Eating Disorders Support Group
Eating disorders are marked by an obsessive need to control the intake and/or purging of food. This community is dedicated to those struggling on the road to recovery. Join to discuss your experience with others and find support. Get advice, ask questions, and meet others who are going through similar struggles.
Hi everyone this is new to me. I guess I'm just looking for any help that I can get. I'm tired of living in a constant urge to binge eat. My emotions are very up and down and are often emotions Of the extreme. My way of coping for the last 10 years with my emotions is to eat. Eat a lot to make me feel really good. Not only is the connecting my emotions with eating unhealthy, but also the guilt I feel after resulting in purging. I have dealt with this for a quite a while. Never seeking much help, only in one close friend, only a few people know. Sometimes it's just minor and happens occasionally and sometimes it will happen 5 times or more a week. I know I've already created my pattern of behaviour to eat when I'm emotional but I don't know how to change it. I guess it would be helpful for me to find a way to cope with my emotions not using food that would work for me. Which I've tried but I always end up falling into the more comfortable way I've always handled it, which is to eat. It's just hard when you always used food to make you happy. I just want to feel more in control of my body and eating habits. All I want is to have a balanced and healthy lifestyle of eating and fitness. I can just never seem to get there.
I agree with you that we have an ED so we can cope with our feelings and sometimes those feelings are quite extreme. The way I healed the ED was to first heal the traumas in my childhood that made it necessary for me to need the ED. My traumas were sexual, physical and emotional abuse by a neighbor as well as having a toxic emotionally abusive family. While healing these trauma's I learned how to feel again. It was quite the process because I had turned off my feelings for a 40+ years so I had to learn to allow myself to feel feelings, then I had to learn what those feelings were and then express them safely. It's when we start expressing our feelings that we release them and no longer need the ED to cope with them. ED's push the feelings down/aside and expressing the feelings releases them so we don't need to push them down or aside.
I would urge you to seek the help of a therapist. If you have trauma in your past then healing that would definitely help you on many levels - not just with the ED. I had to heal the traumas first but others work on healing the ED first or work on healing the trauma and ED at the same time. It's whatever works for you. You can heal and you deserve to heal. You deserve a happy life free from ED's.