Uncompleted tasks add stress to your life and will trigger your eating disorder. Here's a simple way to complete your tasks, reduce your stress and strengthen your eating disorder recovery.

*Simple P.A.M. Exercise  -  Pause a Minute

Situation

• You are overeating:
• You are eating more than you need during a meal.
• Your snack is out of control.
• Food is going from hand to mouth with no sense of feeling.
• Your late bedtime snack has moved from a little yogurt to peanut butter and crackers with no end in sight.

 Exercise:

1. Pause.
2. Take a deep breath and close your eyes.
3. Breathe normally and pay attention to your breath.
4. Feel the oxygen enter your lungs and nourish your body.
5. Tell yourself there is plenty of food in the world. You can have more at your next meal.
6. Imagine your next meal.
7. Commit to what time you will eat a nourishing meal again.
8. Tell yourself you will be kind to yourself during the time between meals, and you will give yourself a good next meal.

As you practice P.A.M. on a regular basis you develop the ability to break your overeating pattern.  You learn to trust that you can bear your feelings.

You earn your trust by supplying yourself with nourishing and tasty meals on a regular basis.

When you trust that you will care for yourself and tend to your needs, you don't need to overeat because you want to ward off deprivation.  You know that you will provide yourself with enough.

1. Do you trust yourself to give yourself the nourishment you need?
2. How can you develop even more trust in yourself?

*PAM is based on an exercise in Healing Your Hungry Heart: recovering from your eating disorder.

Joanna Poppink, MFT, Los Angeles eating disorder recovery psychotherapist. 

I have been a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles, CA, since 1980. Many of my patients have struggled with overeating. Some are brave adults on a particularly challenging healing path as they explore not only their own inner world but also how they contributed to the creation of eating disorders in their children.

Mary (her story) found a way to protect herself as best she could from unavoidable and intolerable fear and pain. Her pain comes from more than the physical event.

Mary is emotionally incapable of tolerating the knowledge that her father can and will terrorize her at any time and that her mother will not or cannot protect her. The people she depends on for daily care-taking and protection are dangerous to her. She cannot bear to live with that knowledge, and so she finds a way to know as little as possible about her true situation.