Hey guys,
I was looking for some info on how to survive the holidays when you are trying to recover from an eating disorder. Because as anyone who has ever been sic knows, the holidays, although they are great and magical, are sooo much about food and that can be extremely triggering. SO I found some forums where people go on and talk about their struggles and experiences throughout the holidays in case anyone is interested in reading them or joining one.

http://fishyvb.something-fishy.org/

Hope this can be of use to someone!
Happy Holidays!

Hola!
So I don't think anyone even reads this anymore which makes me sad...so I don't know what to write about. Because I would've preferred for convos to spring up and new ones to start off of feedback. Anyone have any ideas on anything they'd like to know that has anything to do with eating disorders?
Take care!
Erika

Hey guys,
Jut wanted to share a song that I think does a good job of telling the inside story of suffering with an eating disorder. It's really sad but it's all true. Here are the lyrics:

I told another lie today
And I got through this day
No one saw through my games
I know the right words to say
Like "I don't feel well"
"I ate before I came"

Then someone tells me how good I look
and for a moment
For a moment I am happy
But when I'm alone
No one hears me cry

I need you to know
I'm not through the night
Some days I'm still fighting to walk towards the light
I need you to know
That we'll be okay
Together we can make it through another day

I don't know the first time I felt unbeautiful
The day I chose not to eat
What I do know is how I changed my life forever
I know I should know better
There are days when I'm okay
And for a moment
For a moment I find hope
But there are days when I'm not okay
And I need your help
So I'm letting go

I need you to know
I'm not through the night
Some days I'm still fighting to walk towards the light
I need you to know
That we'll be okay
Together we can make it through another day

You should know you're not on your own
These secrets are walls that keep us alone
I don't know when but I know now
Together we'll make it through somehow
Together we'll make it through somehow

I need you to know
I'm not through the night
Some days I'm still fighting to walk towards the light
I need you to know
That we'll be okay
Together we can make it through another day

Hey everyone,
I found an article about how "adventure therapy" can be helpful in recovering from eating disorders. Adventure therapy would basically be patients trying new activities, like hiking, dancing, and any other things that involve a lot of physical activity, in order to raise levels of confidence and a motivation for change. I defientely agree with this because aside from learning that you have an ability to do an outdoor activity well, or even if you don't yet have the ability but want to develop it, it can serve as an incentive to do well with meals and follow the meal plan and do what needs to be done. I know this because there were things that I was told I could do but not before I maintaniend a healthy weight for my body structure and wasn't engaging in ed behaviors. This helped a lot because I wanted to get to do those things. The biggest one for me was horseback riding. Anyway here is the link to the article and I hope you'll read it and leave some feedback.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/163392.php

Hey guys,
So I wanted to share a song about Anorexia that happens to be one of my favorites. The lead singer of the band Silverchair, the writer of this song, suffered with Anorexia and this song is about his struggle to leave it behind him and get better. I saw the band perform this live once and it was very powerful...so here are the lyrics and also a link to the video which is really amazing... enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdF98W-ON3Q

Silverchair - Ana's Song

Please die, Ana

For as long as you're here we're not

You make the sound of laughter

and sharpened nails seem softer

And I need you now, somehow

And I need you now, somehow

Open fire

On my needs designed

On my knees for you

Open fire

On my knees desires

What I need from you

Imagine pageant

In my head the flesh seems thicker

Sandpaper tears corrode the film

And I need you now, somehow

And I need you now, somehow

Open fire

On my needs designed

On my knees for you

Open fire

On my knees desires

What I need from you

And you're my obsession

I love you to the bones

And Ana wrecks your life

Like an Anorexia life

Open fire

On the needs designed

On my knees for you

Open fire

On my knees desires

What I need from you

Open fire

On the needs designed

Open fire

On my knees desires

On my knees for you

Anyone have any thoughts on the poem? What about YOU MAC ATTACK?!

So our english teacher has assigned us a paper about a poem. We have to analyze it and find info about it and all that jazz. I chose the poem "Anorexic" by Eavan Boland. I think this is a pretty great poem because she doesn't use any annoying cliches and I think some of the stuff she says is quite accurate. So here's the poem which I found on the following website:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/anorexic/

Anorexic

Flesh is heretic. My body is a witch. I am burning it. Yes I am torching ber curves and paps and wiles. They scorch in my self denials. How she meshed my head in the half-truths of her fevers till I renounced milk and honey and the taste of lunch. I vomited her hungers. Now the bitch is burning. I am starved and curveless. I am skin and bone. She has learned her lesson. Thin as a rib I turn in sleep. My dreams probe a claustrophobia a sensuous enclosure. How warm it was and wide once by a warm drum , once by the song of his breath and in his sleeping side. Only a little more, only a few more days sinless, foodless, I will slip back into him again as if I had never been away. Caged so I will grow angular and holy past pain, keeping his heart such company as will make me forget in a small space the fall into forked dark, into python needs heaving to hips and breasts and lips and heat and sweat and fat and greed. Eavan Boland

Hey guys,
I was on the something fishy website and I was reading some things. I foound this poem-ish type thing that I really liked. I hope you'll read it. It has some really amazing insights. Another thing that is so cool is that many people with eds, although have different issues for why they have an ed, still have similar feelings around it. So this does a great job of summing those up for people to better understand.

http://www.something-fishy.org/words/knowme.php

In Their Words

If You Really Knew Me, You'd Know That...

1. I desperately want to be accepted
2. I am afraid of not winning this battle
3. Just now I am figuring out who I am
4. I have a hard time with the concept of forgiving
5. I smile all the time because I don't know what else to do
6. I am starting to become comfortable with the idea that I am ordinary and that there's nothing wrong with that
7. My eating disorder is not the problem; it's the symptom of my real problems
8. Sometimes I just want you to listen, not talk, not interrupt, not offer advice or suggestions. Sometimes all I want is you to sit there and listen and to feel like I have been heard
9. Sometimes the weight of my sadness is bone-crushing, like the pressure of water down deep
10. I hurt myself because it's the only feeling (pain) that I can stand to feel
11. I am terrified of not being a good enough mother
12. At the start of the next day, before I even brush my teeth, I ask God to help me stop myself from hurting either myself or anyone around me
13. I'm deathly afraid of growing up and dealing with all the things a grown-up must think about, even though I'm technically an adult
14. There are so many things I wish I could say
15. Words and actions hurt me even though they weren't meant to
16. I cry when you hug me because of the emptiness and pain I know I'll feel when you finally do let me go
17. I am so incredibly mean to myself. I wouldn't talk to any other person on earth the way I talk to myself
18. What I want right now more than anything is love from myself. If I had more self love, the criticisms, the negativity, the thoughts, the low self-esteem, the self-doubts would all cease
19. I sometimes need your help, but I'm not sure how to tell you this
20. I really do care about you, more than you could even imagine
21. I cry when no one is around
22. I am an emotional and sexual abuse survivor. I am on a healing mission to make sure I stop the cycle of abuse and never pass on what happened to me to someone else. I think that that makes me pretty unique and remarkable
23. I'm head-over-heels in love with my daughter and my husband
24. I hold back from full recovery because I hang on to anorexia as an excuse to not chase after my real goals
25. I don't like the eating disorder, I just am having a hard time disliking it
26. I felt too ashamed, too dirty, too embarrassed and too scared to tell you that I couldn't cope without hurting myself
27. I have a very difficult time seeing myself as a girl/woman/anything feminine
28. I want to make a difference in the world
29. I am unable to see my potential right now but it helps me to hear you when you tell me it's there
30. I'm afraid to know myself and understand my feelings and wishes
31. As I'm smiling and laughing, I have voices screaming and degrading me in my head
32. I blame myself for being raped
33. I am at a crossroads. For thirty-four years I have tried to be someone else. I have sweat, cried, screamed my way out of my skin
34. My family is more dysfunctional than I like to admit
35. When I laughingly say I don't want to grow up, I'm not joking. I really am terrified
36. I believe that everyone's flaws should be accepted and forgiven except for mine
37. My love for my son overwhelms me
38. I am honorable
39. I would give anything to get out of my head and into my body when I am being intimate with my boyfriend
40. I'm always in a state of obsession. My mind is always going a mile a minute and my ED is ALWAYS berating me for something. I never have a moment of pure peace or silence in my head
41. I'd love to escape to somewhere by the beach, eat, drink, dance, without a care in the world
42. I lied my way through treatment and I'm now paying the consequences
43. I'm scared to leave the student world and enter the real world alone
44. I miss my parents like mad
45. I feel there's an empty hole in me
46. Some days I feel like the old me & it feels so liberating
47. More than anything I long for a mother who loves me and listens to me and to go home and feel safe
48. I feel guilty about all the pain I feel
49. I hate, absolutely hate, feeling vulnerable and I will do almost anything to avoid it
50. I feel nothing most of the time and I wait to see your reactions before I know how to respond/reply/react myself
51. I am really sensitive although I appear unfeeling
52. I'll lie to everybody to keep them from being hurt or from hurting them
53. I feel like a complete failure as a mother
54. What I want most is to just hear that I am ok just the way I am even if my natural state isn't common, normal or cool
55. I worship the ground my big sister walks on and she doesn't even know it. I compare myself to everything she does
56. What you said/did hurts
57. Sometimes I feel like I don't belong anywhere and I feel like an alien and that I don't belong in this time because my outlook feels so foreign
58. I don't like myself right now and I need support, but then when I get that support, I'm scared to let go of it again, scared that I'll lose it
59. I still sleep with a stuffed animal
60. No one could berate me more than I do myself
61. I hate being needy and yet I long to be taken care of
62. I am a scared little girl searching for a daddy to love her
63. Without this mask I don't really know who I am
64. I'm not trusting of anyone
65. I simultaneously crave both fitting in and standing out. I feel like a failure when I'm different, and I feel like a failure when I blend
66. The ED was the only constant in my life, the only thing which felt unchanging regardless of what external events happened. The ED was the only guarantee, the only certainty, the only thing loyal to me throughout everything that came my way
67. I wish that I didn't hate myself but at the same time, I don't know how it would feel to like myself
68. I am so afraid of being in an intimate relationship with a man, and I fear I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life
69. I'm afraid I won't be a good mom
70. I wear my weight like an armor
71. The bigger my smile, the larger my pain
72. I use my body to convey what my words cannot
73. I always feel like a burden but usually I hide that
74. I don't want you to give up on me
75. I have big dreams and wish that I believed enough to make them become a reality
76. I don't even know myself
77. I want to love my father, but I cannot figure out how
78. For years, I longed for someone to know my secret, in the hope they'd stop the pain and stop me from hurting because I didn't care enough about myself to stop myself
79. When I do something stupid, and remember it later, the "me" in the memory always looks fat and ugly
80. I have no confidence in myself or my abilities
81. I struggle to believe in myself at times and fear being hurt by criticism but I am courageous and don't shrink back from those things I am gifted at
82. I will not show that I am mad at you. In fact, I probably won't even feel mad at you, unless someone else reassures me that it IS something to be mad about
83. I want to find something that will make my parents proud of me
84. I don't really give a rat's ass about how I look. I only talk about it so much as a way of verbalizing all the fears inside me that I don't know how to identify
85. I love you even when you don't think I do
86. I pray that I will still be able to have children someday
87. I'm so, so sorry for all the times I lied to you
88. I am scared shitless because I don't know what to do with my life and I cannot cope without direction
89. I only pretend to be immature: I'm scared to show you just how serious and deep I can be
90. I need help believing in myself
91. I am holding on to my faith and my belief in God
92. I don't know who I am or what I'm all about
93. I don't feel that I deserve your unconditional love
94. Even when it doesn't look like it, I am trying, and I'm doing my best in the moment
95. I won't ever measure up to "you"
96. I harbor an immense amount of guilt over my actions and this prevents me from telling you, as I don't want you to shoulder my pain and my burden, or know my shameful secret for what it is
97. I am really afraid that I could really exceed beyond my wildest dreams. But I have never let myself try, because what if I succeed then fail miserably
98. I'm scared that this will kill me

wierdos :)

my baby!

sen10rs

I'm too sick to blog so forgive me for my absence.

Hello

Hey guys,
So I found this really interesting new article about a study that Northwestern U did about EDNOS(eating disorder not otherwise specified). It kind of goes over some of the mental struggles people have with food who might not necessarily be diagnosed with any of the most "known" eating disorders like anorexia, bulimia, or even binge eating disorder. But it raises a bit of awareness to the fact that this ed is probably just as common, if not more so, than some of the others like anorexia. I think I've spoken about this before on this blog, but I'm going to say that I think the ignorance or really just lack of info that we have on this ed, can be so detrimental to people who struggle with it. Like I think I've said before, I personally now seem to struggle with this (as told by my therapist) but it turned into EDNOS after years of full blown anorexia. So I know this to be true for many. But this article talks about how this is just how it is for many people. So what I'm saying is that there is no prerequisite to suffer from EDNOS, therefore it may be THE ed some suffer with. I just love this topic because it's so important that we raise awareness about these lesser known, but just as dangerous, eds which include others like "chew and spit" and pica, etc. I'll go into that further soon, but for now here's the article. And btw I just kind of love Northwestern which just makes me that much more excited about this article!!

http://www.northbynorthwestern.com/2009/11/55533/the-most-common-eating-disorder-youve-never-heard-of/

Did anyone read the article? Any thoughts?

Sorry I made a mistake on the last one...here's the actual link :)

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20091027/School-to-college-transition-can-trigger-eating-disorders-in-young-adults.aspx#at

So Mr. Mac actually beat me to my idea when he said to link the stress to the ED...I have to say I'm proud of you for saying tht Mr. Mac! It makes me feel like you actually understand this a little lol. Anyway, stress is very directly related to EDs because it happens that a lot of people who are doing well in recovery may relapse when under large amounts of stress and/or experiencing a transition. Right now, many of us are applying to colleges as seniors in high school which is a transition in itself. There is a lot of responsibility put on our shoulders and for me personally, I feel stressed because it feels like my future is in my hands and if I make the wrong move I can ruin it. But I know that's me "catastrophizing". But I think lots of us can relate to this. Which brings me to the article that I found on google news about the stress of transitioning to college and how that raises the chance of eds. So here's the link to the article...let me know what you think....

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20091027/School-to-college-transition-can-trigger-eating-disorders-in-young-adults.aspx#at

School is very stressful...Mr. Mac is killing meeeeeeee

I was wondering if anyone on here with an ED has a clear idea of what triggers a relapse for them? I'm curently in the midst of a minor-ish one. I say minor-ish because I feel like compared to other times, this isn't so bad. But for where I am now, it probably isn't the greatest. I don't know. I think that some of the things that normally would've triggered a huge relapse are going on but they're kind of manifesting in other ways if that makes sense. I know this happens a lot, but I'm curious to know how it has happened for you guys.
For those who read this and don't have EDs, I apologize if this can get boring. I understand a lot of it probably doesn't make the most sense, so if that happens please let me know and I will try and explain this in not ED terms. The ED jargon is kind of wierd I guess so please let me know! :)

So I was trying to upload my podcast on here. It isn't so great because I say "um" a bunch of times in it but it's basically about how insurance companies suck when it comes to covering treatment for eating disorders. It really is horrible. I have so many friends that haven't gotten the treatment they needed because their insurance companies didn't want to pay. Or they'll pay but they only pay for a certain amount of weeks or just until the patient reaches a certain weight. What these stupid companies don't understand is that the disease really has nothing to do with weight. I mean it definitely plays a part, but restoring or normalizing a person's weight will in no way cure them or make them slightly better. They may stabilize, but that often times makes it even worse on the person. The thoughts will get louder and stronger because how is a girl (or guy) who has spent the last, who knows how long, engaging in the eating disorder that is so deeply ingrained in them, obeying it, being a slave to it, supposed to leave the hospital 15 pounds heavier than they were when they came in, be expected to maintain that when they have no idea how and are scared out of their minds. That is SO dangerous because it triggers those thoughts all over again, and speaking from my own personal experiences, leaving weighing more, made me only that more determined and plain desperate to do absolutely anything I could to lose the weight I gained, and then some, as fast as I possibly could. This can lead to so many dangerous behaviors that can come back even stronger than they were prior to the hospital stay. And these things can be fatal. FATAL. And if you somehow survive whatever hell you are putting your still fragile body through, no matter what your weight may be, then I'm going to guess that 9 times out of 10 they will be right back at the hospital within a week or two. I say this because I've seen it. I remember being in the hospital, seeing someone leave, and then see them back only a few days or maybe weeks later, worse than they were the last time, because they couldn't do it without treatment and support which is so vital in the early and even later stages.
So the point I'm trying to get at is these companies need to realize all of this. And if the only thing that motivates them to change their crappy policies, is that they realize that they actually end up spending much more money on shorter, but more frequent and sporadic stays, than they would spend if they just invested in longer one time stays, then so be it. They need to understand that the REAL work doesn't begin until real therapy begins. And that can only take real effect once a person is healthier and stabilized. But if people are constantly being pulled out of treatment before they can reach stabilization or right as soon as they do, then they have no time to work on the real issues that are causing the eating disorder. And if those things are never dealt with head on, then it will be impossible to recover. And we need to help people recover. It is such a social injustice to have girls and guys suffering with treatable disorders just because they can't get it covered or insured. And this is only considering about all of the people WITH insurance. There are tons more out there who don't have any coverage and can't afford any treatment at all. And that is just as terrible if not worse. Unfortunately, I don't know how to solve that. If I did, I so would've done it by now. All I can hope for is health care reform for mental illness, which would also include all eating disorders.
I will say that I've been very fortunate and haven't had too many of these issues. I've somehow managed to get very lucky and have my insurance cover all of my hospital stays and most of my therapy. They don't cover dietitian appointments though which I think should definitely be added to things health care will cover because nutrition support is also completely necessary in order to recover. But I honestly feel very blessed to have gotten all of the treatment that I needed and still need. Luckily, my treatment has never been terminated because of money, so this has allowed me to take my time and really work on my issues and get better for real. And there is still a lot I have to work on, and I'm fine with that. I'm at a point where I want to face my issues, well for the most part :), because I want to live my life to the fullest and all of that. But I think EVERYONE deserves that kind of treatment-where you are getting adequate care by trained professionals who can really help you dig deeper and ask you the tough questions, but also help lead you back to a life of happiness. It is something I feel very passionately about. I could probably talk about this forever so I will try and stop soon. I will end by posting a link to a site that I think is pretty cool, because it is this organization that is essentially trying to bring awareness to Congress and have bills passed in order to help victims of eating disorders get help. So please check it out and thanks for reading this if you actually managed to read all of this...and if you did, KUDOS to you :)

http://www.eatingdisorderscoalition.org/

Lots to update everyone on!!