When I was in high school, I was extremely unpopular, and stressed about everything. Watching tv and eating was easier then dealing with people. When I got chubby, (I can’t say I was ever real fat, but was soft with a belly,) people began making fun of me, and started calling me fat. When I tried to act like it was just good-natured fun, and referred to one of the people who made fun of me as short, everyone got real pissed at me for being so mean.
One of the first things I did to try to lose the fat was to start skipping meals. The results were that I made my mental condition worse by lack of nutrition, and I gained weight. Plus there was a store on the way home where I would stop and pick up candy. The hunger at that point was just too much to handle. This made me feel week and stupid, and I resolved to try harder and skip more meals if I could. At one point I realized I was being foolish and quit skipping meals. Things improved for me after that.
It was years later before I realized how I was affected mentally. I came close to sticking my finger down my throat, but never went through with it. I sometimes wonder if this might have cost me an inch or two in height.
For me, the best help has been knowledge, and NLP. I realize a lot of people either think it is quackery, or think a lot of the people into it are just nut cases. The first statement is wrong. Unfortunately the second one is sometimes true. Plus there are people who don’t understand it who try to use it and consider themselves an expert after reading one book, or others who might try something, do it wrong, and decide it does not work. I was surprised at how well it worked for me. It did for my brain what Testosterone magazine has done for my body.
My personal opinions are that happy pills (like Prozac) are to quickly prescribed. I too often see people who are not happy just given a pill, and I think it is like taking steroids during the first week a person ever works out. It should be one of the last things a doctor tries, not the first. Sometimes it is as simple as learning what triggers a thought, or feeling, and interrupting that process. An example is when my daughter starts getting upset, and I start humming a circus tune. She cant stop smiling, or laughing. And it takes her out of her upset state.
With anorexia and bulimia I think the pattern of behavior begins with a foolish idea of skipping a meal. The human body is designed to assume this skipped meal might mean famine, and starts giving a warning by increasing hunger. The person then either gives in and overeats causing an extreme feeling of guilt, or learns to ignore the hunger. If a person can learn to ignore the hunger, then the person ends up anorexic because food is no longer important. But if a person just cannot ignore that hunger, too often they feel so guilty that the quick fix of purging seems like a good answer. After a person purges (barfs, pukes, vomits) often the guilt goes with it. A person quickly connects the act of vomiting with feeling better. At that point it may no longer be about getting thin, but becomes about feeling better. Pavlov figured this out years ago. (Who’s salivating out there?)
Too often the problems start in school, and the school is of no help whatsoever. A teacher recently told my daughter that women cannot build muscle without taking hormones. I told her he was an idiot. (Which she got a big kick out of.) Then there is the story on 20/20of high school girls getting gastric bypass to lose weight. One of the girls said she was too heavy to exercise.
Once again I got too heavy winded. (And I have been so good recently.) One of the great things about this web site is that it deals with improving ourselves physically in an intelligent way.