Readers Question: Dealing with Post Anorexia

Jul 29, 2013 by Tatianna

 

Happy Monday my Lovies,

Wishing you a beautiful week! Today I have another question from a reader. This question addresses issues with post Anorexia and I will try my best to share my point of perspective and advice.
Here is the actual question:

 

Dear Tatianna,

first of all I want to thank you for your great work, your blog and your workouts have inspired and helped me a lot.

Now I have a question to you and I really hope you can help me, I am so desperate.?I am a 24 year old Russian girl and I had anorexia, but now for about 2 month I have a healthy weight and I began to train again.?From the point when I felt that I reached something “ideal” for my height, I started to do weightlifting and bike riding for hours to make my self feel a little bit “protected” from obesity. Maybe because of the overtraining I got stuck in this vicious circle, in which I overeat, and later try to compensate on the calories with the huge amount of sports… I wake up every night really hungry, now it became HORRIBLE. When I wake up, I feel a kind of invincible hunger and in these periods I could eat a tons of cheese, nuts or dried fruit, sweets, nut butter….

My stomach became huge and beside the discomfort feeling it is quite painful for days… I am totally devastated, I feel I will never find the control on my diet… What do you think, what should I do? Am I really overtrained? Or this is a normal symptom of former anorexia sufferer?
I hope you can help me out a bit, how to manage the nutrition and amount of sport, and avoid the overeating and overtraining. I need to lose some weight too, since these periods at night throw back on me… I can’t tell you how thankful I would be!

 

I am going to try to give you my best answer your question, but I want you to know something very important first. I want you to know that others such as my self, or your friends, relatives etc, can give you advice and show you the way from their point of perspective, but in the end, you are the only person who truly knows how to overcome this completely.

When our physical life begins showing us misbalance, it’s a sign that there is something going on with us internally which we are projecting physically by being stuck in a cycle, it can be any destructive cycle, but in this case it’s overhearing then trying to compensate with exercise.  In each individual case, only the individual can truly get to the bottom of what is boiling over from within.

In order to help overcome what you are going through physically, you have to be ready to do some deep digging within your self, and then body always follows the mind.

To figure out why you struggled with Anorexia in the first place, and continue to live in fear of it, you have to find the root of the problem. Because what is happening with you now, which is ovetraining because you feel that you are overeating, is just the symptoms of a problem, something you are just trying to put a lid on.

I am going to give you some suggestions on what would I do and what I actually did to help me overcome some of my own deeply rooted things and fears that I struggled with.

First thing that I suggest you to do daily is 15 minutes of deep breathing and finding peace within your self. Daily practice of deep breathing and silence connects us to our true self. Within several days you will notice that conscious thoughts will begin to quiet down while your inner deep seeded thoughts will begin to come up to the top. This is the first step that will help you understanding why you are struggling.

I suggest that you keep a diary, write down all the thoughts that you are thinking about your self at the moment, then go over each of the statements separately. For example, if you’re thinking a thought such as: I’m afraid of gaining weight or I always feel unhappy about my body etc, write down this statement then, ask your self, why do you feel this way? Do this for 2-3 months ( just writing things down but not reading it right away, you will go over everything your wrote in your diary 2-3 months later.  This will help you gain a better perspective of your self and it will help you get to the bottom of why it is you are struggling.

Become more aware of your thoughts and why you feel the way you do about your self, instead of thinking on autopilot and letting your thoughts control you.  Every time you catch your self thinking a negative thought about your body image, in that moment ask your self where do these thoughts originate and why they are coming to the top.

Remember, If your mind is healthy, your body and your habits will become healthy as well.

 

I really hope that this helps,

Have a wonderful week my Lovies,

If any of you guys have some advice or thoughts to add, I would really appreciate all of your help.

Hugs,

Tati

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