Perfectionism and Failure...

Hello hello hello wonderful people,

I realise in the past year I have been extremely bad at writing on here! So I apologise for that. It's been a busy year but I promise to do better from now on!

This post is about perfectionism and failure. I have to admit I am a perfectionist myself and always thought that had a lot to do with my eating disorder. I still think it does but then recently I became aware of another role my eating disorder had... it allowed me to fail. Let me explain...

Being a perfectionist is tiring! You constantly feel the need to be perfect, and seeing as perfect doesn't exist, you are continuously working towards an impossible goal. Your eating disorder fits in with this need to be perfect. But it also has the ability to destroy everything else in your life, making it harder to reach your goal of perfection.

I realised that when I felt I was failing in an area of my life I would struggle with my eating disorder more. First of all it allowed me to feel like at least I was achieving something... but it also gave me an excuse for why I was failing at other things. Being a perfectionist I was ashamed of feeling like a failure, whether it was at school, in my dance classes, in my friendships. But my eating disorder took away the bad feelings because I was able to blame it when I didn't meet my expectations. If I got a bad grade then it was my eating disorder's fault not mine. If I fell out with friends it was because my eating disorder was making me a bad person, not because I, myself was a bad person.

I was tired of trying to be perfect in every area of my life. It wasn't possible. But I couldn't admit to that so instead I found a reason to fail. I was so obsessed with my eating disorder I stopped caring about other areas from my life... it gave me a break.

I haven't realised this until recently. But if I had realised it sooner I would beg myself to see the irrationality in this thinking!
Yes the eating disorder does all of that but there are easier options!

Aim to accept life as it is. Life is not perfect and never will be. We cannot succeed all of the time at everything we do and that's ok. Instead of making excuses, embrace your imperfections, they make you individual, they make you human. Learn to break away from your perfectionism, set yourself goals to help you do this. For example, when I wrote notes in class they would always be pretty messy because I was writing quickly. I couldn't stand to see messy notes so I would then waste time re-writing them all so that they were neat. It was something I didn't need to do. So I set myself the goal of not doing that anymore. It was just a small thing but things like that reinforce to your brain that we don't have to be perfect!
The more you can accept yourself, imperfections and all, the less need you will have to find excuses to fail. You will have less need for your eating disorder.

Love you all.... happy EDAW!
Jasmin xxxx

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

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.

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

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

Christmas exercise programme!

First of all I just realised that I had already done a post on the rules of normal eating so sorry if you read it twice.

Moving on, it's nearly christmas...wooo! I LOVE christmas.
Of course christmas can raise a lot of issues when it comes to food, family etc. For me food has never been the main issue at christmas. For some reason the last couple of years no matter how bad my eating has been leading up to christmas (which is usually bad because october to december for some reason seem to be the months I struggle most)I always seem to relax about food a bit more as soon as its christmas. I'll admit this has sometimes lead to a panic after christmas because of wanting to lose weight but the main thing is I refuse to let food ruin my favourite time of year.
I think part of why it becomes less of an issue is because I tell myself I'm not going to worry. I wish I could do that all year round! I'm off from college so I don't worry about having to wear a leotard for a while. I know that if I try to control food it is going to ruin my christmas as well as my families and with so much food being around I am more likely to binge and purge rather than restrict which could possibly cause weight gain anyway. If I actually allow myself to eat what I want I am less likely to binge and won't actually want to eat all the time. Of course I still have issues over christmas and my relationship with food doesn't miraculously fix itself for a month but I seem to focus less on losing weight and more on relaxing and getting through christmas without constantly worrying about my ED.

However, one issue I do have over christmas is exercise....
As a dance student I'm used to exercising a lot. So of course I want to exercise over christmas still because I need to keep my fitness up. But then there's the fact that it's easier to not worry about food if I'm exercising. Over exercising is never a problem for me except for christmas so this year I decided I should prepare myself for this problem in advance and I thought it might help some of you to.
I'm going to make an exercise timetable. I'm going to decide what type of exercise I'm going to do on what days and how long for and make sure I give myself rest days.
Hopefully I'll be able to stick to this and not get obsessed.

Hope you're all ok and not worrying too much about christmas
Love Jasmin

The Rules of "Normal" Eating

I have mentioned that I am currently reading the above book by Karen R. Koenig, although slowly as I am super busy with assessments coming up! But I thought I'd share with you what she says the rules of "normal" eating actually are.

She says that "normal" eaters:

1. Eat when they are hungry or have a craving
2. Choose foods they believe will satisfy them
3. Stay connected to their bodies and eat with awareness and enjoyment
4. Stop eating when they are full or satisfied

It's good to know what we are aiming for! Of course normal eating is different for everyone but this is the general idea.

Love Jasmin x

Finding the positives...

When in recovery it can feel like you are constantly taking 1 step forward, 2 steps backwards. You may find that all you can see are the negatives, the "failures", the bad days, the new things/fears you try to face but don't succeed at straight away.

This can be known as a way of thinking called discounting the positives. I particularly struggled with this type of thinking. No matter how well I was doing or how much progress I was making all I could see were the things I wasn't achieving or the negatives. Thinking this way can make you feel low and depressed which may hold you back. It can make you feel like giving up. The truth is, the positives are there, you're just choosing not to see them.

Here are a few ideas for learning to focus on the positives:

- Start a gratitude book: At the end of every day write down all the positive things you can remember, it can be both eating disorder related (trying a new food) and non related such as a hug from a friend. You'll start to see there are lots of things every day that are positive and to be grateful and happy for.

-Sticker poster: I particularly like this one. Draw a picture of your eating disorder...however you want it to look, a person, a colour, a symbol, anything. Maybe write words over it that you associate with your eating disorder such as feelings it causes. Put it on your wall or somewhere you can see it. Everytime you overcome an eating disorder rule or do something positive to fight your eating disorder, put a sticker over the picture. Gradually as you add more stickers your eating disorder will be covered by all the stickers/positive steps you've taken forwards. When you feel like you're 'failing' you can look at it and see how far you've come and how many times you've managed to fight it.

-Write a list of all the reasons you have to be happy. Even if you feel like you don't have any keep thinking and I'm sure you'll find some you just have to allow yourself to see them. Do you have good friends? A nice house? A job you like?

See the positives, feel happier, and you're eating disorder will lose a bit more power and you are taking another step towards your rainbow.

Love Jasmin x