By Lori Hanson
I was contacted recently by Deb Beaulieu a fellow blogger and member of Parents Who Click. She struggled with an eating disorder in her life and asked if I would do an interview on her blog. She had some interesting questions and has a great blog. Here’s an excerpt.
Deb: How would you describe what it feels like to have an eating disorder to someone who’s never suffered from one?
Lori: It is incredibly difficult to explain an eating disorder to someone who hasn’t experienced it because to the logical mind it makes no sense. This is part of why I wrote my book so people could read about it first hand. When you have an eating disorder, you are consumed…with food, your body, your inability to control certain things mixed with an intense desire to overcome, but feeling like there is no way you will ever overcome it because you don’t know where to start.
It’s total entrapment, surrounded with the worst form of obsession, shame, embarrassment and hoping no one else will notice. It’s thinking about how much you hate your body from the moment you wake up until you go to bed at night. As a bulimic, it is concern about what you ate, when you ate, how much you ate and how you screwed up. Every morning you wake with new found hope that this day you won’t fall prey to the behavior, and every night you go to bed consumed with anger, fear, guilt, shame and hatred for yourself. I’ve often explained it in my speeches as living in a bubble, life is going on outside of the bubble you’ve built around you and you have no way to connect with it. Life is all about “when I weigh 108 pounds, then I’ll be happy and my life will start.”
Want to know more the road to freedom from an eating disorder?
©2009
In a nutshell, you said it…I live it, am trying not to….
The first step is the hardest. But you can find life beyond the control of an eating disorder. Visit Learn2Balance.com for more info if you’re interested. You have a fullfilling life just waiting for you to discover it.