anorexia Archives - Everyday Chocolate | Libby Stenzel Nutrition

May 8, 2024May 3, 2024 by Libby

Ways to Increase Motivation in Anorexia Recovery

Recovering from anorexia is a long, challenging process. While it is normal (and okay!) for your motivation level to ebb and flow, it is vital to your recovery success that you work to keep your motivation as high as you can, more often than not.

If you are at the beginning of your recovery journey, you may have very little motivation right now. Anorexia is especially unique, when it comes to mental/physical illnesses, in that when we are stuck in it we don’t generally want to get better! (There are a variety of reasons for this, and this contributes to the danger/lethality of anorexia).

However, given that you are reading this blog post, I’m guessing that at least a small part of you does want to get better. Great – let’s start there! We can work with any ambivalence and hesitation you are feeling over time, no matter how strong. This is also normal.

On the other hand, if you are already full-force into your recovery journey, then hopefully the ideas in this post help you to keep building on and maintaining your motivation.

Ways to increase motivation in anorexia recovery:

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November 15, 2023November 11, 2023 by Libby

5 Tips for When Anorexia Recovery Feels Overwhelming

When I think of what generally causes a person (such as myself) to feel overwhelmed by any sort of big goal or desired end result, there are often two key aspects that can cause overwhelm:

(1) the nature or difficulty of the goal itself, and

(2) how we are approaching the goal mentally and emotionally (regardless of its actual objective difficulty).

Overwhelm Source #1: The nature or difficulty of the goal (recovery) itself.

From an objective standpoint, recovering from anorexia is a very challenging process. There is a reason recovery rates are so grim. (BUT that does NOT need to be the case for you!)

There is the obvious physical/nutritional health component. This may include things like:

The often extreme GI discomfort (and unpleasant related symptoms) of the GI system getting used to more food
The challenges of extreme hunger as the body “re-awakens” from its starved state and is desperately needing ALL THE FOOD NOW
Working on balancing and healing hormones and the gut
The COPIOUS amounts of food that need to be eaten to achieve said weight gain (*cue head spinning*)

So much more could be said, but suffice it to say for the purposes of this post that weight restoration / overall bodily healing is often very uncomfortable from a purely physical standpoint.

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November 1, 2023October 31, 2023 by Libby

10 Common Thought Patterns Perpetuating Your Disordered Eating

Our thought patterns have a tremendous impact on our behaviors and our ability to grow and make changes.

Thinking about a non-food example — let’s say I am trying to have a productive work day (intended behavior). BUT, as life would have it, I slept miserably and have a terrible headache. I got out of bed later than I wanted and have barely crossed anything off my to-do list by the time early afternoon rolls around. Some common thought patterns here might be for me to start catastrophizing the day (Now my entire day is ruined! My whole week is going to be thrown off!), viewing the day as overly black-and white (I have gotten NOTHING done that I wanted… this day is an absolute failure) and continually judging myself for struggling to get done wanted I had planned and hoped.

Mentally reacting to my day in this way would likely cause me to continue spiraling throughout the day and week, veering even further from my original intentions.

Instead, a much more helpful response would be to recognize these unhelpful thought patterns, approach my day with flexibility and adjust as needed, show myself understanding and compassion, and live in the reality that I didn’t sleep well / am not feeling well instead of fighting reality by trying to plow ahead.

Like areas of our lives such as time/task management, habit-building, and health routines, many of us may have experience reacting to food with similar unhelpful thought patterns.

How we think about food has a great impact on how we engage with food.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to identify 10 common thought patterns that may be perpetuating any disordered eating you are struggling with.

For each thought pattern, I will provide an example as well as a way to reframe/look at the situation differently. I’ll also provide some additional tips and notes to consider. I hope you find this post helpful and something you can bookmark/come back to repeatedly!