Author: frivvy89
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that emotional eating contributes to weight gain — but is this a false truth? Many patients come to my office with the “emotional eater” label firmly affixed, convinced that if they could solve that problem, all their food and weight woes would evaporate. That’s rarely the case because emotional eating isn’t about food.The concept was born in the 1960s, the idea being that emotional eaters couldn’t tell the difference between hunger and the physical sensations that accompany unpleasant emotions. Today, we often think of emotional eating as “feeding our feelings.” But even though we think…
At the gym. That’s where you could find me on many late weekend nights my freshman year of college. While my friends and roommates slid into skirts, applied makeup, and slammed shots, I sometimes sat nearby in my pajamas. When everyone left, I swapped my bedtime sweats for workout gear and took the elevator to the basement, a fitting place for a gym that often made me feel trapped. I would hop on the elliptical for hours and get off only once the machine told me I had burned 2,000 calories, often past midnight, in an effort to compensate for…
At the gym. That’s where you could find me on many late weekend nights my freshman year of college. While my friends and roommates slid into skirts, applied makeup, and slammed shots, I sometimes sat nearby in my pajamas. When everyone left, I swapped my bedtime sweats for workout gear and took the elevator to the basement, a fitting place for a gym that often made me feel trapped. I would hop on the elliptical for hours and get off only once the machine told me I had burned 2,000 calories, often past midnight, in an effort to compensate for…
After just over three months of being an inpatient in the unit my parents decided to take me out of there as I wasn’t getting any better and was picking up tricks. It was difficult getting better at home, I found it easier to get away with stuff. I would weigh myself every time my family went out and I would exercise in my bedroom when everyone was asleep.I remember feeling so low that I didn’t want to live anymore, I thought of ending my life but the thing that stopped me was my family. I couldn’t think of putting…
Few weeks after being ill with pneumonia I started struggling and picking up new tricks from other patients. At that point I no longer wanted to get better, I had lost hope. Knowing I had put on weight had started to get to me, I really didn’t want to put anymore weight on.Every meal time started to get harder, I would start to take my time eating again. I would start crying because I didn’t want to eat and was scared. The nurses would sit and watch me eat, I hid food in my mouth but the nurses caught me…
Twenty-eight-year-old Toronto resident Katie James* has been binge eating since she was a child. Her mother dieted regularly, and the family had to comply with whatever fad she happened to be on. But when her mom was out, James would stuff herself with the treats that were normally out of bounds. Her eating habits only worsened when she left home. “All of a sudden no one was checking on me so I went wild,” she says. But only in secret. “You know it’s a bad behavior, so you don’t do it in front of other people.” Some days James would…
Melissa Rivera always turned off the cameras before she binged. Newly married to a husband who traveled frequently, the 23-year-old med student, who had recently moved six hours from her friends and family, comforted herself with food. “I’d get this whole pizza that I would eat myself,” she says. Each time, she turned off the house’s security system so her husband wouldn’t see the coping mechanism she’d used since she was 8 years old. “At some point, I realized, ‘This is killing me. I cannot do it anymore,’” she says. She sought help from counselors at the University of Texas,…
It’s the kitchen mistake we all try to avoid above all else: Don’t burn the food. You can save the dinner that you over salted. You can add dairy or acid to tame the spice when you accidentally dump in too much cayenne. But once those forgotten roasted onions have turned a deep shade of black in the oven, once they’ve crisped to heaps of allium ash, there’s no going back.And yet, there are those weirdos out there that loved burned food. We all know them. They’re the human vacuums for neglected chocolate chip cookies; the scramblers for the dry,…
Recovery is a bumpy road, and there are often unexpected twists and turns, even with significant support. It’s important during this process – and I might argue always and even for those without eating disorder histories – to avoid cultural trends that can exacerbate symptoms or interfere with full recovery. The following are several examples that I have seen obstruct the recovery process:1) Waist trainers: You don’t need to “train” your waist. Recovery is about training your mind to be more body neutral – or even accepting – than it is about trying to manipulate any body part.2) Macros, keto…
I’ve often reinforced the fact that genes are not destiny, and that’s because it’s the truth. There’s an entire lineage on my maternal side with the genes that are linked to celiac disease but few of us have the condition. Genes are like literary tools in a mystery book: they might suggest foreshadowing, but then again it could be the reader is going to be thrown entirely off track by their presence, or perhaps they only had relevance to a subplot and not the main plot, and finally it might just be they served no purpose but to entertain.But just…