Hi Audere - welcome to the group.

Sorry to hear about the hormonal imbalance issue you have - that must have been very scary to gain the weight and not know why. I'm glad they have found what is wrong and you have meds to help get your hormones balanced again. I understand what you are saying that you must remind yourself that you are losing weight because your illness is being treated and not get excited about the fact you are losing weight. That's hard to do!!!

I always worked hard to try to understand why I had an ED and I have to say that knowing it and understanding it didn't heal it. I understood I was binging and starving because I was "emotional" but that knowledge didn't stop me from binging and starving. It wasn't until I worked with a therapist to heal my traumatic past, learn how to change those negative scripts to positive scripts, learn how to recognize how I was feeling and then allow myself to feel them and express them, was I able to heal the ED.

This was not a fast process. I am 50 years old and have been working on pieces of this since I was in my early 20's. Granted, not everyone takes quite as long as I do to heal. I am a slow and steady type of healer. :-) One thing you can start doing is changing your negative thoughts to positive thoughts. You say you are trying to watch/read something positive body image related every day and that is great. But you have a script running right now (in your mind) that tells you that you must look at yourself and say "Hey! Let's go to the bathroom and look in the mirror and degrade your self-worth!" and that is a script that can be changed. It takes commitment on your part but I promise you it is worth it. When I was working on this area my therapist had me do a kind of exposure therapy. I was to look in the mirror and find one part of my body I liked. I liked my eyes. Every time I looked in the mirror the dialogue in my head went like this:
*I am so fat and ugly!!!! but I have pretty eyes (I yelled the first part at myself and whispered the second part)

After doing this at least once a day for months the dialogue changed to:
*I have pretty eyes....but I am still fat and ugly (now nothing was yelled. It was all said calmly)

After a while longer the 'fat and ugly' part didn't show up at all because all I noticed was my pretty eyes. So when you get the urge to look in a mirror and insult yourself try to change it to something positive. If you like your hair then always make sure to say you have pretty hair. If you like one single eyelash then make sure to always say to yourself that you have a single eyelash that is beautiful. It probably sounds silly but no matter how small the item is....identify it and bathe in the beauty of it. After a while this does help to change the way you look at yourself. And eventually you move on to the next body part until you look in the mirror and see the truth - that you are beautiful from head to toe.

I have found that ED's are extremely complex and have many layers that need to be healed. If possible, and you are not already, it would be great if you worked with a therapist. This can be a therapist who specializes in ED's or, if you have trauma in your past (i.e. abuse of any kind) then a trauma therapist may be a good choice too. Everyone approaches their healing in their own way - some heal their past and then work on the ED (this is what I did), others work on both at the same time and others work on the ED and then work on their past. It's whatever works for you. You can heal the ED and any traumas you have, and you deserve to heal. :-)

Thank you so much for this thoughtful response, LuckyEmpath! Yes, gaining the weight was very unnerving, especially since my body image issues is quite poor to begin with. It's embarrassing to say, but it took me awhile to even think to do anything about it! I was too busy wallowing over it to think hey, this isn't normal you should see a doctor. But that's okay - I'm getting help now and I let myself feel what I need to.
The idea of pointing out something I like about myself is very good - I actually love my eyes too. It sounds like something that will take hard work and consistency to get right, but it is worth it if it can make me feel better because I want to be better. And slow and steady wins the race :D I look back on myself before I gained the weight and was like oh, my goodness you were so perfect why did you think anything less of yourself? But I'm probably still beautiful now and just don't realize it - it is a constant battle for sure. My goal is to look at myself the way I look at other women - I truly see all women as beautiful.
I have been seeing a therapist for a year now and she is amazing. My body issues and obsessive behavior surrounding food and exercise are just something that have not changed yet, although I do feel that I am improving and that I'm not taking this battle lying down anymore. I definitely think working on my past could be very beneficial. My ex-boyfriend my senior year of high school was the first trigger - when I was filling out (I hit puberty late so I was a rail for a long time), he would comment on what I ate, what I did and didn't do, etc. I for sure don't blame the entire situation on him because other stuff must have happened for my ED issues to persist for 4 years and counting, but I was one of the most self-confident people ever before him.
Thank you so much again for the response. Reading it was extremely uplifting and helped me feel not alone in this fight. It reminds me that my body image issues are only a part of me; they do not define me and cannot always keep me from being happy.

Hey Audere... I can only agree with Lucky's reaponse and empathize, because I'm going through the same thing right now

Body image issues are so hard to heal - at least they were for me. Here's a story for you..... I had my license picture taken when I was at my top weight of 272. I hated that picture. I hated who I was and I hated what I looked like. I longed to be beautiful instead of 'fat and ugly'. I, of course, kept my license in my wallet but I kept it with the back facing out. I didn't even want to risk getting a glance of that picture. Last year as I continued to heal all aspects of my past and present I took the picture out and really looked at it - and I cried. That woman I was looking at was so sad, hurting so much and screaming in pain...and she was also very beautiful...and she was me. I looked at myself for the first time and saw beauty even at my top weight. I saw "ME" for the first time ever and it was a wonderful day for me. After that I made sure to always keep my license picture facing out and I looked at it often. This year I had my license renewed and had to have the picture taken again. Now I have both pictures in my wallet and I love them both.

Keep working on loving you because you are worth loving. Big, small, overweight, ultra thin...we are all very lovable and we are all perfect. ((Hugs))

Hi and welcome to the group. I am sorry about what's going on. Hugs to you. I agree with Lucky, keep loving yourself, you are a wonderful person and I hope you will be ok soon. Lots of Hugs

Thanks for the support, you guys. I really need it and appreciate it.
Red47640 - I'm so sorry you are going through a similar situation. It sucks and it is a waiting game for sure, but we can get through it.
LuckyEmpath - Thank you so much for sharing that personal story. We are taught in society that fat is a synonym to ugly, bad, unworthy, and it simply means none of those things. Fat just means fat, skinny just means skinny (not beautiful, perfect, ideal, happiness).
I really do want to go clothes shopping but I am afraid I am going to have a breakdown. It sounds silly but I was a size 4 and am a size 6 now, and if a size runs too small and I have to get an 8, I know I will likely flip. Any advice?
Thanks again, everyone :* Sending positive vibes out~~

It doesn't sound silly at all about you being upset about the size of clothes and how they fit. I found it very challenging to change my thoughts in this area but I finally did. I no longer care about size - all I care about is how comfortable I am in my clothes. But this new attitude did, as always, take time. I spent hours, days, weeks, months, years improving my self talk and part of that was telling myself that the size printed on the label didn't mean anything. When I would go clothes shopping, a dreaded task for sure, I would practice not letting the size on the label bother me. Yes, I had many breakdowns - in the store, on the way home and once I got home. For me, I had to keep doing it over and over and telling myself over and over that the size on the label didn't matter and eventually it sunk in. I am sure my method would not work for everyone but you can try it and see where it takes you. Hopefully it helps you move forward with this part of your healing but if it doesn't then you move onto the next suggestion until you find what works for you.

You can do this Audere - it's just a number printed on a label. That's all it is. It does not define you at all. ((Hugs))

Thank you so much, Lucky Empath. I really appreciate those words of encouragement as well as the advice. My body image right now though is just making me so depressed. The only times I am happy is when I am distracted by an activity like hanging out with friends - otherwise the negative thoughts creep back into my mind. I am generally sad with happy moments - I want to be generally happy with sad moments. Being consumed by this is killing me. I don't know what to do anymore. I've been going to my therapist and she's amazing, but I still get really down like I am now. My summer internship requires me to sit at a desk for 8 hours/day for 5 days/week, which is terrible for my mind because I can think about my body quite constantly. If I was told as a child that this is who I'd grow up to be, I wouldn't have wanted to grow up. Don't worry - I'm not suicidal. I'm just extremely distraught.

Changing your thoughts from negative to positive is not a fast or easy process. It sounds like you are already very conscious of the negative thoughts which is the first step - awareness. Now it's a matter of always thinking something positive when a negative thought pops into your mind. When I negative thought popped into my mind I would say "No. That is a lie. I am beautiful, outgoing, worthy...etc". Actually naming the negative thought a "lie" helped me a lot. It was a little trick my therapist taught me and it really helped. It's a slow process though so when you start doing this, please don't expect to see results in a few days or even a few weeks/months. But if you keep at it I promise you that you will see results. When I tackle things like this that I know will take a long time to see results I think "I may as well do this work because there really isn't anything else for me to do about it. So I may as well try." I always figured "What the heck...it doesn't hurt to do it..". So I did do it and I was rewarded for all my hard work. My friends today describe me as a positive upbeat type of person but they didn't know me in my 20's when I was depressed, suicidal and negative about everything. It does work so I hope you will start to change those negative thoughts to positive ones. You deserve to be happy and it starts with what you can control - your own thought process. ((Hugs))

Oh! I also want to add that the positive thoughts may feel like a lie and the negative thoughts feel like the truth but, trust me, if you keep doing the work the positive thoughts really do begin to feel like the truth, because they are, and the negative thoughts will feel like a lie, because they are. :-)

Thank you, LuckyEmpath! Calling the negative thoughts out as lies is a really great idea! I often try to tell myself that I am brainwashed, so my perspective of myself is warped, but I like LIE better - so much more concise. And that's true - it can't hurt for me to give it a shot. I'm glad you are so optimistic now :) I describe myself as an optimist who happens to have depression, a confident young woman who happens to have a poor body image. I say it like that because the bad parts are not my defining characteristics. Yes, I think my biggest challenge will be believing that the negative thoughts are lies. But it seems it gets easier and easier over time, so I am going to give it a go! Thank you so very much~~