Tip 1: Understand this is not really about weight or food
In fact, food and weight-related problems are signs of a deeper problem: anxiety, depression, isolation, fear, pressure to be perfect, or feeling out of control. Problems that cannot be healed by any amount of dieting or weight loss.
You first need to recognize that it satisfies a need in your life in order to conquer anorexia. For instance, in many aspects of your life, maybe you feel helpless, but you can regulate what you eat. You can feel strong and effective, at least for a short while, by saying "no" to food, having the best of hunger, and controlling the number on the scale. As a reminder of a "special talent" that most people may not possess, you might also come to love your hunger pangs.
Anorexia can also be a way to distract yourself from challenging thoughts. You don't have to face other issues in your life or struggle with complex feelings when you spend most of your time worrying about food, dieting, and weight loss. Emotional numbness may be created by restricting food, anesthetizing you from feelings of anxiety, depression, or rage, perhaps even replacing those feelings with a sense of calm or protection.
Sadly, any raise you get from starving yourself or losing pounds is incredibly short-lived, and it will stop working for you at all at some point. At the heart of anorexia, dieting and weight loss can't fix the negative self-image. The only way to do that is to recognise and find other ways to satisfy the emotional need that self-starvation fulfills.
Tip 2: Learn to tolerate your feelings
The first step in healing is to recognise the root problems behind your eating disorder, but insight alone is not enough. Let's assume, for example, that it makes you feel healthy and strong to obey restrictive food laws. If you strip away the coping device, the feelings of anxiety and helplessness that your anorexia helped you escape will confront you.
It can be incredibly uncomfortable to reconnect with your feelings. This is why, at the beginning of your rehabilitation, you might feel worse. But the solution is not to go back to the unhealthy eating patterns that you used to distract yourself before; it is to learn how to embrace and accommodate all of your emotions, including the negative ones.
Using mindfulness to deal with complicated feelings
Take a moment to interrupt everything you're doing and study what's going on inside when you start to feel frustrated by negativity, anxiety, or the desire to limit food.
Identify an emotion that you sense. Is this guilt? Shame? Unhelpfulness? Solitude? About anxiety? About disappointment? Scared? Uncertainty?
Accept the experience you are witnessing. Avoidance and resistance only make negative feelings more strong. Instead, without criticizing yourself, try to embrace what you're feeling.
Excavate further. Where in your body do you feel the emotion? What kinds of feelings are your mind going through?
Distance yourself. Realize that your emotions are NOT yours. Emotions are phenomena that pass, like clouds that travel through the sky. How you are, they can not identify.
They won't seem so frightening anymore until you learn how to embrace and tolerate your feelings. You will know that you are still in charge and that there are only temporary negative feelings. They will move easily once you stop battling them.
Fresh methods of seeking emotional satisfaction
You still need to find alternatives to dieting that you can turn to for emotional satisfaction until you recognize the relation between your emotions and your disordered eating habits, and can recognise your causes. For instance:
Call anyone that always makes you feel better if you're lonely or alone, arrange time with family or friends, watch a comedy show, or play with a dog or cat.
By dancing to your favorite song, squeezing a stress ball, or taking a fast walk or bike ride, if you are anxious, expend your nervous energy.
Treat yourself to a hot cup of tea if you're tired, go for a stroll, take a bath, or light some scented candles.
If you're bored, read a good book, go outside, visit a museum, or turn to a hobby that you enjoy (playing the guitar, knitting, shooting hoops, scrapbooking, etc.).
Tip 3: Challenge damaging mindsets
Perfectionists and overachievers are also individuals with anorexia. They are the "good" daughters and sons who do what they are told to do, try to succeed and rely on satisfying others with everything they do. But while they may seem to have it all together, they feel powerless, insufficient, and worthless inside.
Here's the good news, if that sounds familiar to you: these feelings do not represent reality. They are fuelled by unfair, self-sabotaging ways of thinking that can be taught to overcome.
Damaging anorexia-fueling mindsets
Pensing all-or-nothing. Through this harshly critical prism, you're a complete failure if you're not flawless. At least when it comes to yourself, you have a hard time seeing shades of gray.
Emotional justification. You assume that it must be real if you feel it in a certain way. "I feel fat" means "I am fat." "I feel hopeless" suggests that you will never get better.
Musts, not-must, and have-tos. You adhere to a strict set of rules ("I don't have to consume more than x calories," "I have to get straight A's," "I always have to be in control," etc.) and beat yourself up if you violate them.
Labeling. Marking. Based on errors and perceived shortcomings, you call yourself names. Slipping up becomes "I'm a "failure." "I'm disappointed with how I look" becomes "I'm disgusting.
Catastrophization. In the worst-case situation, you jump. For starters, if you backslide in recovery, you think there's no chance you'll ever get better.
Place your thoughts on the witness stand
If you understand the damaging patterns of thoughts you default to, you will begin to challenge them with questions like:
What's the proof that that thought is true? Not true?
What was I going to say to a friend who had this thought? ”
Is there another way or an alternative reason to look at the situation? ”
How should I look at the situation if I had no anorexia? ”
You can be shocked by how easily they crumble when you cross-examine your negative thoughts. You'll build a more balanced outlook in the process.
Tip 4: Develop a healthier relationship with food
While anorexia is not solely about food, you have developed negative food habits over time that can be tough to break. Developing a healthy food partnership means:
Returning to a healthier weight
Starting to consume more food
Changing how you think about food and yourself
Let the strict guidelines on food go. Although it can make you feel in charge by following strict laws, it's a temporary illusion. The reality is that you are being governed by these laws, not the other way around. You'll need to let go in order to get better. This is a big change that will at first feel frightening, but it will get easier day by day.
Let your body back in touch. If you have anorexia, you have learned to suppress the signs of hunger and fullness in your body. You can no longer even know them. The goal is to get back in contact with these internal signals, so that you can eat according to your physiological needs.
Enable yourself to consume all of the food. Eat whatever you want, but pay attention to how you feel physically after eating various foods, instead of taking those foods off limits. Ideally, it should leave you feeling fulfilled and energized by what you eat.
Get rid of the size of yours. Focus on how you feel instead of relying on weight as a test of self-worth. Make health and vitality, not a number on the scale, your target.
Create a meal plan that is safe. A nutritionist or dietician will help you build a balanced meal plan that contains enough calories to get you back to your regular weight if you need to add weight. Although this can be done on your own, you're probably out of touch with what looks like a standard meal or serving size.
