Tales of a (Recovering) Disordered Eater

This weekend my husband and I went to a wedding in Cleveland with a bunch of friends.

We had a truly fabulous time (we laughed so much this weekend that our sides hurt!), and after we got home on Sunday afternoon, we decided to take advantage of the sunshine and warm-ish weather and get to work tending to the dandelions that sprouted up in the past week.

We worked as a team, him using the little digging gadget to get to the root of each ugly weed, and me trailing behind with a bag to collect the dead weeds.

Now, I admittedly don’t have a green thumb and have never really gotten into gardening. Even though my parents are both really into it and can usually be found on a weekend afternoon in the garden, I never joined them as a kid, and honestly don’t know much about it. (more…)

Depending on where I am mentally or emotionally, sometimes I can have a bag of pretzels at home for two months without going near them or thinking about them …

Other times I can enjoy a small handful now and then and be done with them …

And other times, I can’t get them in the trash quickly enough.

I hate to be wasteful, and I realize how awful it is to throw out food (why buy it in the first place?!). But I liken “what is a trigger food” to how sometimes my IBS (which has been much better the past five years on WW) can flare up from eating, say, tomato sauce one day, and the next day I’ll be fine with it …

In other words, what might be a trigger today might definitely not be tomorrow. And it’s nearly impossible to predict, which makes playing “defense” hard. (more…)

I always thought it was mindless eating, or emotional eating … but now I’m more convinced than ever that I’m just a grazer.

I seem to always have something in my mouth … or be talking. An oral fixation, if you will. My mouth is always moving, always doing something.

This isn’t new. Long before my disordered eating days — in middle school and into high school — my nickname was “Motormouth Melissa.”

In fact, I talked so much back then that my friends teased me about a ten-second rule … where I was supposed to think ten seconds before speaking. (Funny how that’s what I’m learning in therapy: to think before I speak!)

And I chewed a lot of ice and gum. (more…)

Eat with dignity.

Three words that say so much, yet took me so long to “get.”

I’ve seen this phrase on my Weight Watchers message boards a million times, and never really understood what it meant until a friend explained her interpretation to me.

She was talking about her tendency to binge and my tendency to chew-and-spit, and how neither behavior is an example of “eating with dignity” and in fact is the very opposite; we’re not dignifying our bodies or our minds when we engage in such behaviors.

Learning to eat with dignity basically means eating with a purpose, filling our bodies with nutritious things we’re proud of, in the amounts we’re not ashamed to be seen eating.

It doesn’t mean extremes (starving or bingeing/purging).

And it doesn’t matter if you’re eating a PB&J in your car on the way to your third meeting of the day, or sitting down to a fancy five-course meal.

It’s such a simple concept but for people with disordered eating issues–or even eating disorders–it’s not that easy to remember or to practice regularly. (more…)