Big can be Beautiful

I was sitting out in my backyard the other day staring around at the different trees and bushes that are blooming and I had a thought…”the bigger tree really is the most beautiful”.  Then, as someone who struggles with weight and body image I started to create an analogy in my head, related to my trees.   This tree is huge…it has a big trunk, a big system of roots, big branches and it covers a big section of my backyard.  But you know what else it is?  It’s beautiful.  It has beautiful, green leaves and it provides wonderful shade in the heat of the summer.  It is the picture of strength and confidence.  No little wind is going to knock down this tree – it is going to stand strong. And even though it might lose some...

What I’ve learned from the turtle

Recovering from an eating disorder is hard.  It totally “stinks” actually (I would use a stronger word here, but my brother got in trouble for using it when he was 8 years old and to this day that still makes me not want to say it in front of my parents, hah!). There are times when it would be SO much easier to just give up, give in and go back to not dealing with the day to day struggles.  There are times when the voice in my head that tells me I’m stupid and fat and gross gets so loud that regardless of the distraction I still hear those messages going round and round in my head.  There are days that I still struggle with “eat – don’t eat – eat a lot – eat nothing – eat that – don’t eat...

Just sit with it

I am not good with emotions…not feeling them, expressing them, recognizing them…you get the picture.  As someone recovering from an eating disorder, I am having to learn that emotions are a fact of life and I had better learn to deal with them.  For years and years I used my eating disorder to avoid the emotions – I would stuff them down, eat them away, purge them out – anything to avoid having to feel them or deal with them. While I was in my treatment program the counselors used to get so excited when I expressed any emotion.  I would get mad and lash out and they would celebrate!  I would be sitting in a group session and start crying and they praised me.  What the heck?!  They explained that I had spent so many years stuffing my...

Choosing a Therapist – SCARY!!

I know I’m not the only one out there who trembles at the thought of reaching out to a therapist.  Spilling my secrets to a stranger?  This is scary stuff to a lot of people!  Before I started going to therapy, when I was still ignorant, I pictured myself sitting in a room with just a couch and a clock and a creepy old dude across from me saying “So, tell me how you feel about that”…scary right??  But I have since found that is so far from the truth it now makes me laugh. First of all therapists are not all men, they are not all creepy and I’ve sat in nice offices with much more than just a couch and a clock. So, how did I get from that ignorant place of imagining creepy therapists to being able to actually find and see a...