It’s brave to ask for help.

Living with anorexia is lonely and terrifying. It pushes you to isolate yourself because of the fixations you have on your weight and food intake, and it can hit you really hard when you want to recover only to find out you are missing some key ingredients. It’s like one day, when you are ready, you wake up and find that you’ve pushed everyone away and it leaves you feeling like a complete failure, like you can’t even keep people in your circle let alone keep your head above water.

One important thing to remember is that you deserve help just like everyone else. It’s taken me longer than I care to admit to actually realise that and occasionally I still have to convince myself that I have a right to take up space in this world.

Numerous people reassured me that I deserved help but only the words of one person have stuck with me.

“Chloe, you are brave for asking for help, not weak. It takes a brave person to ask for help when they need it.” 

I won’t mention names just know that this helped give me the strength to sign my self off work and get the help and space that I needed.

Although my parents are wonderful people I don’t think they really set me up with the best self-esteem in the world. Having such a low sense of self-worth throughout my life has led me to do everything for others and nothing for myself. This ultimately leads to a sense of burn out and a downward spiral into depression and a loss of self. As cliche as it sounds I am not only recovering from anorexia but I am also learning who I am, what I feel and that I am a decent human being and I deserve to feel happy.

It hasn’t been easy but I have been taking all the help I can get from others and from the National Health Service.

Without further delay I want to talk about the start of recovery and the key things you need in your possession to help you beat anorexia.

♥♥♥

Before / during the early stages of anorexia recovery

This is the crucial period for recovery because you’re setting yourself up for the beginning of what will be a big chance in your life, so it’s important that you have a variety of positive support to back you up.

Get all the information that you can:- 

Understanding a problem is the first step to gaining the knowledge and skills to solve it. Learn everything you can about anorexia (or what ever else you are going through). Read text books, get online resources, talk to people who have been there etc.

Make sure the information you are getting is both relevant and creditable – Don’t fall down the dark hole of fictional novels which I have found can be triggering more than helpful. Use your general practitioner and, if you have one, therapist.

Assistance:-

This is where the family and friends come in. It’s hard to be a person everyday when you are in recovery. The age-old phrase ‘some days are better than others’ comes to mind. Meet up with friends and talk to them, have your mum come over and make you a cup of tea, ask your partner to do the hoovering or put the laundry away etc. Small things can make a big difference when you’re in recovery.

Don’t feel selfish or weak just because you asked for a little help – remember you are brave for asking for help, even if it’s just a cup of tea.

Connecting: –

Isolation is a big thing that most people in the midst of an eating disorder do. There is no getting away from that. It makes sense that we would keep people at arm’s length so that they won’t get in the way of our disordered eating habits, but when you’re recovering it has to stop.

Many can find group support helpful because you are connecting with people just like you in a sense. People with anorexia often find they are cut off from a large portion of those in ‘normal’ society and therefore we lack self-esteem. We also lack a sense of personal identity because we have shaped an identity around weight loss and control of food intake and in recovery we are losing that. Support groups help us to meet new people, share stories and just enables us to talk to like-minded individuals. The socialisation aspect helps us regain some of our self-esteem through putting ourselves out there, vulnerable and on show for other sufferers / survivors to see.

It’s not for everyone and some might find it more triggering but it is worth giving it a shot.

Emotional:-

This is self-explanatory. It can take the form of encouragement from partners, parents, friends, GP etc. Support is key to the road to recovery and, although we might fight it at times, it is entirely necessary for our emotional and physical repair.

This could be reassurance that you are doing well and to keep going, or reassurance during a particularly scary meal. Without emotional support it is very easy to just fall back into old habits so try to make sure you have good networks to work with.

Structure:-

I fail at this one from time to time. I sleep in or don’t sleep at all or I eat out of sequence. I am guilty of this and we all are. It’s hard to keep structure in an unstructured and unpredictable world. BUT some sort of structure is very important for recovery.

That is we should be following meal plans and perhaps sticking to a particular wake up time and bed time. So far I have just got the meal plan down – I am still struggling with structured waking hours but that is mostly down to my persistent insomnia. I’m working on it.

My current meal plan is eat 6 times a day. It’s not new to me and if you’re in recovery or have been through this dance before you’ll know it’s a standard to try to get your brain back into the habit of eating frequently. So it goes a little something like this.

• Breakfast: 6.00am
• Snack: 10.00am
• Lunch: 13.00pm
• Snack: 16.00pm
• Dinner: 18.00pm
• Snack: 21.00pm

I use the following form to monitor my intake but you can incorporate it into a book if you want. I have been meaning to but haven’t gotten round to it.

Self monitoring form for meal tracking.

♥♥♥

If you take one thing from this blog let it be that you deserve help, you are worth help and that you are entitled to a full and happy life just like everyone else in the world. You deserve to take up space.

♦♦♦