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