Pathway to Normal Eating: Continue the Journey

Change up frequently. Keep trying new things. There are so many things to learn on your journey, it’s useless to perfect anything before going on to the next.
Keep it fun, find ways to laugh at yourself and the world. Enjoy the food, enjoy the learning, enjoy the exercise, enjoy the journey.
It’s your life. Take it [...]

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Pathway to Normal Eating: Reach Your Own Happy Medium

The single most important principle about non-normal eaters is: if your eating has been not normal for a long time, it will require a long time to correct. Therefore, the most important things to practice are patience and persistence.
Never giving up is the only way to make a permanent change. Even though I’d dearly love [...]

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Opening a can of emotional worms

Change your shape, change your life.
For emotional eaters, learning to not overeat for emotional reasons means learning how to deal with emotions in other ways. When you do this, though, you become a different person.
The same thing happens when you los weight first. In order to keep it off, you will learn new ways of [...]

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Pathway to Normal Eating: Start setting and achieving realistic goals

Setting goals can be intimidating for an ED person. For me, any kind of food limiting goal was impossible. Diets were simply one big long cheat, pretending to want to diet away my fat, yet almost never eating according to the plan. The one time I lost on a diet program, I lost over 100 [...]

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Pathway to Normal Eating: Define What You Want Your Final State to Be

My final state is described in my mission statement.
… permanently change to a moderate range of Emotional, Physical and Social behaviors 
That may sound odd or ambiguous to you, but it’s extremely clear to me. As a compulsive eater who never learned good social or emotional skills, resolving those issues is what I describe as becoming [...]

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Pathway to Normal Eating: Study and Practice New Habits in All Areas

Action is more important than theory here. It’s also the place where most programs fail you. Programs that claim differentiation by being a diet or a non-diet or an exercise program tend to focus in just one area, but your recovery is holistic and needs to take care in all areas. Before you think I’m [...]

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Pathway to Normal Eating: Do Whatever It Takes to Recover

Whatever it takes? How can you define that?
For me, whatever it takes is whatever it takes, short of violating my primary values. For example, I won’t kill to be thin and free of the ED.
Doing whatever it takes means the following:

Doing what you think you need to be doing
Assess the efficacy of your choices and [...]

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Pathway to Normal Eating: Choose to Do Whatever It Takes

It’s thrilling to start a new diet, give up all dieting, start changing your life. The attraction of “change your shape, change your life” is enormous. Who doesn’t get a thrill of thinking, “If I can just get to the right weight, I’ll be so much better off?”
This is just another version of the Cinderella [...]

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Pathway to Normal Eating: Start Making Changes

As a kid and a teenager, I never really knew that there were psychological issues behind my ED. Our family dynamics were such that I barely knew that diets existed, much less believed that people were successful on them.
Once I got out into the real world, or as real as college can be, I lost [...]

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Pathway to Normal Eating: Learn From Others

People who recover from an eating disorder or otherwise make a large permanent change in their lives, always address three areas:

their Rational being, or how they use their logic and knowledge
their Physical being, or how they feed and move their bodies
their Emotional being, or how they learn to work with their emotions

These changes don’t come [...]

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