Day 5

What actions do you believe could be taken in the future to help prevent your child(ren) or close friends from ever developing an eating disorder?

·         We have to positively encourage people around us, and reassure them that they are beautiful and fantastic just the way they are. That way increases their self-esteem and makes them believe that they are good enough, ALWAYS good enough.

·         The community has to stop being so obsessed with appearances, calories and weight loss.

·         Assure that they are good taken care of, by themselves and by others. Be there for them when they need and help them to think more positively, see something positive in every situation. That is important. We need to be more like Pollyanna 

There are so many other actions to be taken to help prevent our close ones to develope

an eating disorder. We have to remember that our actions have consequences. What you

say to another person might not matter much to you, but to that person it can turn their

life upside down. 

So much more

An eating disorder isn’t only about wanting to be thinner and weigh as little as possible, it is so much more than that. It is about control, about getting hold of something in your life again. You feel like everything is slipping away from you, and you search for control. Unfortunately, food becomes a scapegoat.

 All of a sudden, like a thunder from a clear sky, it turns into an intense fear of food, to be more specific: calories. Calories become monsters, monsters that will hunt you every minute of every hour of every day, when in fact they are just a measurement of energy. Energy that is necessary for every living thing on the planet. No energy = no life. What will keep our bodies going if we don’t get any energy?

We humans do not photosynthesize, so the only way to get energy is through food. But when having an ED, you do not care about that. You don’t care if you are dead or alive. You feel dead, and you wouldn’t care if you were in fact dead. You don’t see any point in living, you do not have any energy, you do not have any social life because well, the ED took that away as well, and your health is shitty, because guess what! The lack of nourishment is eating you up, inside out. It is a slow process to suicide.

But what happens when you’ve been stuck in this pattern for a long long time and you’ve decided to want to change it? Maybe it is too late. Maybe your body is about to give up. Even though you mentally are ready to fight off those demons, your body might be worn out. The earlier you decide to fight, the better.

1 in every 5 of those suffering from Anorexia Nervosa dies. That is 20%. There is a bigger possibility to survive cancer than Anorexia; that is unbelievable, right? To me it isn’t. I, like other anorexics, know how powerful and destructive this disorder can be. The thoughts that hunt you down and drag you down with them. That drown you and mentally kill you. People, who haven’t experienced it, don’t know. They don’t understand.  And I guess they never will. And that is probably for the best. 

My food

Recently I started to upload photos of my meals on instagram (margrets_recovery). Here are some of them: