Recovery is such a unique process, and universally I think everyone just wants to be at peace with themselves, but this shows up differently for everyone and how this is achieved can vary so greatly depending on culture, background, and identity.
"That space between my obsession with thinness and my confusion regarding others’ obsession with thinness allowed me to understand that there is another way to perceive the world. There is another way to live inside your body. Much like learning to eat intuitively and to destroy all the food moralizations I’ve built over the years, I’ve been learning to come back inside an intuitive relationship with my body and to destroy the body moralizations I’ve built over the years."
Too often I think about eating disorders in the negative: how many people are still suffering, how much work still needs to be done. But I was thinking, the other day, about how much has changed since I had my eating disorder, years ago. How much progress has been made.
Our Volunteer & Program Manager, Katalina, shares some great pieces of advice that helped her and her husband stay focused, present, and happy as they planned their big day.
We know there is a correlation in teenagers between dieting and eating disorders, and we know that Weight Watchers is a diet (they say so themselves on their own site). So when Weight Watchers announced that they are offering their points program free for teens ages 13-17, I had some serious concerns about the implications of such a program.
Summer is often thought of as being synonymous with spontaneity – taking advantage of the longer days, warm weather, beach hangouts and countless BBQs. However, for those suffering with an eating disorder, allowing oneself to be spontaneous or to genuinely enjoy the summer may be contingent on an endless list of “should” and “if only” variables. Read on for some tips on how to embrace summer fully!
We do need to change the way we think about eating disorders, but more importantly we need to change how we actually go about fighting and eradicating this disease. So let’s break stigma, and then break barriers – barriers to accessing effective treatment, barriers around government inaction, barriers to insurance coverage..the list goes on.
To be in our bodies is a beautiful feeling. Experiencing the multiple layers of ourselves using the information our bodies provide is a wonderful way to form a deeper connection to ourselves and the world around us. I truly believe health is a mind-body connection and as we feel into the ways our bodies communicate with us, we are able to make choices that honour our unique needs. This experience is called the feeling of "embodiment."
Every story of recovery is as unique as the person it belongs to ... For me, I had to experience the process of un-learning before I could really begin to understand myself. When the #metoo movement began to take hold in 2016, I began to reflect deeply on the problem of misogyny in the context of my eating disorder.
A catalytic moment in my recovery was when I realized that I had been trying too hard to assimilate my present and future with my past. What does this mean?