How I self-treated my eating disorder

Hi Lovies. Happy New Year! I know I’m a little slow with the updates, but that’s only because I don’t want to write a lot of random posts without any feelings attached to them.

In this one, I want to talk about eating disorders. As some of you may know, I’ve been through it all. A couple of years ago I wrote some posts about my eating disorder, how I tried to recover from it and how I tried to treat it. To be honest back then I didn’t think that I could ever truly get rid of those bad thoughts about food and my body. I thought they would stay with me forever – because that’s what I had been hearing/reading other people say. I even think I wrote it on my blog, so I had indeed accepted it as a matter of fact. Well, I can now say that I was wrong. Very wrong.

Today, I eat chocolate almost every day, without the lurking feeling of being sad and feeling bad about it like I used to. I can say yes to cake at the office without throwing up afterwards. I can eat burgers and candy with my brother, when we’re having a gaming-night, without a simple thought of guilt taking away my attention.

Like most other women (unfortunately) I’ve had plenty of issues with my body. My thighs were too thick, my stomach was NEVER flat enough, my arms were too big, my weight wasn’t perfect, my waist wasn’t small enough. I could go on and on and on about all the things I hated about my body. But in reality, the things I found unflattering about my body, was in fact just a reflection of this non-existing balance in my mind. The things I hated about my body wasn’t the real issue. Those negative thoughts were only symptoms of a much larger psychological issue.

I ended up seeking help at a place specialized in treating eating disorders last year, because even though I thought I had overcome the eating disorder, the bad thoughts had stayed with me (just as I had told myself they would). As a result, the thoughts continued to come back as well. I ate enough because I had gained enough control to do so, but I never really enjoyed the food I ate.
Luckily, the waiting list was long and I never really began the treatments. I only had 3-4 introduction sessions.

To be honest, I think that place would have made me even more sick. Because I would have told myself week after week going to the treatments, that I was ill and had to go to this special place to get well again. I would have continued to see myself as this sick person who needed help, and I would have continued to be this sick person who needed help.

Anyway, as I said, I didn’t get to actually start the real treatment. Because of the long waiting list it collapsed with my work schedule. I kind of gave up on treating the bad relationship I had with food. But little did I know, that because I, at that time, was working to gain more peace in my mind (something I had never worked on before, and something that turned out to be the real cause behind the eating disorder) – I was actually working away the symptoms of this cause (which was low self esteem, eating disorder, self destructive behavior and so on)

So in this process of working with my mind and achieving more peace, I saw the bad thoughts about food disappearing. The message I wish to forward with this post is to always dig deeper and find the cause of the symptoms and work with that instead of working on fixing just the symptoms. If you never get to the root of the problem, new symptoms will just keep resurfacing.

I will continue this subject and my own personal theory of how it can be self-treated in another post.

Love, Caro