Goodbye Ed, Hello Me: Recover from Your Eating Disorder and Fall in Love with Life - Softcover

Schaefer, Jenni

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071608877 ISBN 13: 9780071608879

Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Don't Battle an Eating Disorder Forever-Recover from It Completely
Jenni Schaefer and Ed (eating disorder) are no longer on speaking terms, not even in her most difficult moments. In her bestseller, Life Without Ed, Jenni learned to treat her eating disorder as a relationship, not a condition-enabling her to break up with Ed once and for all.

In Goodbye Ed, Hello Me Jenni shows you that being fully recovered is not just about breaking free from destructive behaviors with food and having a healthy relationship with your body; it also means finding joy and peace in your life.

"Jenni Schaefer has dedicated her life to helping people overcome their eating disorders and live life to the fullest. She is an inspiration to all!" --Dr. Phil

"Every young woman and man interested in overcoming disordered eating should read this treasure of a book."
-Leigh Cohn, M.A.T., CEDS, Editor-in-Chief, Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention

"The beauty of Jenni's written journey through her tormented relationship with Ed is that it is honest, passionate, hopeful-but, most important, it ultimately assures the reader that life really can move on."
-Lynn Grefe, CEO, National Eating Disorders Association

Combining Jenni's signature personal advice and unfailing encouragement along with valuable exercises you can do as you read, Goodbye Ed, Hello Me will give you the prescriptive tools to take the final steps in divorcing your Ed completely.

Foreword by Carolyn Costin, LMFT, M.A., M.Ed.

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goodbye ed, hello me

Recover from Your Eating Disorder and Fall in Love with LifeBy Jenni Schaefer

McGraw-Hill

Copyright © 2009 Jennifer Schaefer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-160887-9

Contents

Chapter One

HAPPILY DIVORCED Life Without Ed

In order to divorce Ed, I needed a recovery toolbox stocked with tools that really worked. Even more important than having the tools, I needed to actually use them. Finding a life without Ed meant consistently applying what I learned in treatment to each step of my recovery journey. It meant facing the food. When I fell down along the way, I had to get back up again. Part 1 will take you back to the basics of eating disorder recovery and reinforce what works and what doesn't. Get ready to take some real action.

Recovered (Period.)

"I'm Jenni. I have an eating disorder," I said as we went around the room introducing ourselves in a Twelve Step meeting. As I spoke the words "I have an eating disorder," I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach. I felt like I was lying to myself and to everyone else. I thought, "I don't have an eating disorder. Why did I just say that?"

I said it to fit in with the standard format of the Twelve Step meeting. John had begun, "I'm John. I have an eating disorder." Then Sue: "I'm Sue. I have an eating disorder."

So I just followed suit, but I won't do it again. That phrase may fit in with the format of the meeting, but it sure does not fit into my life. From now on, I will say, "I am Jenni. I am recovered from an eating disorder."

It took years and years of hard work, energy, and pain to get myself to the place where that statement is true. I did not work for almost a decade to walk around saying that I still have an eating disorder when I don't.

My personal experience is that I must speak my truth, claim what is true for me: I am recovered. I don't still have an eating disorder, and I am not always going to be in recovery. I refuse to give Ed any power in my life today. Looking back, I can see how he used that kind of power to stay in my life for far too long. I can also see that defining myself in terms of my illness was a self-fulfilling prophecy. As long as I believed Ed was waiting around every corner to get me, guess what? He was waiting around every corner to get me.

Sure, there were many points when I was "in recovery," and checking in at a Twelve Step meeting with "I have an eating disorder" suited me just fine. Those were times when I was still acting out with eating disordered behaviors or when I was consumed by the fear of relapse.

I am grateful that people who had been through it themselves told me, "It is possible to be fully recovered from an eating disorder." Knowing that in recovery could become fully recovered was pivotal in my life, so I like to offer that same hope to others today.

Many people out there are at the same place I am in regard to their eating disorder, but they prefer to keep saying that they are in recovery as opposed to being recovered. They believe that the moment they say they are recovered is the moment they will relapse. The phrase in recovery reminds them that life is a process and that there is always room to grow. Of course, an important part of my being recovered encompasses this life growth as well, so you might be thinking that this is all a lot of semantics.

To further confuse you, a friend of mine who's in recovery from alcoholism and an eating disorder actually uses both terms. She says that she works a recovery program daily and is thus in recovery. But quoting the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, she also says that she is "recovered from a hopeless condition of mind and body."

The point is, semantics or not, we all must figure out for ourselves how we define freedom. If saying what I say—"I am recovered"—feels wrong to you, say something else. I can't force my vision on you and vice versa. When you are alone and grounded, what feels best to you? Do what works.

Claim your truth, and I will claim mine. "I'm Jenni. I'm recovered from an eating disorder."

I Am Different

When I Walked into group therapy for the first time, I scanned the room to see how different I was from everyone else. I quickly determined that I was fatter than all of the other women. I continued to find more and more differences, both real and perceived. "I am different" was my anthem.

Are you different too? Maybe you are a man in treatment with mostly women. Maybe you are an older person in treatment with mostly younger people. Eating disorders do not discriminate by gender, age, sexual orientation, culture, ethnicity, social class, financial status, or anything else.

Or have you received the diagnosis of eating disorders not otherwise specified (EDNOS) and feel like you don't have a "real" eating disorder? Many people with EDNOS have told me they feel this way. The truth is that EDNOS is a real eating disorder that can be just as dangerous as anorexia and bulimia; it currently includes the diagnosis of binge eating disorder (BED)—a life-threatening disorder in itself. We all might do different things with food, but we all use food in an unhealthy way (that is, until we recover).

I don't pay a lot of attention to specific diagnostic criteria, because I know that people can use this information to disqualify themselves from treatment. I used to think, "I don't binge enough to have bulimia," or "I haven't lost enough weight to have anorexia."

I don't even mention certain eating disordered behaviors, because I don't want to trigger similar behaviors in others. So if you read this book and think, "Jenni never mentions [insert your choice of eating disordered behavior here], so I must not have an eating disorder," think again. I probably didn't mention that particular behavior for a reason. Most likely, it was a dangerous behavior that I had learned about by reading a book, so I am careful not to talk about it.

You might feel that you are different because you don't know your diagnosis and believe that your eating behaviors might not be severe enough to warrant one. An eating disorder is an illness that tells us we don't have the illness, and that aspect of it (denial) keeps many of us alone. If food and weight make your life unmanageable, if you are just functioning and not truly living, then you deserve help.

Maybe you don't believe you deserve it, because you have not undergone the same level of trauma as other people. I have learned that trauma is relative to the person experiencing it. What might not seem traumatic to someone else could be very real and traumatic to you.

Or is it that you look physically normal and are not under-weight or overweight? Eating disorders come in all shapes and sizes, every number on the scale. I was at some of my worst points with Ed when I looked normal.

My point here is that we are all different. I proved early on that I was different, and I tried to use that as an excuse for why I could not get better. I thought that therapy might work for others, but it wouldn't work for me because I was different. I was afraid of possibly failing at something that worked for others. It was easier to be different than to fail.

It was also easy to use being different as an excuse to slip off into isolation: "No one in my therapy group understands me, so why should I even go? My 'normal' friends don't get me, so why should I hang out with them?" I left myself out of humanity by focusing on differences. This isolation only strengthened Ed.

To ultimately recover, I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071608877
• ISBN 13: 9780071608879
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland