knittingirl

Hi acs7,

I can empathise with your position, I have been there and so have many others. Even though it feels like it, you’re not alone.

You can do a lot to stop yourself developing a full on eating disorder, but don’t immediately discount the help that others can give you. People around you may not understand everything you’re going through, but they love and want to help.

The first thing you need to focus on is that you want to get better. It’s easy to say you want to recover from an eating disorder, but it’s another thing entirely to truly want it through and through. Think about all the things that you are stopping yourself from doing now that you used to enjoy doing, think about your family, your friends, and think about yourself and your own state of mind. You sound very confused, like you are a bit scared and unsure what’s going on. That’s ok honey, just close your eyes and take a deep breath, and ask yourself what you truly truly want from life.

Now you’ve got that in your mind, that picture of a happy, healthy, friendly, sociable you, you know where you are heading. Whenever you start to feel unsure, close your eyes and picture that.

One big thing you can do to help yourself, is to stop weighing yourself. I don’t know how often you are weighing yourself, but I used to do it every day and it totally screwed with my mind and dictated my mood for the rest of the day. Stopping weighing myself was one of the biggest favours I did myself. If you are scared by the thought of not weighing yourself because you’re afraid that you will gain a lot of weight and not know, then talk to someone you trust (your mum, your dad, a sibling, a close friend etc) and ask them if they will weigh you once a week – not to tell you what your weight is, but so that you know that someone is keeping an eye on it (my mum did this for me, it was an amazing comfort).

The next thing you need to try and do is stop looking up calories – no reading boxes, no googling for calorie amounts, and no going on online calorie calculators. Sweetie, calories mean nothing. The calorie count on a box is the amount of energy a typical example of that food contains if your body burnt it in its entirety. For the most part, your body does not burn the entire food, and what you get in a box is subject to manufacturing variation anyway. If all this weren’t enough, you don’t know how many calories your body needs in a day – generic estimates are all very well but they don’t take into account your individual physique or what you do in a day – and by the sounds of it you are restricting yourself to well below what is needed for your body to carry out basic functions (like keeping your heart beating, lungs and brain working etc) on a daily basis anyway. Even if you were to lie down on your back all day, your body still needs a considerable amount of energy just to function.

I think I’m going on quite long here, but I’m happy to talk more if it helps. One more thing though, try not to shut people around you out of your life. It’s very easy for everything, including talking to friends and family, to become too much effort. Talk to your parents, try to explain to them what you’re trying to do and ask for their support. Perhaps make a deal with them, for example that you will go to see a psychologist in two months if you haven’t made progress – they are your parents, they love you, and they only want to help.

Stay strong

knittingirl