# Healing from an Eating Disorder: How to Stop Hating Yourself and Your Body



## David Baxter PhD (Dec 5, 2018)

*How I Healed from an Eating Disorder and Stopped Hating Myself and My Body*
by Roni Davis, _Tiny Buddha_
December 5, 2018

*“Quiet the voice telling you to do more and be more, and  trust that in this moment, who you are, where you are at, and what you  are doing is enough. You will get to where you need to be in your own  time. Until then, breathe. Breathe and be patient with yourself and your  process. You are doing the best you can to cope and survive amid your  struggles, and that’s all you can ask of yourself. It’s enough. You are  enough.” ~ Daniell Koepke*

 I remember looking at the nutrition information on the bag of jujubes  I had just eaten and feeling utterly and completely disgusted with  myself.

 That was my first binge. Little did I know how much worse it would get.

 It was four days in to the first official diet that I had somehow managed to stay on for more than one day.

 I had dieted on and off most of my life, but any time I tried a diet  that told me what I was and wasn’t allowed to eat (Atkins was the first  of many), I never managed to last longer than a day or two before I’d  “blow it” and give up.

 Prior to the day of my first binge, I had actually lost a lot of  weight on my own, simply by counting calories, but I hired a trainer  because, while I reached my goal weight on my own, I still hated my body  and wasn’t happy.

*So, I did the only thing I knew to do at the time - pay someone  else to tell me what to eat so I could have a perfect body and finally  be happy.*

 Ha.

 I white knuckled my way through four whole days before I found myself  at the grocery store feeling much like I’d imagine a junkie feels as  their high begins to wear off. I needed a fix and was jonesing bad.

 The next day, I barely ate anything and ran for about two hours to punish myself for being such a pig the day prior.

 Within a few months, I was sitting in a therapist’s office hearing  him call me bulimic while I bawled hysterically and begged him to tell  me how to stop feeling so completely out of control with food.

 The harder I tried to control my intake, the more out of control I became.

 The more out of control I felt, the worse I felt about myself and treated my body.

 Depression, panic attacks, bingeing, and restricting/over exercising (those were my compensatory behaviors) took over my world.

 What was wrong with me? I wanted a perfect body so desperately; why couldn’t I just eat what I was supposed to eat?!

 I spent a lot of time with my therapist, and he never really gave me  answer for what was wrong with me (beyond the eating disorder) or how to  fix it.

 It just kept getting worse.

 My body would shake and I’d be so desperate to get into whatever food  I had as fast as humanly possible that I’d usually end up eating an  entire large bag of candy on the drive home before continuing to eat  until I was sick once I got home.

*After awhile I started noticing that it literally felt like a  hole in the center of my being that I was frantically trying to  fill—unsuccessfully. No matter how much I stuffed in there, it just  never ever felt full.*

 What started with one small bag of candy turned into a monster inside  me that I could not control. It morphed from a bag of candy to eating  myself sick and ultimately feeling like I was killing myself with food.  At my worst, there were nights when I had eaten so much I was  legitimately scared I was going to have a heart attack in my sleep and  wondered if I should go to ER.

 So I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I was  desperate - desperate to not eat myself to death, but also desperate to  find a way to stop so I could just have that perfect body and finally be  happy.

 But as I read, I came to realize that my bingeing wasn’t about the  food. The over exercising and starving myself to compensate for the  bingeing, none of it was about the food or exercise.

 And my desperate need to have a perfect body, in order to be happy, wasn’t even about my body.

 It all had everything to do with how I felt about myself and my worth as a person.

 I hated myself and felt worthless.

 I didn’t think I was good enough for anything.

 And in that one moment of awakening, everything that was wrong in my life made complete sense.

*I finally knew why I was angry all the time — I was in pain.*

 The starving, restricting, bingeing, and over exercising made sense — I was punishing myself.

 The obsessive ways I dove into everything, including food and  exercise, were attempts to keep myself numb and not address the pain.

 I knew that if I ever had any hope of changing anything, I had to  stop chasing the perfect body and start learning to love and value  myself, which meant figuring out where the self-loathing and feelings of  inadequacy were coming from.

 The first thing I had to do in my process of healing, recovery, and  growth was to start learning to be forgiving of myself and treat myself  with compassion. I had been living with excruciating emotional pain my  entire life that I never allowed myself to even acknowledge, never mind  deal with.

 My constant anger didn’t make me a b*tch or a horrible person; it was a symptom of someone who was hurting deeply.

 The initial weight problem that morphed into dieting/disordered  eating and ultimately bulimia didn’t make me disgusting or weak; it was a  symptom of someone who hated herself so badly she was punishing herself  every day.

*Those realizations allowed me to start extending myself  compassion for those things in me that I wasn’t proud of. They allowed  me the space to start healing. Because you cannot change while you  believe you deserve to be punished.*

 I gave myself permission to eat whatever I wanted.

 I even gave myself permission to binge, and the weirdest thing  happened — I began to do it less and less. Now I cannot remember the last  time I binged. It’s been years.

 It sounds crazy, like the opposite of what we should do. Permission to binge?!

 But when I realized the purpose it was serving and stopped judging  myself for it so I could work on actually healing the need it was  filling, it all changed.

 You see, as long as we’re judging and hating ourselves, we’ll always  feel like we’re bad and deserve to be punished. And as long as we  believe we’re bad and deserve to be punished, we’ll never stop punishing  ourselves.

*It came down to five basic mindset switches for me: permission, acceptance, compassion, kindness, and curiosity.*

*Permission:* It’s okay because I’m doing the best I can with what I know right now. When I learn how to better handle these feelings, I’ll make more loving choices for myself.

*Acceptance:* It sucks pretty bad, but it’s my journey. For whatever  reason, whatever I’m supposed to learn from this, this is the journey  I’m supposed to be on.

*Compassion:* How would I speak to a friend or client going through this? That’s how I started trying to speak to myself.

*Kindness:* The worse I felt, the kinder I was to myself.

*Curiosity:* I couldn’t just blindly give myself permission to binge  forever without actively getting curious about why I was doing it. So,  every time it would happen, I’d spend a lot of time asking myself why.  How was I feeling? What feelings was I trying to keep myself from  feeling? Was there a better way I could manage those feelings?

 Alongside making those changes I also worked on learning to love and  value myself and change the stories I had been telling myself about who I  was and what I was worth my whole life.

 So, dieting may have made me bulimic, but my obsession with finding  happiness and self-acceptance by building a perfect body led me down a  path of learning to love myself and create happiness from within.

 I am enough.

 And so are you. So give yourself permission, acceptance, compassion, and kindness, and get curious about _why_ you do the things you do. Perhaps, like me, you’ll find this is the key to your healing.







*About Roni Davis*
_Roni  Davis is a wellness coach who helps women lose weight, heal their  relationships with food and their bodies, and transform their lives. You  can join her mission to rid the world of diets at RoniDavis.com or find her free 5 day program at: ronidavis.com/freetraining.
_


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