An Update & "Labels"

I think I'm finally at a place where I can start posting here regularly again. This blog will continue to be about my random musings...my struggle with bulimia and self-injury, my recovery, and my lifestyle.


The first thing to change about my lifestyle in recovery was my way of thinking about food...and I don't just mean eating it and keeping it down. At the treatment center I went to, they practiced intuitive eating. It entails simple things like recognizing hunger/fullness signals, not counting calories/fat/carbs/etc...but really listening to what your body needs, and how much it needs. But it also includes a way of thinking about food I had never heard before: that, despite what other people tell you, there is no "good" or "bad" food. No food is "bad" in moderation...if you enjoy it, have it. Not as a binge, not as a reward for restricting so well...but simply have it. Because you enjoy it. Ideas like that really mess with the disordered view of black and white about food.


I still find myself struggling with this concept. Especially now, in recovery, as I have become what others call a "yogi", I find myself still bombarded with the thoughts of "good" and "bad" when it comes to food. I'm very much into yoga. It has been, and still is essential to my recovery. I practice every single day. As I move into difficult postures and poses, it really gives me a sense of gratitude for my body. That, I can do physically AND mentally challenges things with my body, after all of the abuse I put it through, is an outright miracle. And at the end of every practice, I meditate on that, at times finding myself in tears, feeling overwhelmingly grateful for the grace God has given me...even in the physical sense. But as much peace as the physical practice of yoga brings me, I can't bring myself to agree with some of the other aspects of the "yoga lifestyle". First of all, I'm not into any eastern mysticism or religion, I'm a Christian, and those views haven't changed. I don't believe its "wrong" to eat meat. I don't believe everything I eat needs to be "organic" or "vegan", and that anything other than those things are going to wreck your body...or the environment. I have a difficult time with restrictions of any kind when it comes to food. It's a slippery slope of disordered behaviors that creep their way in slowly and quietly. I've taken notice of those same thought patterns infiltrating our society. Commercial after commercial of "low fat", "low calorie", "whole", "all natural", "healthy". I don't think there's anything wrong with any of those foods...but to pit them against every other food is....well, in a way, disordered.


To combat this, my dietitian asked me to start using two different categories for food other than "good" and "bad". She asked me to view foods as either "supportive for my recovery" or "non-supportive for my recovery". Are low-fat, low-calorie foods supportive for recovery? No. They encourage the need to lose weight, to be fearful of being "fat", distortions of the eating disorder.


So that's where I'm at right now. Fighting the battle with "labels" about food. The mind is a difficult thing to re-train.


Instead of posting "thinspo", I'm going to post a picture of a yoga pose I nailed today during my practice: Parsva Bakasana, "Side Crow Pose". It's taken A LOT of discipline and hard work to get here, and I'm proud of myself :)