What Are Eating Disorders

What Are Eating Disorders

In the previous two articles we looked at eating disorders as disorders of feelings, emotions, self-control, thinking and coping. But there are much more to know about these disorders.

Eating disorders are also disorders of identity, values and lifestyle.

1. Eating disorder are disorders of identity.
People's self-identity is rooted in their subconscious beliefs; in what they associated themselves with. Sufferers often have a poor sense of self because of their perfectionist nature and their eating disorder becomes a substitute for their own self worth.

They described that being without their disease would be like going without air to breathe. When in hospital, some are afraid that if they recovered, they would "cease to exist."

Sufferers are nearly always concerned about what others think of them, rather than what they think of themselves. This is because they don't know who they are and only associate themselves with their ED. They often describe the sense of emptiness inside or a numbness which are all symptoms of "lost identity".

By changing the sufferers subconscious beliefs they can manage to improve their self-esteem. And after improving self-esteem their sense of identity becomes stronger and more powerful. Anyone with an eating disorder should really focus on these two things: self-esteem and identity, as I believe they are the key to real recovery.

To help regain self-esteem the sufferer should make a habit of setting goals and planning to follow them through, this will help a lot with their identity problems. Keeping to a plan will make them feel like achievers, and solving problems along the way will make them feel like they are problem solvers. But it has to be other interests not about food.

2. Eating disorders are disorders of values and lifestyle.
For many sufferers spending time alone and binging is much more important than going out seeing friends and socializing.

The eating disorders become their lifestyle, their entertainment, and their total interest in life. At the moment the sufferer's main priority is to allocate time for their eating disorders - time for counting calories, reading labels, making a diet plan as well as time for preparing a binge.

Starving themselves for a whole day and then eating enormous amounts of food at night and purging it all up are seen as great accomplishments and a boost to their self-esteem. But of course this has nothing to do with accomplishment and is just another sign of being totally controlled by their eating disorder.

Many sufferers describe what they do. They describe that their pattern for years can be just to eat nothing all day except coffee and some water. Then they may start cooking at about 5 p.m. in preparation for a dinner binge which usually lasts about 6-7 hours. Their stomach obviously cannot handle all they cook so they vomit to make space for more: eat, vomit, on and on for hours.

To fix this cycle sufferers may have to spend many days, months and even years to re-train their mind and their heart to value other things in life not just things related to food and eating.

For the sufferer during the re-training process it is important to recognize that it is not what they feel it is more what they do that counts.

There is an interesting fact that an average person thinks from 30 000 -70 000 thoughts a day. Some thoughts are good, some of them are bad, most of them are neither good nor bad and it differs from person to person. But we don't act on all these thoughts. We choose which thoughts to act on and which ones we should just ignore depending on our values.

And this is what eating disorder sufferers need to understand. They must learn to differentiate good and bad thoughts and the ones upon which they can act.

Deep inside their mind they understand that what they are doing does not make sense but they continued doing it because it is their obsession. After learning focused training and focused attention sufferers can teach themselves to get better and better.

Eventually they can differentiate their thoughts between destructive and constructive, and act on the constructive ones only. Also sufferers will be able to identify their own values in life and hold them in their mind constantly. As a consequence they will be able to identify false messages that come into their head and not act on them, but just ignore them altogether.

There is more about eating disorders in the next article where you will learn that eating disorders are also disorders of relationships and behaviour.

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Dr Irina Webster MD is the Director of Women Health Issues Program. She is a recognised authority in the eating disorders area. She is the author of the published book "Cure Your Eating Disorder: 5 Step Program to Cure Your Brain". To learn more about Eating Disorder Books Cure Your Eating Disorder: 5 Step Program to Cure Your Brain" go to http://eating-disorders-books.com

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