Eating Disorders Behaviors & Thoughts
List of Behaviors and Thoughts
- Bingeing
- Purging
- A need to exercise even if it’s not practical and/or your body is showing signs of fatigue or pain
- Comparing your body to others
- Comparing what you eat with what others are eating
- Keeping clothes in your closet that don’t fit
- Eating when you aren’t hungry (if done on a regular basis)
- Dressing to hide your body
- Negative self-talk when thinking about your body or food or after eating
- Obsessing about food, weight, exercise
- Paying more attention to your body, food, etc. than your relationships with yourself or others
- Chronic Dieting or thinking about dieting
- Talking about being fat, eating too much, not exercising enough
- Thinking life will be better if you lose weight
- Perfectionist thinking
- Black and white thinking
There are a lot more similarities to the various eating disorders than there are differences. In fact, the one real difference is the way you interact with food.
For example, if you have anorexia, you restrict food intake, often to an extreme. However, someone who is bulimic may eat large amounts of food and then vomit it back up. A binge eater will often eat well past being full more often than not.
Each eating disorder carries its own behaviors around food and how you manage food intake and the potential for weight gain.
Yet, each eating disorder type is riddled with fear of weight gain, obsessive thinking about food and weight, a strong tendency to hide the symptoms and shame about what’s happening. In each, the symptoms will worsen over time until you get help. In fact, most of what you will try to do to fix it will only make it worse. Your weight is likely to change often and your sense of “goodness” or “badness” will depend upon how you eat, what you eat, how often you eat, and how often you think about food. You will lose more and more of who you are and your eating disorder “voice” will get louder and further and further take over.
Underneath every eating disorder is a person who feels ashamed, not good enough, not lovable enough, unworthy.
The cause of these feelings of less-than can stem from a variety of places. Certainly, society plays a role. Also family messages, personality tendencies, such as perfectionism, and other factors come into play.
Whatever it is, the eating disorder is a way to “fix” it and/or to hide from those feelings.
No matter what eating disorder you may have, getting help to face your feelings and to find new ways of living a life is at the heart of recovery. It’s for this reason that getting help is key! If you could have felt better by dieting, restricting food, binging, vomiting, over exercising, obsessing about your weight, you would have felt a lot better by now!
You may be completely lost about what to do to get better. There are people out there that are not lost and can help you find the way out! Some have found the way out themselves. You need help and it’s okay to need help. We all do. You don’t have to suffer alone and in silence and shame. Get the help you need! Now.
Find someone in our directory that you have a sense of liking or you feel “drawn to.” Or give us a call and we will help connect you with one of our providers. Either way, reach out to someone… for your health!