Re: The voice of an eating disorder

What a lovely message. I agree completely. As soon as Olivia starts eating again, I mentioned I would be cheering, and then we could help her on refeeding.

I know that you know, and you probably know that I know that the fasting for weight loss forum was created years ago for people who wanted to fast for little concern for safety. You mentioned it in this old post //www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=688336#i

I think the reason people still come here for weight loss is because there is better technical advice here, though they often ignore that and try and put their own views across to try and make the impossible come true. Often they end up in states of poor nutrition. As the semi starvation experiment showed, poor nutrition can lead to emotional disturbances and obsessions with food. It's a vicious circle. The feeling of worthlessness that comes with it is a self fulfilling prophecy.

The sort of support those people need - and Olivia - is not the Olympic style "go on, you can do it" mantra that I once foolishly took part in, and I am pleased that we see less of that here these days. Once could conclude from the semi starvation experiment that fasting and poor nutrition could even cause an eating disorder, and cetainly fasting is a purging mechanism used by many people with EDs, which is why ED specialists warn against it.

When she is around, Maverick494 does some excellent posts giving the right sort of support, both on this forum //www.curezone.org/forums/s.asp?f=335&ob=d&c=0&t=150&m=Maverick494 and on Fasting for Weight loss //www.curezone.org/forums/s.asp?f=556&ob=d&c=0&m=Maverick494

But the advice is only in the last 5 months, she knows how to give good advice because she has recovered from an ED, so she is best placed to know. Anyone with problems would do well to look at her recent posts. She is saying all the right things, fasting won't solve the problem, you will put on more weight than before, you will end up in a worse mess than you were in when you started. One of her posts //www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=1409995#i
starts off "Probably not what you want to hear..." and that indeed is the crux of the problem. People fixated on losing weight often do not want to hear what is best for them. Instead they hear "You're fat", "You're disgusting", "You don't deserve to eat", "You're worthless", "You deserve to die"

Those are "The voices of an eating disorder. A never ending dialogue that plays inside the mind of a person suffering with an eating disorder. Those voices and the cruel words they speak are with a person from the minute they wake up, until the minute they fall asleep. They encourage their victims to continue to abuse their bodies through starvation, bingeing, purging and other dangerous methods of weight control, and can bring them to the brink of death."

That quote is taken from this website http://www.mirror-mirror.org/voice.htm and there's more about that here http://www.something-fishy.org/isf/negativevoices.php - I only became aware of this recently.

Anyway, I don't know how others feel I think it is quite right for people to ask a few questions before giving advice. Just a simple look at the headers of their old posts or asking the question "how tall are you?" so that you can calculate their BMI at their target weight is often enough http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/

So if anyone has problems like that, go get some real life support from your family or your doctor or a trusted friend, or join an online community NOT the pro-ana ones). Something Fishy is such a community, and can be found at the last link above. Curezone has an anorexia and bulimia support forum here too //www.curezone.org/forums/f.asp?f=381
but it does not get much use. Unfortunately that's probably because they are too busy trying to lose weight in the fasting forums.

Lastly, some people have openly said here that they have an ED, and the support they got here was helpful to them. Identifying the problem seems to be half the battle.

Happy fasting to all those doing it for health. Tweet