eating-disorders

As the helpless vampire watched the transformation, it started screaming. It was still screaming when his rows of razor sharp teeth sank into its throat.

I long ago came to the understanding that the problems I once had with food were not merely about food. Eating was a way of trying to fill up the emptiness, to provide comfort. It was a substitute for love. I'm not referring to the love that comes from someone else. The love that was missing from my life was self-love. With age I've discovered a sense of worth that makes me less hungry. A piece of cake is just a piece of cake.

Your body is the piece of the universe you've been given; as long as you have a pulse, it presents you with an ongoing shower of immediate sensate experiences.

Hold yourself back, or heal yourself back together. You decide.

The loneliness I endured during that time of my life is something I hope never to experience again.It's more than just the feeling of being isolated. I was disconnected mentally, physically and emotionally from the entire human race, it seemed; I didn't even feel part of it. I was a subspecies of the people who walked the streets and went about their daily lives. I was not part of the world they'd built and lived in. I was like a half-formed variety of what they were; a critter that was intended to be like them but was never finished. I was unworthy of the space I took up in that world and the lies I showcased in order to fit in.

Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.

We may also discover that sexual abuse helps to explain the high prevalence rates of eating disorders among women and may lend some insight into why we are starting to see more documentation of eating disorders among boys as we see the reports of sexual abuse for male children increasing. Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders.

What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?

Eating disorder recovery becomes possible when you keep making the next right decision over and over. With time, these decisions become automatic.

When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself -- but never quite believing it because you don't sense yourself directly.. . . I started teaching a simple belly meditation in which I asked people to become aware of sensations in their belly (numbness and emptiness count as sensations). Every time their mind wandered . . . I asked them to begin counting their breaths so they could anchor their concentration. Starting with the number one and saying it on the out breath, they'd count to seven and begin again. If they were able to stay concentrated on the sensations in their belly centers, they didn't need to use counting as a concentration anchor.. . . you begin the process of bringing yourself back to your body, to your belly, to your breath because they -- not the mind medleys -- are here now. And it is only here, only now that you can make a decision to eat or not eat. To occupy your own body or to vacate your arms and your legs while still breathing and go through your days as a walking head. . . . Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.

Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors.

If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.

I__e memorized the best angles in the bathroom mirror from which to see how badly I__e disintegrated. I truly do go from sixty to zero.

In the mirror I stand, an injured deer in headlights, or maybe high beams, judging by the way my eyes water. I measure my wrists with my fingers, and I clutch at my rib cage, fingering it languidly, tracing the rise and fall of sharp bones until my heartbeat slows, and I dream of a faraway ocean.

What was wrong with me? Why could I not just flip the switch and see all the brightness ahead if only I chose the correct path? Or rather, why could I see the correct path but not choose to tread upon it?

I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're thin.

There's a weight in the room now, a remembrance of childhood. It sinks like a stone, or a heart, or my weight on a good day.

There__ a weight in the room now, a remembrance of childhood. It sinks like a stone, or a heart, or my weight on a good day.