Laxatives and Eating Disorders - The Things You Should Know

It was in the news a few weeks ago that moves were afoot to stop laxatives from being available off the shelf in pharmacies and, presumably, supermarkets.

Apparently, as with paracetamol-based products and cough medicines, we need to be protected from ourselves and our addictions.

I fail to see how taking it off the shelf and making it dispensary-only is really going to stop people from using them for nefarious purposes, specifically those suffering with eating disorders.

What we really need is for more information to be available on the subject. For those of us who have trodden this well worn path over many years to educate those who follow in our footsteps. And, hopefully, to prevent them from making the same mistakes and suffering the same long term health consequences.

For anyone who thinks that laxatives are a good idea for dieting, the many years of intestinal difficulty that I suffered as a result of taking that route to facilitate my own eating disorder should provide a stark warning.

In my late teens and early twenties, I was both bulimic and anorexic. Mostly, I would eat nothing and use the laxatives to lose more weight but, if I did binge, I went through purging myself by putting my fingers into my mouth and activating the gag reflex until I vomited.

This is a totally disgusting process, which rots your teeth and just makes you feel permanently nauseous.

After several months of this, I could bear it no longer and moved onto laxatives to do the job more discreetly.

As a result, my poor bowels never really knew where they were.

Sure, it seemed to work for a while but then my system just became totally confused.

I was either completely constipated, with the waste building back up through my system and causing terrible bloating which only added to my distorted perception of my own body.

Alternatively, my stools were so loose that I was terrified to go out for fear of soiling myself.

However, my body dysmorphia meant that I persisted in this ridiculous routine of starving and purging myself.

Then followed the worst symptoms. The acute stomach cramps every time I did try to eat something. These were so painful that I couldn't walk. My gut would go into spasm, causing my belly to distend. I wanted to be sick and to defecate to ease the painful swelling but was unable to do either.

Although I only used the laxatives regularly for a year or so, these problems continued for decades afterwards, even during the time periods when I thought my anorexia was under control.

IBS and Crohns Disease were all suspected at various times, but now I know that a lot of it was triggered by my reliance on laxatives.

The damage this did to my intestinal walls was exacerbated by my predominantly bread-based diet and stressful lifestyle. The candida (gut bacteria) proliferated and leeched through into other parts of my body, causing thrush and other yeast infections.

After suffering with this for many years, I have chosen to try the anti-candida diet for the last few months and start making my gut more healthy by taking probiotics.

I haven't used a laxative for over twenty years, but only now that my diet has improved have I actually started to recover from the damage that my prolific use of them caused.

Autor: Joanna Cake

This article can be used on other relevant websites but a reference to the author and a live web link to the sites in this resource box MUST be displayed. For information on treating thrush, candida and yeast infections, visit: http://www.treatthrushcandidaandyeastinfections.com

Joanna Cake is a life blogger who writes about health, parenting, sexual relationships and intimacy. For more articles like this, visit: http://www.havingmycakeandeatingit2.wordpress.com

Added: December 31, 2009
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/

A Support System For Eating Disorder Recovery - What is It?

A woman asks: Would a boyfriend be a good support system or do you recommend that I find a female to confide in? I'm ready to finally get over my bulimia."

Answer:

A support system is more than one person. It's a whole system of people, activities, classes, treatment professionals, spiritual centers, etc. who support your eating disorder recovery.

Sometimes people get confused and think that support means agreeing and supporting whatever they think or want or whatever their perception is in the moment. But if you have an eating disorder, sometimes your perceptions are distorted. Your emotions can go haywire. Your thinking can be confused or unrelated to reality.

The people in your recovery support system will support your efforts to get clear and reality based. Yes, they will help you with structure when you are flailing emotionally or mentally. They will do their best to help you find a way to experience soothing so you can learn to soothe yourself.

But you might not like what they say if you are in the grip of eating disorder thinking or emotions. A good support system will be clear and firm about healthy and necessary boundaries, reasonable expectations, honoring commitments, following through on your word, being honest and perhaps most difficult, postponing immediate urges.

A good supportive system will offer you alternative explanations and perspectives on an issue that you feel is black or white and requires your immediate reaction. A good support system will give you a safe place to go, healthy activities to do, learning and creative exercises to grow by.

A good supportive system will tolerate you when you are in an irrational state that you believe is rational. Yet that support system will not be pulled into your unrealistic passions that you believe are completely justified. (You are most likely to feel this kind of unralistic passion when you are slowing down and finally stopping your eating disorder behaviors.)

A good supportive system does not support your eating disorder or your e.d. thoughts and feelings. A good support system supports the genuine you and supports your health and recovery.

A boyfriend or a girlfriend or a relative can't do this. They can love you, but they don't know about the real experience of living with an eating disorder. They don't know the suffering, pain and creative defenses you experience when you are doing your recovery work. In fact, they may try to help you by soothing you and, without realizing it, offer you suggestions that lead right back to your eating disorder. If you accept this help you move back to your eating disorder life. If you recognize the dangers of their suggestions you may get angry with them. Either way leads to pain and suffering where everyone involved can be hurt and bewildered.

So, building your support system requires that you begin to learn what recovery means to you and gather people around you who support that recovery.

A psychotherapist who knows about eating disorders can be a positive bases where healing begins and where you can learn to build an authentic support system beyond your therapy appointments.

Overeaters Anonymous and eating disorder support groups can be part of your forming support system. A spiritual practice with people who may know nothing about eating disorders but who do know about honoring body, mind and spirit can help.

So can a yoga class and other classes like art, writing, gardening, sculpture. They give you a place to go and put you in contact with people who are working to develop their skills and talents. Such activities can provide you with much needed structure and foster development in the right hemisphere of your brain.

A good support system does not give you a place to hide. It does give you a place from which you can grow and heal.

Creating your genuine eating disorder support system is a wonderful and necessary endeavor to help you on your recovery path.

I wish you and all who need a solid recovery support system good luck, courage and kindness within to listen to your wisdom voice that will lead you to your health and real recovery.

Autor: Joanna Poppink

Joanna Poppink, MFT
psychotherapist in private practice specializing in eating disorder recovery
Eating Disorder Recovery book in progress through Conari Press
10573 West Pico Blvd. #20
Los Angeles, CA 90064
http://www.eatingdisorderrecovery.com
joanna@poppink.com

Added: December 30, 2009
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/

How to Avoid Binge Eating Or Compulsive Overeating

I recently read about someone who was having problems with binge eating and wanted advice. They were doing great with the weight loss and actually hit their first major milestone successfully. And the very next day they found themselves buying cookies and a candies and eating them all in one sitting. Has this ever happened to you? It certainly has happened to me.

Having been on the weight loss journey for a while, this is one of the most common experiences I have seen others talk about and even experienced them myself. So, how what causes binge eating or compulsive eating and how can you prevent it from happening?

a) When you lose weight and feel successful, you feel inclined to celebrate. And we are brought up to celebrate mostly with food. I have noticed that if I am not losing weight like I am supposed to I become even more watchful and strict with the diet but if I am losing weight like I am supposed to, I subconsciously switch gears and tend to coast or even take a few liberties with my nutrition. This could also be due to the fact that we get over-confident due to success.

b) If you went from bad nutrition all the time to ONLY good nutrition all the time in a short amount of time, your mind and body will try to retaliate and go back to "things as they were". This is why having at least 1 or 2 cheat meals a week, is a way for our mind and body to balance out from one extreme to the other.

So if you are constantly depriving yourself of foods that tempt you then you are likely to lose control on impulse and overeat. If you do, then consider your binge as your cheat meal, lose the guilt, and go for an extra long walk tonight to burn those extra calories. Guilt can lead to further binging because guilt is essentially hating yourself for your actions ( or non-actions ).

c) Making a "lifestyle" change as opposed to a 30/60/90 "program". If you change your frame of mind to view yourself as a healthy person ( as opposed to your old self ), you can start living like one. So as a healthy person, you would enjoy the treats like above once in a while, wouldn't you? As a healthy person you wouldn't feel guilty or bad because its' a minor transgression to your daily healthy lifestyle and would be treated as such. And as a healthy person you would also know that such splurges can also be counter-balanced with daily exercise.

In a nutshell, be careful how you label your overeating experiences ("failure", "sabotage") and how you see yourself (healthy vs. unhealthy). These two things will determine your long-term success (or lack of it). I have a couple of friends who are very lean and very fit. And I model their habits as much as I can since they are already successful in that area. What I have noticed with them is that

1. They exercise regularly and are very active.
2. They watch little TV and are always doing something ( even if its fixing a broken door handle or planting a new tree or even going for a movie ).
3. They are never stationery for too long.
4. They don't count calories or obsess over certain food.
5. They eat whatever they want but are also conscious of their overall food choices. ( For e.g. One friend wont drink too much beer...the other friend usually has salads for lunch and then eat whatever he wants for dinner. )
6. They are very in tune with their body. This is the MOST common trait I have noticed in people who are lean. If they don't feel hungry, they won't eat. Earlier, I would have lunch whether I was hungry or not, completely out of habit ( and possibly unreasonable fear that I might go hungry if I don't eat ). If they have a huge lunch, then they will balance it out by having a salad for dinner. Or if they have had a week of going to too many parties, they will cut down on eating out for the rest of the week or workout longer to burn those extra splurges off. So without having to think about it they are always maintaining an overall caloric balance.

Doing so, allows them to eat whatever they want. This leads to no binge eating because they are not deprived. They also exercise regularly so they are conscious about portion sizes. So the takeaway here is that deprivation most certainly leads to binge eating. Guilt also leads to further compulsive eating. So if you crave a cookie, have one. And then make sure you burn it off with exercise. You do not want to be a prisoner of your "diet", cause you will be thinking about the "escape" all the time.

Autor: Harsh Desai

Hi this is Harsh Desai and I invite you to visit my website http://www.harshathlete.com for weight loss information as well as fitness advice. I invite you to follow my quest, to get six-pack abs as well as my current 50 day weight loss challenge that ends by the first week of January 2010.

Added: December 28, 2009
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/