut calories tended to have more active visual circuits than healthy teens or those with bulimia, a disorder that compels people to binge and purge. The result isn’t easy to explain, says Lock. “Anorexics may just be more focused in on the task.”
Bulimics’ brains told a simpler story. When teens with bulimia saw the letter “X,” broad swaths of their brains danced with activity — more so than the healthy or calorie-cutting anorexic volunteers, Lock’s team reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry. For bulimics, controlling the impulse to push the button may take more brain power than for others, Lock says.
Though the data don’t reveal differences in self-control between anorexics and healthy people, Lock thinks that anorexics’ well-documented ability to swat away urges probably does have signatures in the brain. He notes that his study was small, and that the “healthy” people he used as a control group might have shared similarities with anorexics. “The people who tend to volunteer are generally pretty high performers,” he says. “The chances are good that my controls are a little bit more like anorexics than bulimics.”
Still, Lock’s results offered another flicker of proof that people with eating disorders might have glitches in their self-control circuits. A tight rein on urges could help steer anorexics toward illness, but the parts of their brain tuned into rewards, such as sugary snacks, may also be a little off track.
Sugar low
For many anorexics, food just doesn’t taste very good. A classic symptom of the disorder is anhedonia, or trouble experiencing pleasure. Parts of Heenan’s past reflect the symptom. When she was ill, she had trouble remembering favorite dishes from childhood, for example — a blank spot common to anorexics. “I think I enjoyed some things,” she says. Beyond frozen yogurt, she can’t really rattle off a list.
After Heenan started seriously restricting her calories in college, only one aspect of food made her feel satisfied. Skipping, rather than eating, meals felt good, she says. Some of Heenan’s symptoms may have stemmed from frays in her reward wiring, the brain circuitry connecting food to pleasure. In the past few years, researchers have found that the chemicals coursing through healthy people’s reward circuits aren’t quite the same in anorexics. And studies in rodents have linked chemical changes in reward circuitry to under- and overeating.
To find out whether under- and overweight people had altered brain chemistry, eating disorder researcher Guido Frank of the University of Colorado Denver studied anorexic, healthy-weight and obese women. He and his colleagues trained volunteers to link images, such as orange or purple shapes, with the taste of a sweet solution, slightly salty water or no liquid. Then, the researchers scanned the women’s brains while showing them the shapes and dispensing tiny squirts of flavors. But the team threw in a twist: Sometimes the flavors didn’t match up with the right images.
When anorexics got an unexpected hit of sugar, a surge of activity bloomed in their brains. Obese people had the opposite response: Their brains didn’t register the surprise. Healthy-weight women fit somewhere in the middle, Frank’s team reported August 2012, in Neuropsychopharmacology. While obese people might not be sensitive to sweets anymore, a little sugar rush goes a long way for anorexics. “It’s just too much stimulation for them,” Frank says.
One of the lively regions in anorexics’ brains was the ventral striatum, a lump of nerve cells that’s part of a person’s reward circuitry. The lump picks up signals from dopamine, a chemical that rushes in when most people see a sugary treat.
Frank says that it’s possible cutting calories could sculpt a person’s brain chemistry, but he thinks some young people are just more likely to become sugar-sensitive than others. Frank suspects anorexics’ dopamine-sensing equipment might be out of alignment to begin with. And he may be onto something. Recently, researchers in Kaye’s lab at UCSD showed that the same chemical that makes people perk up when a coworker brings in a box of doughnuts might actually trigger anxiety in anorexics.
Mixed signals
Usually a rush of dopamine triggers euphoria or a boost of energy, says Ursula Bailer, a psychiatrist and neuroimaging researcher at UCSD. Anorexics don’t seem to pick up those good feelings.
When Bailer and colleagues gave volunteers amphetamine, a drug known to trigger dopamine release, and then asked them to rate their feelings, healthy people stuck to a familiar script. The drug made them feel intensely happy, Bailer’s team described March 2012 in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. Researchers linked the volunteers’ happy feelings to a wave of dopamine flooding the brain, using an imaging technique to track the chemical’s levels.
But anorexics said something different. “People with anorexia didn’t feel euphoria — they got anxious,” Bailer says. And the more dopamine coursing through anorexics’ brains, the more anxious they felt. Anorexics’ reaction to the chemical could help explain why they steer clear of food — or at least foods that healthy people find tempting. “Anorexics don’t usually get anxious if you give them a plate of cucumbers,” Bailer says.
Beyond the anxiety finding, one other aspect of the study sticks out: Instead of examining sick patients, Bailer, Kaye and colleagues recruited women who had recovered from anorexia. By studying people whose brains are no longer starving, Kaye’s team hopes to sidestep the chicken-and-egg question of whether specific brain signatures predispose people to anorexia or whether anorexia carves those signatures in the brain.
Though Kaye says that there’s still a lot scientists don’t know about anorexia, he’s convinced it’s a disorder that starts in the brain. Compared with healthy children, anorexic children’s brains are getting different signals, he says. “Parents have to realize that it’s very hard for these kids to change.”
Kaye thinks imaging data can help families reframe their beliefs about anorexia, which might help them handle tough treatments. He thinks the data can also offer new insights into therapies tailored for anorexics’ specific traits.
Sensory underload
One trait Kaye has focused on is anorexics’ sense of awareness of their bodies. Peel back the outer lobes of the brain by the temples, and the bit that handles body awareness pops into view. These regions, little islands of tissue called the insula, are one of the first brain areas to register pain, taste and other sensations. When people hold their breath, for example, and feel the panicky claws of air hunger, “the insula lights up like crazy,” Kaye says.
Kaye and colleagues have shown that the insulas of people with anorexia seem to be somewhat dulled to sensations. In a recent study, his team strapped heat-delivering gadgets to volunteers’ arms and cranked the devices to painfully hot temperatures while measuring insula activity via fMRI.
Compared with healthy volunteers, bits of recovered anorexics’ insulas dimmed when the researchers turned up the heat. But when researchers simply warned that pain was coming, other parts of the brain region flared brightly, Kaye’s team reported in January in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. For people who have had anorexia, actually feeling pain didn’t seem as bad as anticipating it. “They don’t seem to be sensing things correctly,” says Kaye.
If anorexics can’t detect sensations like pain properly, they may also have trouble picking up other signals from the body, such as hunger. Typically when people get hungry, their insulas rev up to let them know. And in healthy hungry people, a taste of sugar really gets the insula excited. For anorexics, this hunger-sensing part of the brain seems numb. Parts of the insula barely perked up when recovered anorexic volunteers tasted sugar, Kaye’s team showed this June in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The findings “may help us understand why people can starve themselves and not get hungry,” Kaye says.
Though the brain region that tells people they’re hungry might have trouble detecting sweet signals, some reward circuits seem to overreact to the same cues. Combined with a tendency to swap happiness for anxiety, and a mental vise grip on behavior, anorexics might have just enough snags in their brain wiring to tip them toward disease.
Now, Kaye’s group hopes to tap neuroimaging data for new treatment ideas. One day, he thinks doctors might be able to help anorexics “train” their insulas using biofeedback. With real-time brain scanning, patients could watch as their insulas struggle to pick up sugar signals, and then practice strengthening the response. More effective treatment options could potentially spare anorexics the relapses many patients suffer.
Heenan says she’s one of the lucky ones. Four years have passed since she first saw the anorexic brain images at UCSD. In the months following her treatment, Heenan and her family worked together to rebuild her relationship with food. At first, her fiancé picked out all her meals, but step by step, Heenan earned autonomy over her diet. Today, Heenan, a coordinator for Minneapolis’ public schools, is married and has a new puppy. “Life can be good,” she says. “Life can be fun. I want other people to know the freedom that I do.”
Searching for treatments
The bowl of pasta sitting in front of Kelsey Heenan didn’t look especially scary.
Spaghetti, chopped asparagus and chunks of chicken glistened in an olive oil sauce. Usually, such savory fare might make a person’s mouth water. But when Heenan’s fiancé served her a portion, she started sobbing. “You can’t do this to me,” she told him. “I thought you loved me!”
Heenan was confronting her “fear foods” at the Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research at UCSD. Therapists in her treatment program, Intensive Multi-Family Therapy, spend five days teaching anorexic patients and families about the disorder and how to encourage healthy eating. “There’s no blame,” says Christina Wierenga, a clinical neuropsychologist at UCSD. “The focus is just on having the parent refeed the child.” Therapists lay out healthy meals and portion sizes for teens, bolster parents’ self-confidence and hammer home the dangers of not eating. Heenan compares the experience to boot camp. But by the end of her time at the center, she says, “I was starting to see glimpses of what life could be like as a healthy person.”
Treatment options for anorexia include a broad mix of behavioral and medication-based therapies. Most don’t work very well, and many lack the support of evidence-based trials. Hospitalizing patients can boost short-term weight gain, “but when people go home they lose all the weight again,” says Stanford University’s James Lock, one of the architects of family-based treatment. That treatment is currently considered the most effective therapy for adolescent anorexics.
In a 2010 clinical trial, half of teens who underwent FBT maintained a normal weight a year after therapy. In contrast, only a fifth of teens treated with adolescent-focused individual therapy, which aims to help kids cope with emotions without using starvation, hit the healthy weight goal.
Few good options exist for adult anorexics, a group notorious for dropping out of therapy. New work hints that cognitive remediation therapy, or CRT, which uses cognitive exercises to change anorexics’ behaviors, has potential. After two months of CRT, only 13 percent of patients abandoned treatment, and most regained some weight, Lock and colleagues reported in the April International Journal of Eating Disorders. Researchers still need to find out, however, if CRT helps patients keep weight on long-term.
If you’re into it, feel free to share this with any other people in your support circle that you KNOW need to hear these words!
Yours in love and support,
Scarlett Ramey, MS, RDN, CD
P.S. Hope to see you in the comments. Let’s rally together during this time and stay connected in supporting YOUR Recovery journey. The world deserves the BEST of you.♥️
Bulimia Nervosa is usually characterized by a heightened sense of anxiety, quelled by a compulsion to eat rapidly and compensate through vomiting, abusing laxatives, or compulsive exercising. The stimuli for the behaviors associated with Bulimia Nervosa are usually associated with anxiety or overwhelm.
Through my years in treating bulimia, I have noticed an interesting theme in the behaviors of binging and self induced vomiting. There is, what I’ve termed, a “Magic Bite.” The “Bite of No Return.” The one that makes it all better, the “deciding moment.” What does this mean? And why is it so nerve wracking?
So if you are bulimic, you’ll jump right in and jive with this, but if you’re not, this is good to know to support your loved one with more education. This is the magic bite:
You’re going along with a meal and you feel full. Not uncomfortable, and not like you couldn’t possibly take another bite, or at ALL stuffed. Just full “enough.” Enough to spark a level of anxiety that could drive you off a bridge. A level forcing you to find a solution in desperation. And then, there it is. . . the magic bite. The one that will make it all go away. The one that will SAVE the situation. It really is magic.
This is the bite that decides you are too full and now must eat 8 times what you normally would, and then vomit as a compensatory measure. Literally this bite is enabling you to eat just to vomit. The purging then releases the anxiety you just felt. This is the bite that allows you to call the shots and get the situation back in your control, and press redo.
This is such a huge theme throughout the bulimic community, that I felt I needed a solution for it! When these sweet folks get to this point, the science actually dictates the compulsion to relieve the anxiety. Interestingly enough, the intestinal tract is only sensed through stretch receptors. The gut could be cut in half, and we wouldn’t feel a thing, but as it stretches, when food goes in, there are receptors that send signals to the brain that there is fullness, or emptiness. OK, who cares, right?
When we are hungry, our brains flood with endorphins in order to keep the stomach from feeling the pain of hunger. The interesting thing is that once we are full “enough,” the stretch receptors signal the brain to stop producing extra endorphins. The endorphins that flood the brain when we are hungry ironically numb the pain we feel over an environment we cannot control.
The feeling of full “enough” can be the most painful for someone with bulimia. The next bite simply allows them to take their anxiety to the highest level with a binge, and release the WHOLE situation in one/two/three episodes of vomiting. This bite is the ANSWER!
What do I do?! I’d never write a blog without giving you a REAL resource STRAIGHT from the heart! And this IS where it gets real. Instead of judging this cycle, I truly believe we should learn from it and explore it for everything it CAN provide, and it can provide a lot. Since the possibility of binging and purging is likely going to happen again, let’s make it an opportunity to explore the feelings that bring us to that point. Or rather the FEAR of the feelings that could arise.
Below is a free resource that should be done after that magic bite. Go ahead and TAKE the bite, let those floodgates open, and start in on this sheet. This is a tool DESIGNED only to be done in that very specific moment. THIS is where the feelings and insights are that we use behaviors to numb. Let them LOOSE! Also to be noted is that this sheet is NOT to be used to distract yourself from using behaviors, but to get some insight out of the process.
No judgement about the actual behaviors, we’ll get into that later, but for now, if they ARE in your life, let’s USE them to explore the deeper issues. Once we can attack those, the behaviors will subside.
If you or someone you love has an eating disorder, it’s important to make sure you understand the dangers and the importance of treatment. Whether it’s bulimia, anorexia, binge eating disorder, or something else, these are serious illnesses.
