I am more determined than ever before to not let any weight loss obsession enter my mind.
I don't want to go back to my ED days.
But the truth is, sometimes I still have very disordered thoughts about food, exercise, my weight, my body, etc. Some of those thoughts include:
Maybe I should just do what I did a decade ago. It didn't kill me, and I lost 80 pounds in a year. Maybe this time, I wouldn't need to be treated for anorexic behavior, because I will be able to
control it better.
Maybe I should just throw up that bag of chips I just ate. One time wouldn't kill me, and I would feel better about myself than I do now, post chip-binge.
Maybe I should start doing 2 hours of cardio a day, like I did back then. One hour at the beginning and one hour at the end of each day.
Maybe I should join My Fitness Pal again, and edit the calorie number so that I will definitely lose 3 pounds every week.
...and so on.
I am fortunate that these thoughts are extremely fleeting, and that they are also extremely rare. But they do pop up sometimes. And I hate that they do.
I wonder how many years it will take for these thoughts to stop completely, or if, like some people say, once you have an ED, you will always have an ED.
I don't believe that though. I know that it's been a decade since my "recovery" and I still have these thoughts, but I also know that they happen less often with each passing month.
Time heals most wounds, and I believe that some take longer than others, but that doesn't mean that the healing isn't happening.
My ED will one day be truly a thing of the past.
But for now, I still (very) occasionally have to deal with these thoughts. And so long as I don't act on them, or give them any attention whatsoever, I believe that they will continue to happen less and less often until one day, maybe next year, maybe by the time I'm 40, they will vanish completely.
Today, I am focusing on loving myself and my body. True, I am still working on losing weight, but I'm choosing to not make that a central focus in my life. It's just a small part of it, and doesn't have anything to do with who I am as a person.
xoxoxoxo
1 comment:
I've never dealt with an eating disorder, but I still have some of these thoughts. In my heart, I know that calorie counting is overly restricting for me, but sometimes I find that I still count them up in my head when I find that I'm having a binge-type kind of day.
I honestly don't know if these types of thoughts will ever go away. It's kind of like a bad habit, maybe even as extreme as an addiction in some cases. It could be something we might struggle with for the rest of our lives, however, I think it's a good sign that you don't want to regress back to this behavior. It shows progress that you acknowledge the feelings and are able to continue on the path you've laid out for yourself.
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