Best 113 quotes in «eating disorders quotes» category

As I searched for food perfection, and as I gained weight, I began to realize that the race for perfection in anything was the path to destruction.

Ask yourself what you love. Without fear of consequences, without force or shame or guilt. What motivates you to be kind, to take care of your body, your spirit, others, the earth? Trust the longing, trust the love that can be translated into action without the threat of punishment. Trust that you will not destroy what matters most. Give yourself that much.

As she continually disregards and overrides her body's signals of hunger, fullness, and fatigue, a bulimic woman becomes increasingly disconnected from her subjective experience. Because she does not heed her own needs, desires, preferences, and limits, she grows ever more reliant upon external gauges to guide her life".

As the helpless vampire watched the transformation, it started screaming. It was still screaming when his rows of razor sharp teeth sank into its throat.

Beauty" and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be "beautiful" to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both "beautiful" and "sexual" constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.

Can you tell me why you added weight to your gown?" Dr. Chu asked. Another trick question. Bones shrugged. "I wanted you to think I was gaining weight." Dr. Chu nodded. "We need accurate records for every patient." (Our job is to make sure you gain as much weight as possible while you're here.) Dr. Chu leafed through Bones's file, checking off little boxes. "Since you lost weight--even with two stainless steel knives sewn into your gown, it's obvious you've been purging. Either by vomiting or--" (We have closed-circuit cameras and hidden microphones in your room.) "Or engaging in unauthorized exercise." (Bingo!) "I know this may be difficult," Dr. Chu said. "But the nutritionist and I have decided to raise your calories." (We won't be satisfied until you resemble a scrap-fed hog.) "Are you listening to me son?' Bones's eyeballs hurt from so much nodding. "Yes, sir." (Fuck you!) "One-hundred calories isn't as bad as it sounds." Dr. Chu dropped his voice, forcing Bones to learn forward in his chair. "That's it for now.

Being constantly hungry is no life at all.

Bones stared at the cheap melamine plate with an omelet, fruit bowl, and dry toast. "Is something wrong?" Dr. Chu asked. I have the stomach flu, sore throat, tooth abscess, migraine, allergy to gluten . . . . I never eat breakfast on Wednesdays or in closed rooms or during a lunar eclipse, especially in July or when I'm out of deodorant. . . "I'm just not hungry.

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

...compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting -- of leaving ourselves -- hundreds of times a day.

Counting calories is not the answer, because eating is not the problem.

Chronic trauma (according to the meaning I propose) that occurs early in life has profound effects on personality development and can lead to the development of dissociative identity disorder (DID), other dissociative disorders, personality disorders, psychotic thinking, and a host of symptoms such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse. In my view, DID is simply an extreme version of the dissociative structure of the psyche that characterizes us all.

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories, sensations, and experience of the sexual abuse through starving, bingeing, purging, or exercising. They keep the focus on food, body image, weight, fat, calories, diets, miles, and other factors that women focus on during the course of an eating disorder. These disorders also have the ability to numb a woman from the overwhelming emotions resulting from the sexual abuse — especially loss of control, terror, and shame about her body. Women often have a combination of eating disorders in in their history. Some women are anorexic during one period of their life, bulimic during another, and compulsive eaters at yet another stage.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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'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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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".

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

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

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.

How did I get like this?

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)

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

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.