I've binged....now what?!

Someone recently explained to me that she had been through a few days of eating a lot and didn't know what to do next. Of course she wanted to restrict to make up for it but she also wants to recover.

This is a situation I faced many, many times. When you're trying to learn how to eat more again it is very easy to feel unbalanced at first or doubt yourself. Sometime you may not even be overeating but you feel like you are. On the other hand it is very easy to overeat. The binge part of your brain might be tempted to give in or you might find yourself experiencing days where your calorie intake is a lot higher than you would like which can be overwhelming.

I'll admit to begin with all I wanted to do was to restrict to make up for it. It avoided me purging but allowed me still to have some control so it seemed like a great idea but it isn't....at all! By doing that you're just asking for your eating disorder to continue!!
Here's why it's a bad idea:

- When you restrict your body goes into starvation mode and slows the metabolism down....this makes your body a lot more likely to store what you've eaten over the past few days.
- When you restrict your body tries to protect you. It thinks you are starving so it causes the urge to binge. So you will be more likely to binge again and once again you will want to restrict, then binge, then restrict, then binge, you get the idea.
- You will feel depressed, energy less and miserable.
- You are preventing yourself from getting better.

The best thing to do would be to continue as if it hadn't happened. WHAT?! I hear you say...that's impossible? That's what I thought and you have to take lots of small steps to get to that point but you can get there. If you go back to eating a regular amount of calories your body will use what you have eaten over the past few days as it doesn't need it all and fairly fast as your metabolism will have been given a boost from eating more.
At first you may want to just try to eat regularly even if its just small amounts. Then next time you can see if you can try to eat a bit more following a binge. If I have a weekend that involves quite a bit of eating now I usually continue to eat as often as I usually would but for a few days after I'll go for slightly healthier options. I think that's a healthy way of dealing with it. I don't restrict and I don't obsess over it. I can also safely say that since using that technique my weight has stayed a lot more stable compared to when I binged...restricted...binged...restricted which often caused my weight to go up.

Hope that's helpful.
Love Jasmin

Food Phobias!

I recently got asked a question on how to overcome the fear of 'bad' foods. I remember the endless arguments with my therapists when they told me I just had to do things and I felt like they didn't understand because it was a phobia and I just couldn't. I feel hypocritical saying it but after years of learning to face 'bad' foods the best thing you can do....is just eat it. I know that's not what you want to hear and you might be thinking...but I CAN'T. But truthfully and I'm sure deep down you know this, the only thing stopping you is your fear. Here is a few tips to help you break your phobia.....

- Start with slightly scary foods and gradually move on to scarier foods
- Take it slowly, start off with just a bite of certain foods every now and then
- Remember: 'THERE ARE NO GOOD AND BAD FOODS, ONLY GOOD AND BAD DIETS'
- Ask yourself what makes that food bad and why your scared of it....is there 100% proof behind your thoughts?
- Set yourself small targets like trying one scary food a week
- Have a distraction planned for afterwards to take your mind off it
- Reward yourself for facing your fear
- Do research on the food to find positives about it

Honestly....facing scary foods is one of the hardest parts of recovery...Before eating certain foods I would feel scared, anxious, sick, worried and afterwards I would cry and cry and cry. But gradually I started to see that those foods weren't having the affect I always thought they would....they didn't suddenly make me gain weight and I very gradually started to overcome my phobia.

Remember it's not impossible, it just takes a lot of strength, courage and desire to recover. If I can do it, so can you.
If anyone ever wants to ask me a question or needs some support feel free to email me at jas_1211@hotmail.com

xxx

Buddies?

OK...so I had an idea for a charity and would love your opinion...

I have recently been kind of mentoring a homeless man and a girl with an eating disorder. It has made me think about how much easier it can be to talk to someone that can relate to us other than a psychologist. Many people often feel like a psychologist is just analysing us and it is hard to open up to them. But what if we all had a friend that had recovered from whatever it is we are going through whether it is an eating disorder, addiction (achohol, drugs etc), self harming, depression or even an illness we cannot prevent? What if we had a friend who could guide us through recovery/the illness? I personally found the beat message boards one of the most helpful things during recovery because I was able to release my thoughts and feelings to someone who could completely understand where I was coming from. It helps us feel less lonely and gives us faith in the place we could get to once recovered.
So what if there was a charity that promoted this and paired people up so that people had a 'buddy' to guide them through their problem?

Let me know what you think!!

Hope you are all ok :)

People like to talk about food and eating...that's life. But there's still that part of me underneath that thrives on it. Part of me hates it because I've worked so hard to gain the views I now have on food but part of me loves it because it's justification for those old eating disordered thoughts.
What I believe now, whether it's true or false helps me to stay healthy and feel safe around food. It helps me to block out the eating disorder. But as soon as someone starts talking about food and dieting it's like the eating disorder wakes up. I try to argue against people as a way to prevent those eating disordered thoughts making their way into my subconscious but it's a struggle. People don't always understand and might think I'm annoyed with them when really I'm just annoyed with the situation because it creates such a difficult battle in my head.
It's like the eating disorder grabs on to what that person is saying in an attempt to make its way back in. I go off into my own little world where I'm trying to reassure myself that my way of thinking now is healthy and I don't have to let anyone influence that while the eating disorder pokes at me to hold onto those negative thoughts so that it can get its own way by persuading me to give into it.
Sometimes there may be a lot of truth in what is being said...but while a simple statement might be a small healthy belief in that person's life, for someone who has had an eating disorder it has the potential to grow into a self destructive belief system that destroys them as a person when the eating disorder takes over.
Talking brings back memories. Once again the eating disorder loves it and pulls on them until I give in to the positives of that memory, of course it will never allow me to focus on the bad when it's trying to persuade me. It's proud of those memories of fasting and weight loss and I feel that part of me take over when I can't help pointing out those "successes" to others. That's not the kind of person I want to be, I'm not proud of hurting myself. Those memories are a part of my past to remind me why I chose to recover and have the life I have now, not to point out to other people how good I was able to starve myself...it is not a talent or achievement!
This might be a challenge I face now. But gradually I hope to develop the resilience I need in these situations to block out the negative thoughts. It will be difficult but it will make me stronger!

Love Jasmin x

I'm back!!

Heyyy!

Sorry I haven't posted on here in such a long time! I've had internet problems which have only just eventually been fixed. Hasn't been good...haven't been able to follow my favourite blogs either :( But....I'm back and I have lots to come.

Quick catch up on me... I'm running the British 10k for Beat on the 10th of July. If you would like to sponsor me you can do so by going to www.justgiving.com/Jasmin-Turner

I also went to the my personal best/body gossip event a couple of days ago to celebrate beats new website which helps people with their self esteem and to reach their potential...my personal best. A few of the my body gossip cast came to read monologues written by beat young ambassadors...it was an amazing day. You can look at the website yourself by going to www.mypersonalbest.org.uk

Hope you're all well
Love Jasmin

The benefits of an eating disorder...

I know what you're thinking....there are benefits? Yes and I'm not talking about losing weight because remember weight loss caused by our eating disorder is NOT an achievement even if it feels that way at the time. And I'm not just talking about the benefits of recovering. I'm talking about the benefits of the whole experience, the benefits we gain from the battle, the benefits we gain in growing as people because of our eating disorder.

When you get to a point where you are sick of the eating disorder and are ready to recover it is easy to look at the eating disorder and see all the negatives and hate it for what it does to you. That's good because you are seeing the eating disorder for what it really is and it drives you to recover. But there comes a point when being so angry about having an eating disorder and hating yourself for it can have the opposite affect. You might have even recovered already but looking back with regret and sadness at that experience isn't going to change what happened and is only going to affect your happiness that you deserve now that you're free.
If you had a choice would you like to look back on your life with regret and anger, wishing that things had been different or would you like to look back with acceptance and happiness because everything you have been through has lead you to be who you are today (hopefully that's a recovered and happy person). It doesn't matter what we've been through in our lives, we all deserve to be happy and accept our lives as they are because no amount of worrying, regretting, or anger is going to change the past. But we can change how we feel about the past if we look at our experience in a new light.

So we have had/have an eating disorder, we can't change that. But as it's eating disorder awareness week I thought it would be the best time to try to look at our eating disorder from a new light and appreciate the person it has helped to make us today...

- Everything happens for a reason. I truly believe that every situation we face no matter how good or bad, happens to help us learn something new or change the course of our life in a positive way if we are able to see the opportunity or to meet new people who in turn affect our life. We might not see it straight away but there really is something to gain through everything we experience.
"We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations."

- We discover ourselves. Recovery from an eating disorder takes a lot of soul searching. You learn to dig beneath the ed and find out who you really are. Most people go through day to day life never really questioning themselves or as silly as it may sound getting to know themselves. They don't have a reason to. But we get that chance and we come through the other side being a lot more in touch with ourselves. When you understand yourself as a person I find it makes life more rewarding. I feel more like an individual and like a worthwhile person because I can see what makes me, me. I think for me the most important thing I learnt about myself or learnt to use from within myself is my spirituality. I'd definitely call myself a spiritual person which I never did before. Having that spirituality has made me a much happier person and I doubt I would have discovered it or realized it's potential if it wasn't for my eating disorder.

- We learn to love and respect ourselves. For most of us our low self esteem probably played a big part in our eating disorder. Of course many people without eating disorders and low self esteem often have a higher sense of love and respect for themselves than we start off with but do they stop to question it or appreciate the skill of loving and respecting themselves. Do they question if they could love themselves more? Be nicer to themselves? Or see it as a priority? We learn the importance of these skills and it is such a good feeling when you reach that point where you can accept yourself and feel good about yourself. We learn the techniques to increase our self acceptance more and more giving us the potential to have such good self esteem if we allow ourselves to.

- We become stronger. All I want to do to elaborate on this is share some quotes with you which I really think emphasis the strength we are able to gain through suffering.
"Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength."
"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."
"In the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer."
"Pain nourishes courage. You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you."

- We learn to manage our emotions and understand them. We have the opportunity to become emotionally healthy people who not only stop using food to deal with emotions but learn the healthiest way to deal with them. When we understand our emotions and why we feel the way we do they become easier to deal with. Now we understand them we are prepared for life. Of course they will affect us but we have the potential to be in a place where we can deal with them in the best possible way.

- We are able to appreciate other people's problems and understand other people better. When you learn so much about the connection between thoughts, feelings, behavior and life experiences you begin to have a lot more sympathy for people. I find I am now a lot less judgmental about people because you never know what is going on in someone's life. You are able to understand the layers there are to people and see beyond the exterior.

- We are able to appreciate life. When you've been through hell and back the freedom of recovery feels amazing. You are able to appreciate every breath of fresh air, every moment of happiness, every bit of energy you have, every moment of enjoyment, every thing that makes you smile. You are thankful for getting through to the other side to such a beautiful new world and you are ready to embrace it and love every moment of life.

So if I could go back and change my experience, would I? Probably not. It has made me who I am today and that is a much stronger and happier person. It has taught me to see life in a new way and understand life and myself in a new way. Recovery has provided me with skills for life not just connected to beating my eating disorder but in continuing to be a happy, healthy person. So I won't look back at my eating disorder with regret but with relief and a sense of achievement because I got through it and it has given me so much to be thankful for.

Dear Jasmin....love your body

I wanted to share with you a letter I wrote as a recovery project. I'm writing from the point of view of my body. It's a really good idea to help you try to listen to your body and really think about what you're putting it through so hopefully you'll try it too. If you're body could talk what would it say to you?

Dear Jasmin
I just want you to know how it feels when you treat me the way you do. I know you can’t exactly help it and you know deep down that what you are doing to me is wrong but you do have a choice to stop it if you could just find that strength that I know you have.
I don’t know what to do with myself. I can never prepare myself for what you are doing to do to me because it is always changing. Sometimes you fill me with goodness and I am thankful for that because it allows me to function properly, to be filled with energy, and then I can do good things back for you like producing the chemicals you need to feel happy. I am able to feel peaceful knowing that I am not about to suddenly break down and can allow you to sleep peacefully in return. My muscles feel strong and I can cope with the pressures you put me under when dancing and allow you to dance to the best of your ability. I have everything I need to look after every bit of you even down to your hair, skin and nails making you look healthy and feel good about yourself. But when you don’t feed me properly I can’t do these things. Like a car with no fuel I do not have the energy and begin to slow down. If you ignore these signals and push me to keep going I will start to break down. Sometimes you fill me with so much that it hurts and I don’t know what to do with it all. You purge which confuses my hunger signals and I know that confuses you too because I am unable to give you messages properly on what your body needs.
Sometimes you give me so little I don’t know how I keep going. I feel like I barely am and that I will give up any moment but I try to keep fighting for you. But I want you to realise how hard that fight is. I feel limp and lifeless. Everything slows down within me because I don’t have the energy to keep it going. I try so hard to keep everything within going that I lose so much connection to the world outside. Everything is just there, a world behind a translucent screen that I want to be part of so much and I know you do to but I can’t see it clearly enough or feel or hear it enough because I’m surrounded by this bubble of pain, sadness and weakness that lack of food brings. I am there in a moment of time lifelessly, going through the motions, not really there.
I like exercise. It can make me feel energised and it helps me to release chemicals that can make you happy. It can help me move properly and gives me lots of strength. It is good for my blood and my heart but in certain amounts. Too much and it has the opposite affects. When you push me too far I don’t have the energy to allow you to feel happy. Even when you feed me, you are using more than I have so again I begin to shut down. I have to take energy from other places to keep going such as your muscles which is taking away my strength. My heart is put under more pressure than it can handle because the more I take from my muscles the weaker my heart gets. One day it will give up.
I know this isn’t how you want to feel. You want energy. You want to feel healthy and happy and I can give that to you if you let me. I can’t keep going this way much longer.
Love...your body

Stay strong everyone
Love Jasmin

Guest Blogger....Maintaining a positive attitude through illness

Here is a post that Eric Stevenson very kindly offered to share with through the clouds about maintaing a positive attitude through illness which I definitely agree with! My negative attitude about relapsing ended up actually causing my relapse and I'm sure more of you can understand that. Ever since my own recovery and through reading different books I have become very pro positive thinking and I think it can change your life dramatically and especially help you recover from your eating disorder. Here's what Eric has to say....

Individuals struggling with any kind of serious illness are prone to anxiety and depression. These are difficult problems to overcome, and can sometimes even cause enough stress to exacerbate the original illness. The good news is that the reverse is also true – having a positive attitude has been shown to help with recovery and mitigate the side effects of both illness and treatment. Staying positive is a difficult but important goal when faced with sickness.

There is no single mindset or approach that will work for everyone. Some people may take comfort in learning everything there is to know about their condition so that they can plan in advance. Others might find this amount of information overwhelming, and instead prefer to take it one day at a time. One man who followed the former strategy is popular science author Stephen Jay Gould. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma, an aggressive form of cancer that usually has a survival rate of 9 to 12 months. But he didn’t let himself be discouraged by that figure, instead focusing on the fact that his otherwise good health and positive attitude gave him the best chance to survive. He lived with mesothelioma symptoms for another 20 years before passing away from an unrelated cancer.

This is not to say that Gould’s positive attitude is the only thing that helped him beat the odds. Rather, his famous essay “The Median Isn’t the Message” is an example of one man finding hope in an unusual place: statistics. His story illustrates the uniqueness of the human spirit in finding ways to remain positive in the face of a frightening situation. Even for those facing illnesses far less immediately threatening than the symptoms of mesothelioma, maintaining a good attitude can have real, tangible effects on day-to-day life.

Eating Disorder Awareness Week...

Heyyy everyone...

So, today is the start of eating disorder awareness week and luckily half term for me (yay!) so I will try to write a new post everyday this week.

I just wanted to tell you all about New Looks new Beat watches. As you know I am a Beat young ambassador and this Saturday I went to New Look with some other people from Beat to kind of launch the watches and have some photos taken to start promoting them. They are £2 and the money goes towards Beat so if you haven't already...go and buy one!

I have lots of things planned for my blog this week including a guest blog but for today I'd just like to share a recovery analogy with you from the book 'The Rules of Normal Eating'....

Why is change so slow?
"Picture a hill of damp sand with a marble on top. If you give the marble a nudge in one direction, it will roll down the hill, forming a slight groove in the sand. Each time the marble gets nudged in the same direction, it will slide into the groove, and plunge downward.
Now suppose you decide that you want the marble to roll down the other side of the sand hill. You'll have to place the marble on top of the hill and push it in the other direction because if you don't, it will slip automatically into its old groove. If you push it only once or twice in the new direction, its inclination will still be to return to return to its old groove. So initially, you'll need to push the marble in the new direction over and over until a new groove is carved out. Eventually when your old groove and the new groove are about even, the marble will have the potential to roll either way. To ensure that it will always go in the new direction, you'll have to keep gently nudging it until the old groove fills up with sand and the new groove is deeply carved. Then the marble will naturally fall into the new groove every time.
Translating this marble analogy into behavioral terms, we have to repeat a new behavior more often than an old behavior in order to have the new one become a habit and the old one disappear. Behaviorists call this process conditioning because it conditions or prompts us to behave in certain ways. Of course most people are not linear learners and don't go straight from point A to point B. We try a new way, revert back to the old way for a while, then tentatively try the new way again. We're inconsistent, then we wonder why we're not changing quickly enough, after all our hard work.
Think back to the marble on the sand hill. What would happen if sometimes you pushed it one way and sometimes you pushed it the other? The old and new grooves would stay about even right? That's what happens when you try a new behavior or way of thinking, then return to the old action or thought. For example, if food makes you anxious, you try pushing yourself to eat when you're moderately hungry. Succeeding you feel proud of overcoming your fear. But the next time you feel hunger pangs, you ignore them and put off eating until you are nearly sick. Or you triumphantly pass by the jar of chocolate kisses on your worker's desk one day, only to find yourself sneaking a handful the next. Alternating like this for days, weeks, months, or even years causes you to feel as if you never change even though you're doing things right a good deal of the time. You prevent yourself from changing by reinforcing both the new and the old, achieving a behavioral draw.
Returning to the marble analogy, we could say that every time you revert to an old behavior, you're deepening the first groove,while every time you push yourself to practice a new behavior, you're not only carving the second groove more deeply, but you're allowing sand to erase the first one. Similarly, if you continue to press onward with a new behavior, the neural pathway in your brain that elicited the old behavior will eventually fade away."

Hope you're all ok
Love Jasmin

Another... Recovery quote!

I do love recovery quotes...(in case you hadn't noticed). I always found they were able to give me hope or a bigger feeling of courage when I was feeling low.
I just came across this one in my recovery flash cards which I have a massive pile of and I think it's a really good way of looking at the recovery process...

"Very slowly and carefully, you let go of the log and practise floating. When you start to sink you grab back on. Then you let go of the log and practise treading water, and when you get tired, hold on once again. After a while, you practise swimming around the log, twice, ten times, twenty times, a hundred times, until you gain the strength and confidence you need to swim to shore. Only then do you completely let go of the log."

Hope you're all ok
Love Jasmin

Recovery is not and never will be perfect....so don't try to make it.

Heyy, Sorry it's been so long since I've posted anything. Life's been pretty busy. I guess I should start by saying Happy New Year! I hope it's brought lots of new hope for you all and you haven't been too strict or pressurizing on yourself with your resolutions. This is actually the first year I've not set myself any resolutions involving my weight or recovery. Things aren't completely back to normal since my relapse and I thought about a resolution to overcome those things but then I realized I'm just setting myself up to feel bad if I don't manage to do it. I'm better off not having any expectations and taking each day as it comes and giving myself time rather than pressurizing myself to suddenly change just because it's a new year. Yes it's a good time to put things behind you and maybe see it as a chance to start again but be gentle with yourself and don't punish yourself if things aren't changing, recovery is still a process and a new year won't speed that up. That brings me on to the topic of this post.....

One thing I'm sure we're all aware of is the constant ups and downs of recovery. It's a constant battle and you forever feel like you move forwards and then you take a step back again. Sometimes you even feel like you're right back at the beginning again or getting nowhere. I just want to remind you that that is ok. It's part of recovery and no-one expects anything else. RECOVERY IS NOT PERFECT.
More importantly because it's something I have needed to learn to accept since being recovered is that even once you're recovered, you're relationship with food won't always be perfect and there may be bad days. I became so focused on not allowing myself to lapse and having "perfect" months where I didn't purge that months and months into being recovered when I had a bad day it triggered my relapse. It was one bad day but instead of accepting it and trying to move past it I beat myself up because I had broken my perfect no purging streak which just caused so many more problems. I felt that one bad day meant my eating disorder was back and I just gave into it when I could have fought it.
The more you try to make recovery perfect the harder it will be when you have a bad day, and there will be bad days because no-one recovers overnight. Instead, prepare yourself for those bad days, have a plan of action for when you fall, what can you do to help yourself get back up again. Remember that a bad day or even a bad week or month does not mean you aren't making progress. They are just speed bumps slowing you down but you are still heading in the same direction.
Every time I went back to my dietitian after doing really well and then having a bad week or day he said it was a good thing because it raised more issues to deal with. And the more you can deal with in recovery and the more you learn about your eating disorder the better things will be when you are out of treatment.
So accept recovery as a journey full of unexpected turns. You never know what each day is going to bring but whatever it is be kind to yourself and see each day as a new step forwards because even the bad days have a purpose. No matter what you are always in control of choosing to keep moving forwards and one day you will get there.

Hope you're all ok
Love Jasmin