What Doesn’t Work

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the things I’ve done to recover. The things that worked, the things that didn’t and those that helped me for some time. Until not so long ago I worried too much about finding the one correct way to recover, the one magic method that would save me.

I kept wondering what the real way out of an eating disorder was…

“Should I try following the Minnie Maud’s guidelines? Perhaps I should stick to a meal plan… No, I know I HAVE to go to therapy or I’ll never recover. You know, maybe I’m not even sick, I’ll pretend I don’t have an ED and it should all work out. What if I just have to tame my animal brain? Ok, I give up, I’ll take all the medication in the world. You know what? Fuck it. I’ll eat intuitively.”

Nowadays we have so much information available on the internetz that it gets confusing. You can find people swearing by one approach and even mocking others.

But apart from the “you have to do what works for you” cliché but I still think it’s true. I want to talk about what doesn’t work.

We know that a lot of things work, there are thousands of peoples’ stories out there about how they recovered through different methods (therapy, multidisciplinary treatments, meditation, intuitive eating, the “Brain Over Binge Method”, medication, etc). But there’s one thing I’m sure doesn’t work and it alarms me that so many people keep doing it.

Spoiler alert: it is trying to stop bingeing just to lose weight.

I know I keep sayin this over and over again, and I know too that it can be boring and even annoying to you. But keep reading, what I really mean is that you won’t get anything good from recovery if you’re only doing out of hate and anger.

Ok, chances are you’ve gained a lot of unwanted weight from binge eating and it sucks, I know, believe me, I’ve been there (many times, actually). But wanting to stop bingeing only to lose weight only adds stress, a sense of obligation and lots of pain.

The worst part of all this are the things we think (and the way they make us treat ourselves).

Do you ever feel like you have a bully in your head? I’ve found myself many times feeling like I have a Regina George in my head. Yeah, I know I could’ve found a better example, but stick with me.

Let’s say you just woke up, had a nice shower and are going to get dressed. You pick an outfit inspired on something you saw on the internet, but when you go to check how you look in the mirror you notice you’re telling yourself something like “You look ridiculous, c’mon you don’t have the body to wear this, people will laugh at you.” or when you’re having lunch. You chose what you really wanted and are happy about your decision, and then the voice comes again “Why are you even eating that? If you eat like this you have no right to feel bad about being fat.” or after putting some make-up “Take that off, you look like a clown, it’s too much for you”.

What would you think of a person who tells that kind if things to other people? What if it’s always to the same person? That would be bullying, wouldn’t it? And we know how much bullying damages other people.

What if it was you doing it to yourself? Would you treat other people like that? Would you bully other people?

Of course you wouldn’t (well, that’s what I hope). And if you wouldn’t do it to other people why would you do it to yourself?

I know. We’ve done it for so long we’ve come to accept it’s part of how we think, we’ve come to think we deserve it. We just don’t know how to stop. But here are a few tips that may help you, maybe not to stop but to make things easier:

• Recognize the mean voice: Whenever you’re thinking one of those awfully mean things, recognize it. Yes, it sounds easy but when you’re so used to living with that voice in your head it gets a bit tricky. Do the exercise of noticing when it pops-up.
• Separate it from yourself: Start taking that voice as an intruder in your head. Acknowledge it, don’t ignore or fight it (that only adds more stress), just recognize that it is there and it doesn’t belong to you. It’s not how you really think or how you want to think. Remember that we are not our thoughts.
• Let it go: Once you’ve done that choose to think about something else, choose to focus on something else. By doing this your taking away the power these thoughts had over you. They will be just that, thoughts. Not voices that rule your daily decisions and make you diet, not dress the way you want to or even binge as punishment.

 

Will they disappear from one day to another? Of course not, our brains are used to sending them because we’ve acted upon them for so long. But if we stop acting on them, they will slowly start popping-up less. And we will have more headspace to connect with ourselves. Our brains learn, and they will understand that those signals they’ve sent for so long, just have no use anymore.

If you do this please take the time to notice how better life is when you don’t have a bully in your head. How freer you feel, how good it is. Slowly start trying to practice kindness towards yourself. Start figuring out who you really are without those voices tormeting you.

You don’t have to stare at yourself in the mirror and scream “I LOVE MYSELF SOOO MUUUUCH” until you believe it. But you can allow yourself to buy that videogame you’ve wanted for a while, or enjoy the cup of tea you like so much, you can just sleep for four hours if you’re tired (just don’t blame me if you can’t sleep at night afterwards), or spend a whole afternoon doing “nothing productive”.

You’re not a machine and you don’t have to keep accomplishing things in order to be valuable.

So start treating yourself the way you’d treat a loved one. Listen to yourself, if you’re bingeing it’s not because you’re a failure or you’re “so lazy and lack willpower”. It’s because your body is trying to tell you something, it’s crying for help. If you heard a baby crying would tell them to shut up? I thought so. Listen to yourself and allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling because your experience is as valid as anyone else’s.

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I hope you find these tips helpful, they have really made things easier for me lately, and though I’m not counting my binge-free days anymore (adds-up to the anxiety), I know it’s been about three or four weeks since I last did it, so, it’s working 🙂

(and it may work for you too!)

Please take care of yourself!

Pol

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A New Try

So… I could come here preaching about how I’ve found my way back into recovery and how I have so clear on my mind what to do to stop bingeing.

I could just say “I’ve been through a rough time lately but now I’m doing good!”. But what would be the point of it?

The truth is that I relapsed badly, I started bingeing again almost like I used to and thanks to an injury I’ve had to stop working out so it’s been getting harder for me to deal with my stress.

Well I don’t remember if I mentioned this before but I was trying to apply to medical school… And I got rejected. So you can tell I’ve been pretty successful lately.

I guess I needed a break from blogging, social media and even a break from recovery. A break from trying too hard. I’ve been feeling like I was trying too hard to be an “example” of what recovery is, just trying too badly to do everything well. Typical me.

And in the end there are a lot of ways to recover, there really isn’t one failproof way that’s going to fix every eating disorder in the world. Not at all.

At first I just stopped my therapy and taking my meds, eventually I started overeating and then bingeing again. A part of me thought that maybe this time I could do it on my own, the other part was just rebelling (I think). I was probably using food to hide my frustration at not being accepted into med school, at having to decide between studying a career I didn’t like or having to prepare the stupid test for a whole other year.

I managed to accept that I couldn’t do it on my own. Yes, a lot of people have overcome BED on their own by reading books, meditating, or by eating intuitively. But that’s not me, what really works for me is therapy and a flexible meal plan that gives me structure. So I’m going to try that again but without meds this time.

I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting my blog and instagram, I can’t really promise that I will posten more often. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I just want to stop trying to be so perfect and start trying to be more human, or well, more like myself.

I hope you’re doing well 🙂

Pol

#thestruggleisreal

After a few posts with no mention of my ED, I’m writing one about only that topic. If you follow me on instagram you may know I haven’t been doing very well lately, so as usual, I started posting less often and ultimately decided to take a break from my recovery account.

I’m the kind of person who finds it very hard to share her struggles. Some people like venting (nothing wrong with that) and talking about their problems, I’m just not like that. It’s not that I’m hiding anything or lying to you, I just don’t really feel like sharing anything at all when I’m not well, not until I find a solution.

I want you to know that I relapsed badly on my binge eating during this month. I had real binges and frecuent episodes of overeating. I went completely out of control, and that’s the problem. No matter how hard I tried, I just kept unconsciously trying to restrict. I kept trying to be in absolute control of my eating and my body. I kept checking if I had eaten too many carbs, compensating. Forbidding myself foods, only letting myself eat some kinds of them. So eventually all that resriction firebacked. And I ended up bingeing again. I kept cooking some delicious dishes that I love to other people, intending not to eat them, because of course I didn’t “deserve” them. Somehow in my twisted mind I just couldn’t take the risk of gaining weight because it meant I would be less worthy. Naturally I ended up bingeing on those foods, and hating myself for it. I felt like I was in an eternal diet, and that wasn’t the original plan.

Almost unconsciously, I started restricting my food again in order to compensate. And I ended up bingeing again. After lots of tears and “I’ll never do this again”s I figured something had to change. I decided that I neded a radical change of mindset. Instead of keeping my mind stuck in the “eating x amount of carbs and fat a day” I needed to switch to a different, healthier one.

I have to say, that when you’ve done so well for a long time (I had about 9 binge-free months, maybe more) relapsing really, really sucks. It makes you feel like you’re never really going to heal. Or that maybe it was all a dream and you eventually had to wake up. But the truth is that for as long as I didn’t find my answer, what really worked for me and healed my relationship with food and my body and I wasn’t getting anywhere.

So I started searching for answers. I’ve said before that intuitive eating didn’t work for me, and maybe I wasn’t ready (or maybe I wasn’t ready to let go of the “control” I had by then). But maybe this time it would. If I was going to do this thing, I had to do it well.

Someone recommended me to read the books Gennen Roth wrote about emotional and bigne eating. Since I live in Chile and I don’t have full access to buying all the eBooks I want, I picked the one that sounded the most appropiate “Breaking Free from Emotional Eating”. I crossed my fingers hoping it wasn’t bullshit. And it was not. In fact it’s being a great read, it has consistent arguments and it really makes you analyze the way you eat, the things that apparently don’t make sense (but that ultimately have a purpose) and a lot more. It’s really changing the way I behave and feel around food.

(Yes, this is my recommendation to you to read this book.)

From one day to another I started ignoring all the rules I had been self-imposing for so long. And well, the first days were CRAZY, I wanted to eat nothing but sweets and chocolate. It was like “woah I really want to have a lot of chocolate for my afternoon snack, ok let’s do it” or “I want to have lots of cereals for dinner, ok I’ll do it”. I started eating what I wanted BUT when I was hungry and until I was full (that is the hardest part). While during the first days all I wanted to do was eating all the things that were before forbidden to me as the days went by it started becoming easier and easier to listen to what my body really wanted.

I’m eating a lot more than before, yes. But this process has been really freeing from my restrictive and very punishing old mindset. I will probably gain weight (I have probably gained already), but it’s time I understand that choosing to be thin instead of being at peace with myself is a very sick decision. It’s time for me to grow-up and embrace who I am instead of wanting to change everything about me all the time.

It’s time to finally understand that I’m not becoming less-worthy of anything if I gain a few pounds and that I’m allowed to let my weight fluctuate like a “normal” person does.

I’ve said it a hundred times but it’s time to act like it: my self worth isn’t measured in numbers.

Pol