Posts Tagged “Guest Bloggers”

**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 Abby Couture

At the age of 14, I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. My admission into intensive care was sudden. I had gone from starving myself for months to being fed three meals and snacks a day in a hospital bed. Needless to say, I didn’t exactly embrace this abrupt change in routine. Though as traumatic as living through an eating disorder was, I believe I was able to survive for a few main reasons.

The first was my reckoning with control. A common feature of individuals struggling with disordered eating is an underlying fear of lacking control in one’s life, or feeling powerless and uncertain with their sense of self.

Throughout my freshman year of high school, I struggled to feel grounded and secure in shifting family dynamics, redefined friend groups, and a fluctuating identity with academics. In middle school, everything seemed so much easier, my grades were above average, and I felt more or less socially safe. In high school, I found myself frequently shifting between different social groups that were often in conflict. I felt tethered between old ties and new ones, constantly shifting “selves.” This ultimately led me to constantly question how I could be defined. At the end of the school year, my grades had dropped and I was no longer on the honor roll. Compounded by a disconnection with my academic self was a feeling of alienation from my own bodily identity. As I navigated puberty, I began to gain attention from older boys, leading me to objectify my own body as I learned to view it as social capital.

**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.

Lisa Whalen’s book, Stable Weight: A Memoir of Hunger, Horses, and Hope, is now available from Hopewell Publications. Her writing has also appeared in An Introvert in an Extrovert World; The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield; Introvert, Dear; and Adanna, among other publications. Whalen has a PhD in postsecondary and adult education and an MA in creative and critical writing. She teaches composition, creative writing, literature, and journalism at North Hennepin Community College, where she was selected Minnesota College Faculty Association Educator of the Year in 2019. In her spare time, she is an equestrian and volunteer for the Animal Humane Society. Learn more at her website, and follow her on social media @LisaIrishWhalen. 

“Describe how the antagonist drives your book’s plot.”

Those were the instructions 74 other authors and I received as we prepared to attend a conference in New York City. The conference would teach us how to pitch our books to agents or publishers, which involved a lot more time, research, and effort than I realized. We were told that to get the most out of each session, we should complete some assignments before we arrived. The first was describing how our book’s antagonist (villain) drives our story’s plot. It was a straightforward task for every author…except me. The others had written novels; I had written a memoir describing how The Emily Program helped me recover from an eating disorder. My story doesn’t have an antagonist, I thought, frustrated.

**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.

Jason Wood is currently in recovery from orthorexia. He is now determined to turn this battle into a movement aimed at raising awareness of orthorexia as well as eating disorders in males. You may read more about his journey and movement at orthorexiabites.com. 

Trees amaze me with their relentless nature. They bend to the mercy of the wind. They shield from the heat of the sun. We watch them strip in the fall and awaken in the spring. Such a resilient force, rooted into the earth with unwavering confidence. Do you ever stop to think how stout they are?

Imagine what they’ve witnessed and experienced. Scientists have found olive trees in the Middle East that exceed 5,000 years in age. Talk about a lifetime full of memories! In California, redwoods are known to be almost indestructible, thanks to their thick bark. Some trees are even known to regenerate after wildfires. Here in Colorado, I love seeing the evergreens that stick true to their name. Always green, come snow and ice or heat and sun. These trees seem to know their identity and wear it proudly.

Why can’t humans be so courageous, so resilient, and so stout? Well, my friends, I believe we are! Just look at our bodies. They are our only true home. No mortgage or rent payment required. All they need is love and nutrition. And talk about sturdy–the human body amazes me just like the forest full of trees.

**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.

Andrea Kelly is a transformational coach and writer who also has a background in real estate. After many years of struggling silently with anorexia and bulimia, she has found freedom in the last few years. She shares her eating disorder story in Fear Less: Transforming Fear into Courage within Relationships, Career, Society, and Self, available for preorder now. Follow her on Instagram @andreakellylove.

Recovery Conversations is a question-and-answer series that shares voices and stories of eating disorder recovery. In this post, Andrea Kelly describes the ways fear presented itself in her eating disorder and how she learned to confront it in recovery.

**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.

Lisa Whalen’s book, Stable Weight: A Memoir of Hunger, Horses, and Hope, will be available from Hopewell Publications on March 2, 2021. Her writing has also appeared in An Introvert in an Extrovert World; The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield; Introvert, Dear; and Adanna, among other publications. Whalen has a Ph.D. in postsecondary and adult education and an M.A. in creative and critical writing. She teaches composition, creative writing, literature, and journalism at North Hennepin Community College, where she was selected Minnesota College Faculty Association Educator of the Year in 2019. In her spare time, she is an equestrian and volunteer for the Animal Humane Society. Learn more at her website, and follow her on social media @LisaIrishWhalen.  

Whether we know it or not, language shapes our perception. I never thought much about how the language I speak and the way I view the world were connected until I took foreign language classes in high school. My Spanish teacher explained that translating wasn’t just word-for-word substitution. Unlike the equations I learned in algebra, where I could replace X with a number to answer a question like 4x + 2 = ?, I couldn’t always replace an English word with its Spanish equivalent to answer a question like, “How do you say _X  ?”

Learning Spanish was my first introduction to the idea that each language has a unique structure. Studying Spanish taught me that some structural differences between languages are minuscule, like the English rule that adjectives should come before nouns, as in “the blue car,” versus the Spanish rule that nouns should come before adjectives, as in “the car blue.”

Later, when I began teaching college English classes, I saw how other structural differences between languages affect every aspect of communication, such as English verbs having up to 12 tenses to indicate time versus Hmong verbs having a single tense. English requires us to say I eat, I ate, I have eaten, I will eat, I will have eaten, to tell listeners when the action happened because Western culture perceives time as linear and moving toward the future, while Hmong speakers say I eat yesterday, I eat tomorrow, I eat before sunset because traditional Hmong culture perceived time as cyclical and anchored by the present moment.

Karen R. Koenig, LCSW, M.Ed., is a psychotherapist, international, award-winning author of 8 books, and popular blogger. She has 30-plus years of experience in the field of eating psychology teaching chronic dieters and emotional, binge, and over-eaters to become “normal” eaters through using a non-diet, non-weight focus on eating intuitively and creating joyous, meaningful lives. Her eighth book, Words to Eat By: Using the Power of Self-talk to Transform Your Relationship with Food and Your Body (Turner), is due out January 26, 2021. She lives and practices in Sarasota, Florida. Her website is http://www.karenrkoenig.com.

It is January 2021, a time when many people are chiding themselves for their holiday food intake and psyching themselves up to change their eating, exercise, and self-care habits. But more often than not, our standard self-talk is so judgmental, punitive, and bullying that it fails to generate sustainable positive change and leaves us frustrated and hopeless before the first quarter of the new year has gone by.

To turn this pattern around, it’s crucial to understand that self-talk is not simply mindless mental chatter but instead a major way we humans have evolved to get our brains to take action. Whether conscious or unconscious, self-talk is what governs our emotions and behavior. That is, the brain interprets whatever we say as a directive to feel or behave in a certain way. It awaits our instructions and then executes them.