Best 117 quotes in «eating disorder quotes» category

HEALTHY EATING isn't about counting fat grams, dieting, cleanses, and antioxidants; Its about eating food untouched from the way we find it in nature in a balanced way; Whole foods give us all that we need to perfectly nourish ourselves.

her eyes are unfathomable to me, hostile, even, as if she had removed herself to a place where I cannot reach her - somewhere I cannot know.

I am my own cannibal.

I again invoke my favorite analogy for eating disorders: abusive lovers. And what do you do when someone is in an abusive relationship? You don’t allow visitation rights, weekly dates. You don’t put them in the vicinity of or let the abuser flirt with them. You keep them the fuck away.

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

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 am too big and too small and too much and not enough and too frightened to change and too sad to stay the same.

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 left myself out of humanity by focusing on differences. This isolation only strengthened Ed” (17)

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 the past, my brain could only compute perfection or failure—nothing in between. So words like competent, acceptable, satisfactory, and good enough fell into the failure category. Even above average meant failure if I received an 88 out of 100 percent on an exam, I felt that I failed. The fact is most things in life are not absolutes and have components of both good and bad. I used to think in absolute terms a lot: all, every, or never. I would all of the food (that is, binge), and then I would restrict every meal and to never eat again. This type of thinking extended outside of the food arena as well: I had to get all of the answers right on a test; I had to be in every extracurricular activity […] The ‘if it’s not perfect, I quit’ approach to life is a treacherous way to live. […] I hadn’t established a baseline of competence: What gets the job done? What is good enough? Finding good enough takes trial and error. For those of us who are perfectionists, the error part of trial and error can stop us dead in our tracks. We would rather keep chasing perfection than risk possibly making a mistake. I was able to change my behavior only when the pain of perfectionism became greater than the pain of making an error. […] Today good enough means that I’m okay just the way I am. I play my position in the world. I catch the ball when it is thrown my way. I don’t always have to make the crowd go wild or get a standing ovation. It’s good enough to just catch the ball or even to do my best to catch it. Good enough means that I finally enjoy playing the game.

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

I believe, Stevie, that human beings...we're oriented toward health. Meaning, your body wants to heal. Your mind wants to heal. If you can get to a place where you let your mind and body do what they want to do, you will start to move toward health.

If you think my waistline defines my worth, you are not worth my time anyways.

In more ancient times the life was simpler, but now the discovery of all these different medicines for curing dyspepsia shows that people are suffering from this disease. In this country we know that there are so many kinds of pills and medicines used. We even have those in India now. These things show that not only in America but in all the countries of the world we have to recourse to artificial means for necessary nutrients because people are not aware of right rules of diet. It is better to follow the right rules of diet in the beginning in order to avoid any kind of artificial medicines later on.

It is not easy to find someone your size once the Freshman Fifteen turns to the Sophomore Forty or the Senior Sixty. Even when, through some miracle of self-restraint and bulimia, college girls managed to continue to have feminine bodies, so many of these tacky sluts have never heard word one about what fashion entails.

I used to think, that when my old inner demons started creeping back into my life, that it was a sign of failure or moral weakness. But the saints have shown me that part of the human condition is to struggle with the same sins and suffering over and over again. Once I accepted the fact that I’d probably always have to be on guard against spiritual attacks related to food and my weight, I began to really recover.

Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior.

My body had never felt so small or so fragile. In one sense, it was a moment of ecstasy and I was comforted with soft, almost compassionate, encouragement. "Delicate," she said. The word imprinted on me like the cold before it. I was weak and going numb, but I was delicate. This is what I had wanted. I wanted to lose weight and retain some ounce of delicacy to resemble that of the spider-figured women I had seen in all those flashing images. Suddenly, the lack of strength displayed by my body was counterbalanced with a surging lease of mental satisfaction and might. As I lay in bed, buried under all my layers of clothes and bed sheets, the warmth still could not reach me. It was too late for that now and I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep, basking in my success and enduring the cold until I could finally slip into a forgetful slumber.

I was a very lonely child and it's funny but the first word that comes to my head is "starved". I felt starved of affection, starved of love and I felt that it wasn't OK to ask for it. Maybe there was a sense that if I deserved it, it would be there. There must be something I'd done which meant I didn't deserve it.

I was always happy when he was around. My heart did not stay still in it's place even. Nowadays my stomach replaced my heart. I was filling my stomach as long as my heart stayed empty. Just because of filling somewhere inside of me.

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.

My reflection followed me mercilessly in mirrors, car doors, shop windows. I lived in a world of circus mirrors, the grotesque distortion of my body looking back at me everywhere.

Oftentimes, especially during my recovery, I didn’t need to think about everything I was doing wrong; instead, I needed to focus more on what I was doing right—and then do more of the right stuff. I needed to live more in the solution.

Perhaps a past of bingeing, restricting, or purging comes back to haunt you from time to time. Maybe you have to fight hard battles against vanity, gluttony, and shame. But with God’s saving power, every new day is a gift, an opportunity to detach yourself from tormenting thoughts about food or how you look and to attach yourself to God. Remember, we all hunger for God, more than we hunger for a big bowl of ice cream or a perfect physique.

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

She used to look forward to changing in the locker room when other girls stole shocked glances at her emaciated body last spring. Now they would look at her and think she was fat--just as fat as all the other girls, maybe even fatter. Nothing separated her from the parade of thunder thighs trooping up the stairs from the locker room to the gym.

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.

The barriers we face in life are so often the ones we create in our minds. As a child I couldn’t open that wooden gate because my body prevented me from doing so. As a teenager it seemed I couldn’t open that door because my mind held me hostage. The world that waited beyond it now was no longer one of safety or escape. Instead, I knew every time that I opened that door, it would be to a life of psychological insecurity and emotional entrapment. She - that cerebral leech who clung to all my thoughts - convinced me of this fact. Only with her could I find and maintain an asylum of mental armour

Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms was staggering, and included somnambulism (not sleepwalking as we think of it today, but a sort of amnesiac condition in which the patient functioned in a trance state, or "second state," and later remembered nothing); trances or fits of sleep that could last for days, and in which the patient sometimes appeared to be dead; contractures or other disturbances in the motor functions of the limbs; paralysis of various parts of the body; unexplained loss of the use of a sense such as sight or hearing; loss of speech; and disruptions in eating that could entail eventual refusal of food altogether. Janet's profile was sufficiently descriptive of Mollie Fancher that he mentioned her by name as someone who "seems to have had all possible hysterical accidents and attacks." In the face of such strange and often intractable "attacks," many doctors who treated cases of hysteria in the 1800s developed an ill-concealed exasperation.

The good news, however, is that, also contrary to popular belief, full and lasting recovery from an eating disorder is possible.

The greatest lesson I learned in this long and confusing journey was that my body was never broken, my mind was never beyond repair, and I was never really as alone as I thought I was.

The notion that life could be any different - that it could be better - becomes inconceivable. You forget how good it was to be normal. Worst of all, you come to believe that you prefer it this way.

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of "grand hysteria" described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics..." "The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head..." "One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle — and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse. She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would "see" her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.

Then I took a shower, unlocked the door, and set out on destroying myself.

The only way to move forward is to focus on the good in your life and the good that you are doing for others and yourself. My past has shown me things in life, others and myself that I wouldn't wish upon anyone, but I can choose to pick up the pieces and build a beautiful life for myself and help others to do the same.

There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a bareness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.

The reasons for Emma's illness and for her decision to allow life in, rather than die, are intertwined and involve the beginnings of her feelings of belonging, of safety and of competence to be in the world.

To actually accept that you have an eating disorder or a mental health issue is actually a sign of great, great strength. It is not a sign of weakness at all.

The tattoo artist inflicts pain and I take it. With each breath I count to one again. Each inhale, each exhale, time passes in the smallest of pieces, and pieces still smaller than those. This is how you count a life. This is how you go through it. Each second of hurt is a second that's already passed, one you never have to go through again. I have counted in pieces that small, when walking from the bed to the fridge seemed an insurmountable goal. I have counted my breaths, my steps, my eye-blinks, my hiccups, the tiny pulse in my thumb. And when I started getting tattooed, two of the things I used to need were gone: to write on myself, and to find irrelevant things to count. A second of intense pain is the most profound thing you can live through. And another, and another, and another, and then you know what it is to feel, and to struggle through that feeling one small agonizing increment at a time, and if you know that, you know what it is to live with mental illness.

We are beautiful because we are sons and daughters of God, not because we look a certain way.

Well, Kessa, I am glad to see that you're taking your body seriously. I shudder when I see the girls leaving class and heading for the nearest hamburger, coke, and French fry station.The thought of them pouring all those dead calories into themselves makes me want to cry. You'd think after a rigorous dance class they'd have more respect for their bodies.

When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat.

Why couldn’t I find one action that would make the need to binge automatically disappear? Because there is no magic action to make that horrible prebinge feeling go away. The cool thing is that we are designed so that the feeling will pass through us on its own—in time. All we have to do is sit there and feel what is going on inside of us. We must experience the feelings. To help us deal with the feelings, we can call someone on our support team. We can also express the feelings by focusing on our breath or even hitting a pillow. The important thing to remember is that no matter how terrible, feelings do pass. It takes patience and trust—not food . . .

Why? You want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight. Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all, "a disappointment." Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and drink and cut because you need the anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's too late because you are mainlining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop. Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heartbeat scream that everysinglething is wrong with you. "Why?" is the wrong question. Ask "Why not?

With Ed, I always pushed away the good and only heard the bad. Today, I let in the good.

You are a beloved child of God. But please remember this, too: You are human. You cannot expect to eat perfectly, look perfect, or be perfect. When you stumble, pick yourself up, even if you have to do it again and again.

You see, a binge is almost always inevitable when one goes withut eating for such a long period of time. It doesn't just satisfy the physical hunger that becomes you; it nourishes the psychological need to escape from your own controlling mind. In this way, the binge presents itself as the ultimate loss of control.

An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were; that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.

Because I make films about eating disorders and sexual assault, people always come up to me and are like, "Are you okay?" like I'm a broken-down shell of a woman.