Some of you may have been curious about the “out of the blue” question I asked yesterday about disordered eating.
I started thinking about it over the weekend when I read this post by Jen from Semi-Charmed Wife, where she talked about a disordered-eating episode she had. Jen lives here in DC and I’ve been reading her blog for a number of months now. We’ve never met in person (although I’m sure we’ll be remedying that very soon), but we have a lot in common. Our biggest commonalities are our histories with disordered eating, our current focus on healthy living, our occasional slip-ups, and attempting to write blog posts that provide inspiration and motivation to our readers.
I contacted Jen about her post, and we discovered that both of us feel strongly enough about the subject of disordered eating that we know we’d like to do something. We’re not sure exactly where this will lead as of yet, but I asked for suggestions yesterday and today Jen wrote a fantastic post about her triggers and how she avoided a disordered-eating episode.
I’ll have to put additional thought into what my triggers are before I can write about that subject myself, but I do know that I want to hold myself accountable to not engaging in occasional overeating, and also challenge myself to stop eating mostly the same foods all the time. Instead of posting about it here on this blog (because some people find looking at lists of what other people eat to be triggering for them in a negative way, and also because I’d like to keep the focus of this blog the way it has been), I created a profile on SparkPeople yesterday.
SparkPeople gives you the ability to track your food, your fitness, join/create groups, post to message boards, and all kinds of other things. I’m not sure how involved I’ll be as of yet, but I’m making a promise to track my daily food intake for at least the next 30 days — and then I’ll see where I go from there. If anyone else is a member of SparkPeople (or is interested in joining me), feel free to add me as a friend.
If anyone has any thoughts on what we can do to fight back against disordered eating, your suggestions are welcome.
UPDATE:
I’ve created a team on SparkPeople called No More Hiding.
14 Comments
I’ll join you and I’ll try to actually participate once in awhile.
Good for you! I’ll have to take a look at your SparkPeople page:)
By writing about this, you are already helping women by letting them know they are not alone. Keep up the great work.
Z – I don’t really obsess over food. Training? Yea. Food? Nope. I need it. It’s fuel for my body. I hope you don’t ever fall back into your old ways. Hang in there.
In other news – my bike came yesterday! I will be sure to get a pic when it’s put together.
Thanks again Z.
I am on SP, too. Haven’t been there in ages, though… probably should head back over there and try doing ‘this’ again.
i happened to write about the same subject yesterday!
zandria, thanks for the comment on my blog. we seem to have had similar experiences, though i know that disordered eating is a common thing in our generation and age group.
i’ll definitely check out the no more hiding group.
happy blogging to you…
just an observation…first, great infor. zan. second, personally, for years i exercised and ran most everday. a diet consisting of just about nothing more then carb’s and and a great amt. of them. not eating until the end of the evening was the plan of the day. just grain’s and veg…”that’s was it”. actually it worked quite well as long as the routine lasted, but, we all know that nothing last forever. so when the routine stopped the calories began to add up and so did the pound’s. now, i still have the weight, but, for the first time and without any effort on my part…i have actually lost several pound’s.. no diet, no exercise…i still do not eat any red meat and try to stay away from the candies…so what did this for me? i now stay away from that great evil…my total obsession with “CEREAL”. i now eat twice as much food as before, but, a much greater variety…vegie burger’s and diet bread…that’s right i eat 2-3 slices of bread everyday…i havent eaten bread or cake..cookies etc. for years..now, i sample it all. so, a great motivation for me was in knowing that i could eat in the morning and have my snack’s etc and dinner and lose weight without all the drama and (what about those scall’s.) so a healthy variety of food is the answer…minus the other stuff of course. lovu
Great idea – I’ve been looking for a way to tackle my occasional “wobbles” and I’m definitely going to give this a go! I think writing down triggers and identifying how to tackle them automatically gives you control over a situation before it’s even occurred. And surely feeling out of control and that a disordered episode in a certain situation is inevitable has GOT to be the heart and soul of the problem, right? Genius. I’m gonna try it. Not sure I’ll get the guts to post it, but I’m definitely going to try it! Cheers Z
TA x
Before yesterday I suspected I had a teeny little disordered eating problem. NOT an eating disorder. Not something to really worry about. But something to notice. The quiz supported my belief.
Oddly, I think I would have scored lower before I started to eat healthy. What is it about eating healthy that makes one a little disordered? Except that in some social situations, the choice is to bend to the crowd choice or to fight with food choices.
Disordered eating?
I have skipped meals, counted calories, worked out until i passed out, worked for 3-4 hours at a time, ate the same thing every day, ate popcorn for dinner for months on end.
I could go on and on about my disordered eating.
I think what I’m learning is to balance it. When I have a negative feeling, I try my best to sit and rationalize, which helps me out a lot.
Dear zandria. I have done both, but not extremely. I dropped about 7 kgs one summer by only really eating dinner (and only half of it). Other than that, it was juice for other meals. Then on the other hand, I have also had periods of overeating.
More recently, when I wanted to lose weight I went to weight watchers, which helped give me a framework for a healthy lifestyle.
I’m really excited about this! I think the approach I’ll take is to continue to post about triggering events and how I handled them. I might add a more general weekly update if it seems appropriate.
I’ll have to check out SparkPeople, and definitely keep us posted on how it’s working for you!
I am new to blogging (as of yesterday!) and am hoping to blog about my battle with disordered eating. I was so pleased to do a search and find out that there are others out there with similar struggles. I will look up your spark thing. I have been using the daily plate to do a similar thing although I am not always sure it helps as it makes me focus on calories even more than I normally do which is already a lot.
I really want to be free from disordered eating. It’s a huge problem and there doesn’t seem to be any help out there to deal with it.