A client has written a personal blog entry about her journey in overcoming an eating disorder—or, rather, “ordering her eating”—as she powerfully puts it. In the entry she discusses our work together and how hypnotherapy made a difference. She has generously given me permission to repost her entry here.
I should mention that before we began our work together, and with the client’s permission, I spoke with the practitioner who diagnosed her condition to make sure that hypnotherapy would complement and not contraindicate her existing treatment plan.
Beauty and the Beast: My Victory over Eating Disorders and Why I Love My New Voluptuous Shape
It all started when I was a very little girl. For some reason, I was never really big on eating. I rarely had an appetite, and I often saw sitting down to eat as something that was an inconvenience that interfered with doing other, more “important” things (like playing with my sister or friends, talking on the phone, singing, getting into trouble, etc.). When I was very, very young, I didn’t understand the physiological need behind food and often questioned my parents’ and grandmother’s authority, “Why do I have to eat if I am not hungry?” I would often ask. It didn’t make sense to me. I won’t get into all of the drama of old wounds – I’ll just say I went through a lot as a child, and there were times where my nutritional needs were not met, and this only complicated my already distorted relationship with food and caring for myself through eating properly. I forgive the adults in my life for the mistakes that they made when I was very young. I can only think that they had similar experiences and did not know any better. I feel fortunate to have “woken up” from the cycle of things and to have become aware of this unhealthy pattern so that I will not pass this on to anyone in the future.
As a teen, my body image and relationship with food worsened. Even when I was 92 pounds, (and a little over 5′, or 1.524 meters tall), I thought I was obese. Yes, OBESE. I was so critical of myself and saw someone fat when I looked in the mirror. Nowadays, I still cringe when an occasional photo from my teen years resurfaces (there aren’t many out there, but my mother does have a few). My cheeks were so sunken. I was so emaciated. My skin tone was even a little bit yellow. But I thought that trying to live on 600-1500 calories a day and limiting my fat intake to under 20 grams per day was the healthy way to go, and I literally starved myself for many years.
All of it, it turns out, was an unattainable attempt to be perfect and to have control over SOMETHING in my life. In so many ways, my life felt out of control. I ended up in a girls group home for teenagers, and my father died when I was 16 of AIDS, and my mother and I did not get along. I developed OCD, which fed into the need to have everything a certain way and to obsessively count calories and track fat intake. Controlling what I would and would not put into my mouth, subconsciously, was my mind’s way of trying to exert some sense of control in what I thought was otherwise an out of control life.
In my early 20s, I met the man who I thought would be my prince charming. It was with him that I tried Taco Bell for the first time (which to this day is a guilty pleasure, lol). In fact, I began to eat meat (which I hadn’t done since I was much younger), and I went buck wild. I ate everything I wanted to, whenever I wanted to, and I enjoyed every single second of it. It was like I was making up for all that time of self-deprivation when I thought I was the one who was in control. Then I began to gain weight. Lots of it. I went from about 98-105 pounds at the time to 130 pounds. I barely noticed as it happened, but my ex sure let me know. He said things all the time about it and drew my attention to the cellulite I had on my legs (I’d never had cellulite before). I felt bad about it but told him that he either needed to love me whether I was skinny or heavy, or else I didn’t need him. We broke up for other reasons, but I am so glad that I took that stand for my body.
Since then, I have had episodes of anxiety where I have completely lost my appetite. In fact, a few years ago, I was just so not interested in food that I ended up losing a lot of weight and went down to 103 pounds. That’s when my boyfriend (who I am with to this day) told me I needed to get help. I sought out therapy and followed their suggested regimen of counseling and medication. Eventually I got well, but I would have repeated incidents over the years (luckily not to the same extreme with the excessive weight loss).
If you look at some of my YouTube videos, you will see that there is a drastic difference between my weight in May of 2009 when I started on YouTube, to the present. That’s because in December of 2008, I had one of these episodes. I lost complete interest in eating and just could not bring myself to eat a healthy amount of food to take care of my body. This time, I realized that I really, really needed to get to the root of the loss of appetite and address it directly, or else the source would keep causing these symptoms and episodes to resurface. I decided that, in addition to checking into a daytime hospitalization program and meeting 1-2x a week for intensive counseling, that I would also try medical hypnosis. I found a woman who is certified in hypnosis and arranged a consultation. The work we have done has been amazing, and I have since been able to handle the episodes when they begin to arise. I remind myself that at one time, my body/mind reaction or impulse not to eat served my best interest for survival (in the abusive settings I experienced and when there were times when I went hungry from lack of food). My mind now needs a new “tape” to pop in when it is triggered by stress or uncomfortable situations.
Now I love myself through such episodes, which now last a maximum of 3 days, and I am able to function just fine during those days. I eat whatever I feel in the mood for – and I monitor calories, but for a DIFFERENT reason altogether from the reasons I did earlier in my life. I watch to be sure that I am caring for my body well and taking in enough nutrition to nourish my body and keep me in optimum health. Read the rest of this entry »
