If you have an eating disorder you may yearn for this kind of peaceful sleep.

Eating Disorders: Impact on Sleep and Vice Versa

Individuals with eating disorders often face significant challenges when it comes to sleep. The bidirectional relationship between eating disorders and sleep disturbances means that both conditions can exacerbate each other, leading to a vicious cycle that can be difficult to break. Understanding the causes and impacts of sleep disturbance in eating disorders is crucial for developing effective strategies to address these issues and support the recovery process.

Anxiety and Stress Affect Sleep and Stimulate Eating Disorders

Food craving: strategies to divert your attention can be as simple as observing nature.

Food cravings can be challenging, but there are several strategies you can try to manage them effectively. Here are some tips:

Recognize the craving:

The first step is to acknowledge that you're experiencing a food craving. Understand that it's a natural response and that craving is temporary.

Identify triggers:

Pay attention to what triggers your craving. It could be stress, certain environments, specific emotions, or even specific foods. Once you know your triggers, you can take steps to avoid or manage them.

Tip for Freedom from Disrupted Eating

Regardless of whether you binge eat, overeat or did in the past, when you have someone in your life who supports your well-being you have a gift in your life. You know the benefits of knowing that she or he listens to you when you are hurting.  Knowing that she or he cares about you and helps you get back on track restores your faith and confidence in yourself. 

The recovery tip is: reciprocate. When you trust this person and come to rely on him or her to have your back, you both will benefit more if you find meaningful ways to reciprocate.

Reading quality novels can help your mind and spirit grow beyond the mental and spiritual chokehold of an eating disorder.

Reading quality novels can be particularly helpful in eating disorder recovery for the following reasons:

1.   Emotional Connection:

Novels often provide rich and nuanced portrayals of characters and their experiences. By immersing themselves in a well-written novel, individuals in recovery can form emotional connections with the characters

Relapse after Recovery

A thirty-three year old man told me he had been a binge eater most of his life and now was fully recovered. Food has been a non issue for two years.

His statement inspired me to think about what the term recovery means to many people. 

Healing questions to find your authentic center. 

Healing Question: Are you using your eating disorder as your center?

You developed an eating disorder to hold your emotional and psychological life together. Something interfered with your developing a solid self core that could sustain you through the trials and challenges of living. Developing an eating disorder is a creative act. You created a core center that you can support by controlling how you eat (or don’t eat), how you exercise, how you isolate and how you limit your life to specific habits and routines.

Yes, the benefits of losing friends become clear as you move into more health and personal power.

Benefits of Losing Friends

 

 

“Want to go to a bar tonight, drink and pick up guys?” She hasn’t gotten that invitation in a long time. She hasn’t gotten a call or seen that person for a long time.

When a person is seriously ill with her eating disorder, many people are attracted to her and maintain a relationship with her as she lives and responds in life with her eating disorder intact. They are attracted to the needy, people-pleasing, high-risk-taking person who rarely says no. She's fun. She doesn't show her secret pain. She goes along to get along.

Being in recovery and in harmony with her true self attracts more healthy relationships and sends a wave of user repellent into the crowd around her.

Your feelings map is in your hands.

Pushing Feelings Away

A common coping mechanism when confronted with challenging emotions is the tendency to push them away. This is often seen as a defense mechanism, a way to avoid discomfort. However, it's essential to realize that suppressing your feelings does not make them disappear.

Instead, they tend to fester beneath the surface, causing more significant pain over time. It’s possible to behave harshly without appreciating why because what sets you off are denied feelings. You can push feelings out of your awareness but not out of your psyche.