Best 113 quotes in «eating disorders quotes» category

Eating is not a crime. It’s not a moral issue. It’s normal. It’s enjoyable. It just is.

Eating disorder recovery becomes possible when you keep making the next right decision over and over. With time, these decisions become automatic.

Eat like you love your body.

eat, baby. eat. chew. please. I know it hurts. I know it doesn’t feel good. please. I know your hunger is different than mine. I know it doesn’t taste the same as mine. imagine you could grow up all over again and pinpoint the millisecond that you started counting calories like casualties of war, mourning each one like it had a family. would you? sometimes I wonder that. sometimes I wonder if you would go back and watch yourself reappear and disappear right in front of your own eyes. and I love you so much. I am going to hold your little hand through the night. just please eat. just a little. you wrote a poem once, about a city of walking skeletons. the teacher called home because you told her you wished it could be like that here. let me tell you something about bones, baby. they are not warm or soft. the wind whistles through them like they are holes in a tree. and they break, too. they break right in half. they bruise and splinter like wood. are you hungry? I know. I know how much you hate that question. I will find another way to ask it, someday. please. the voices. I know they are all yelling at you to stretch yourself thinner. l hear them counting, always counting. I wish I had been there when the world made you snap yourself in half. I would have told you that your body is not a war-zone, that, sometimes, it is okay to leave your plate empty.

Everybody at Sweet Valley High, even Elizabeth, seemed to forget that there was ever a fat and ugly Robin. But Robin would never forget.

How did I get like this?

Everything changed when I learned to honour my body instead of fighting it. When I learned to take care of it, like a precious castle to protect this weary heart. To stop harming it, punishing it for looking like this or that, feeling like this or that. I don’t look like they all told me I had to, but I’m healthy and strong and vital. That is enough.

Father absence has been implicated in anorexia nervosa, in which daughters may exhibit literal father hunger by starving themselves.

For girls who've been pressured into sex they didn't want, growing into a woman's body can be terrifying. Anorexia and bulimia can be an attempt to say no, to assert control over their changing bodies. Compulsive overeating is another way.

For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.

Hold yourself back, or heal yourself back together. You decide.

Her behaviors turn her psychic pain, which she fears is not legitimate, into physical pain, which is indisputably real".

If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.

I decided to say something. It was through an email, an email to my mom confessing that I had a problem with food, that maybe it was an eating disorder, that I wasn't sure what to do or feel. That yes, I had gained weight, and I was scared, and I was constantly thinking about food. That it was taking over my life.

I felt as if I had a secret stomach that could never be filled, always cramping for hunger, even when my regular stomach was about to explode. What am I hungry for?

I drift into the armpits of strangers, tasting their manic salt, and sleep to forget everything.

If I had the capacity to withstand instantaneous physical pain, I think I would have even considered taking a razor to my leg. Because after so long of living in that hole, I would have rather felt pain than nothing at all; I just wanted to feel something again. You reach a milestone in such illnesses when denial lifts and you realize that the things you do are truly damaging both to yourself and to others. By then, however, you learn to not care and you embrace the notion that this method of self-harming is both deserved and satisfying.

I knew, deep down, that running would not save me. Rawchael would not save me. Rachael would.

I had always liked my anorexic reflection. It meant seeing the parts instead of the whole. Each connection, each articulation of muscle, skin, and bone made explicit. Gert said that we all had distorted images of ourselves. Either fatter or skinnier than we really were. She said we hated our bodies, hated ourselves. I had never thought so.

If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.

I long ago came to the understanding that the problems I once had with food were not merely about food. Eating was a way of trying to fill up the emptiness, to provide comfort. It was a substitute for love. I'm not referring to the love that comes from someone else. The love that was missing from my life was self-love. With age I've discovered a sense of worth that makes me less hungry. A piece of cake is just a piece of cake.

In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as "a human experiment"--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year.

I'm just scared I won't run as fast as I did my freshman year,' I admitted, choking back tears. Coach Woj looked at me for a moment, his eye gentle. 'You don't have to.

I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're thin.

I need to make myself strong on the inside instead of what is on the outside. I know all of this, but why can’t I put any of it into action? I guess that’s why I am in this place.

Invece respiro ancora. Con la responsabilità di chi è stato riammesso al gioco. Dopo un fallo contro la vita.

In the mirror I stand, an injured deer in headlights, or maybe high beams, judging by the way my eyes water. I measure my wrists with my fingers, and I clutch at my rib cage, fingering it languidly, tracing the rise and fall of sharp bones until my heartbeat slows, and I dream of a faraway ocean.

In just two years, CSAS ignited the flame Grandmother lit years before. Carl would never succeed in his attempts to extinguish it. But his parental authority was able to keep it dormant and unthreatening for several years. At Ooltewah High School, I was like a lion forced into captivity after a liberating romp in the jungle. Nothing challenged me. Nothing motivated me. Nothing moved me. My claustrophobia itched to the point where clawing at my own skin seemed to be my only method of relief. With no social outlets and no intellectual nourishment, I caved into self-destruction. My bulimia amplified from throwing up obligatory family dinners to driving to grocery stores, Dollar Generals, and gas stations, shoving junk food into my purse in between security camera reach, devouring the calories in the corners of desolate parking lots, and scurrying into remote public restrooms in the outskirts of town. My knees would rest on the cold, sticky tile floors as I wrapped my arms around bleach-scented toilets as if embracing an old friend.

In yet another paradox, bulimia nervosa serves as both an expression of feelings and a defense against experiencing feelings, particularly shame, anger, loneliness, sadness, envy, and guilt. A person with bulimia nervosa fear, whether consciously or unconsciously, that painful feelings would be unbearable, even annihilating".

It's funny. When we first started hanging out I didn't want Ashley to think I was a pig, so I was careful not to eat too much in front of her....Now, I don't even think about it.

I think sometimes making yourself vulnerable before you are ready is exactly what can hold you accountable. Do what you fear.

I promise no food will ever hurt you as much as a negative mind.

It’s 2009, a Thursday night in September, and I’ve stopped looking for stars in the Los Angeles sky. I settle instead for the ones I see in my head when I go three or four days without eating. Same difference.

It's never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around. When we start defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels. We don't want to EAT hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes. We want to come home to ourselves. (p. 174-5)

I’ve memorized the best angles in the bathroom mirror from which to see how badly I’ve disintegrated. I truly do go from sixty to zero.

I've come to realize that hunger feels more like home than any tangible structure ever has, or probably ever will. I know now that creating absence is my way of coping with absence.

It's the soul that's starving, not the body

Maybe we choose to stay in a constant state of ignorance as a protective instinct — maybe I was just in denial. I just don’t get how you can be completely in love with someone one day, and then all of a sudden you just aren’t. I will never forget that day...the day where I became numb.

No one could see the thoughts when the body looked normal to them. The voice wanted it to just be the two of us. It wanted to hide. If no one saw it, then no one would believe me. No one would ask.

Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.

My parents’ attempts to stop my habit were through guilt and force. They grounded me several times. Carl made cracks when he felt that I was eating too much and snide comments on my weight yo-yoing. They sent me to psychiatrists who tried to quick fix me by Paxil, Zoloft, and Effexor prescriptions. All were antidepressants with weight gain for side effects, which might as well have been rat poison for a bulimic.

No. Absolutely not. I forbid it. You'll have nightmares." "She was my friend! You must allow me. Why are you so horrid?" As soon as the angry words were out of my mouth, I knew I had gone too far. "Matilda!" Mother rose from her chair. "You are forbidden to pseak to me in that tone! Apologize at once.

No food will ever hurt you as much as an unhealthy mind.

Nothing in the world scares me as much as bulimia. It was true then and it is true now. But at some point, the body will essentially eat of its own accord in order to save itself. Mine began to do that. The passivity with which I speak here is intentional. It feels very much as if you are possessed, as if you have no will of your own but are in constant battle with your body, and you are losing. It wants to live. You want to die. You cannot both have your way. And so bulimia creeps into the rift between you and your body and you go out of your mind with fear. Starvation is incredibly frightening when it finally sets in with a vengeance. And when it does,you are surprised. You hadn't meant this. You say: Wait, not this. And then it sucks you under and you drown.

Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. (p. 80-81)

No two eating disorders are the same. No two individuals are the same. No two paths to recovery are the same. But everyone's strength to reach recovery IS the same.

One of the most dangerous myths surrounding eating disorders is that they are a life sentence.

Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors.

Recovery is full of ups and downs. There is no such thing as a linear life. But you can always turn your setbacks into setups to come back stronger.

Premevo la lama come si fa con la maniglia della porta. Sperando di entrare in un'altra vita.