Posts Tagged “Eating Disorders”

You might have started the new school year knowing you were struggling with an eating disorder. Or you might only be beginning to suspect that something isn’t right.

Either way, maybe you hoped the routine would help: that classes, friends, and a full schedule would leave less room for it. Maybe you decided you could manage for now and wait to see whether things got “serious enough.” When getting help could mean missing class or watching everyone else keep going without you, waiting can feel like the safer choice.

Postponing help doesn’t protect your school year from an eating disorder. Left untreated, these illnesses can interfere with everything you’re trying to protect: your focus, your health, your friendships, and your ability to participate in school.

If you’re a parent, keeping up with the latest slang your child uses can sometimes feel like learning another language. And when it comes to social media, that language can change quickly.

Some terms kids and teens use online may seem harmless (and may be completely unfamiliar to parents) but can sometimes signal exposure to content focused on weight, appearance, dieting, or exercise, including content that promotes disordered eating or negative body image. This doesn’t mean that using a particular word automatically means your child has an eating disorder. Rather, understanding the language can help parents know what their child may be encountering online and open the door to supportive conversations.

If you’ve been wondering whether you have an eating disorder, chances are you’ve also been talking yourself out of the question. It’s not that serious. Other people have it much worse.

Living in a culture that constantly moralizes food and normalizes disordered eating and exercise patterns can make it incredibly difficult to accurately evaluate your own relationship with food, exercise, and your body.

Eating disorders are serious, life-altering mental health conditions that thrive in silence and isolation. However, with specialized support, lasting recovery is entirely possible.

If you think you might have an eating disorder, here are three reasons to reach out now.

**Content warning: This is one person’s story; everyone will have unique experiences in recovery and beyond. Some stories may mention eating disorder thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms. Please use your discretion when reading and speak with your support system as needed.

Alleigh Colleran is a Seattle-based writer and mother of one, currently pregnant with her second. This essay draws from her lived experience with eating disorder recovery, pregnancy, postpartum, and motherhood.

For most of my life, food has felt loaded. It has never been just food. Even when I tried to convince myself otherwise, there was always something more attached to it: control, shame, discipline, temptation, comfort, punishment. I spent nearly two decades moving in and out of the grips of bulimia and anorexia. Some years, the eating disorder whispered. Other years, it took over completely. But whether it was loud or quiet, it was always there, shaping the way I moved through the world.

When I was deeply consumed by it, my inner life narrowed into negotiation. What had I eaten? What had I earned? What would I allow myself next? What did I need to undo? Hunger felt suspicious. Fullness felt dangerous. And pleasure, simple, unguarded enjoyment, felt perhaps most scary of all.

For years, I thought that when I was ready to let it go, I simply would. I thought I was choosing it. I thought the control still belonged to me.

What if the help you need for an eating disorder isn’t nearby? And what if the help that is nearby isn’t enough?

Leaving home for treatment can feel like a lot to ask. You may be weighing whether the travel is worth it, whether you could just work with your regular therapist or family doctor, or whether it’s even worth trying again after a program that didn’t really understand eating disorders already let you down.

Eating disorders are complex, multifactorial illnesses, and healing from one takes specialized, multidisciplinary expertise that isn’t available everywhere. That’s worth understanding before you rule anything out—including the option of going a little farther for care that actually fits what you’re facing.

School’s out, and the house is full again. Maybe your teen is home all day for the first time since the fall, or your college student just moved back in with a semester’s worth of laundry. Either way, summer puts more of your child’s daily life where you can see it. Meals that happened in a school cafeteria or dining hall now happen in your kitchen. Downtime is at home now, not between classes.

Sometimes that closer view comes with a sense that something about your child’s eating habits, exercise, or mood has changed.

Behaviors that might have developed during the school year—and were easy to miss between classes, practices, and packed schedules—can come into focus with more time face-to-face. If your gut says something is off, that’s worth your attention. Eating disorders are serious and more common than most people realize. But they’re also treatable, especially when they’re caught early.

**Content warning: This is one person’s story; everyone will have unique experiences in recovery and beyond. Some stories may mention eating disorder thoughts, behaviors, and symptoms. Please use your discretion when reading and speak with your support system as needed.

By Jessica Corriher

I am just a human figuring things out in real time. I’m on a healing journey that includes growth, hard truths, and, at times, a little wit. I share my story honestly because healing is messy, laughter is at times necessary, and pretending we’re “fine” is overrated. None of us is meant to do it alone.

When you’re in the middle of a struggle that takes up way too much real estate in your head and life, hope can start to feel like a nice idea—for other people. I know this because for the longest time, I couldn’t picture my future self.

I remember sitting in a high school classroom, faced with an assignment to write a letter to our future selves. Where do you imagine you’ll be in five years? Ten? Everyone around me started scribbling like they had insider information. I just stared at my paper, pen hovering, coming up blank. While visiting my parents over the holidays, I found that letter, which led me here today, sharing my story with you.

You’re a few hours into treatment—or maybe a few days in—when you begin to wonder if you’ve made a mistake. The anxiety you expected to subside has only gotten more intense. You’re not sick enough for this, it says. You can handle this on your own. Part of you is already scanning for the exit.

This can happen even if you felt ready to begin eating disorder treatment. Even if you walked in with real motivation and a sense of hope. However disorienting it might be to experience, a spike of panic at hour twelve or an overwhelming urge to leave at the end of day three are not signs that treatment is wrong for you. Research tells us that the eating disorder voice tends to get loudest when it feels most threatened, and entering treatment is about as threatening as it gets.

Read on to learn why the first days can feel so destabilizing, and what to do when the urge to leave feels the strongest.