Much Needed Help for ME!!!

I've signed up for a retreat weekend at an eating disorder center as I've been struggling with Anorexia Nervosa since I was 19. I've been hospitalized countless times but just to get my weight back up to a healthy weight. I never had to deal with the emotional baggage that came with it. People think that eating disorders are all in our heads but that are only people who don't understand them. People with eating disorders use it as a way to cope.

"Anorexia is not about weight or food

Believe it or not, anorexia isn't really about food and weight—at least not at its core. Eating disorders are much more complicated than that. The food and weight-related issues are symptoms of something deeper: things like depression, loneliness, insecurity, pressure to be perfect, or feeling out of control. Things that no amount of dieting or weight loss can cure.

©Helpguide.org. All rights reserved. This site is for information only and NOT a substitute for professional diagnosis and treatment."

I first developed Anorexia when I moved away from home to go to college. I would walk the bus route first but after i got to know the city better I found shorter routes to school but I carried my most heaviest books so that I had more weight in my backpack and was sweating by the time I got back to my apartment as I knew that would help me lose weight. Then I cut back on my food intake and exercised more then I joined a hip hop dance class. During one class,after I had lost about 35 pounds, I fainted. This was some where near the beginning of November. I woke up in the hospital with an I.V tube connected to me 2 days later. There was a doctor there to explain to me what had happened and a dietitian to go over meal plans while I was in the hospital. It took me 6 weeks to get back up to a healthy weight. I was 125 pounds when I started losing weight. I had to be 110 pounds before they would let me leave the hospital. I got weighed every Tuesday and Thursday back on from the scale which is called a BLIND WEIGHT.

Signs of Anorexia

• Dramatic weight loss – Rapid, drastic weight loss with no medical cause.
• Feeling fat, despite being underweight – You may feel overweight in general or just “too fat” in certain places such as the stomach, hips, or thighs.
• Fixation on body image – Obsessed with weight, body shape, or clothing size. Frequent weigh-ins and concern over tiny fluctuations in weight.
• Harshly critical of appearance – Spending a lot of time in front of the mirror checking for flaws. There’s always something to criticize. You’re never thin enough.
• Denial that you’re too thin – You may deny that your low body weight is a problem, while trying to conceal it (drinking a lot of water before being weighed, wearing baggy or oversized clothes).

©Helpguide.org. All rights reserved. This site is for information only and NOT a substitute for professional diagnosis and treatment.

I've been struggling with it again recently. I have been seeing a Psychiatric Nurse for almost a year now and I've been seeing a dietitian for over a year. I have had a Psychiatrist since I moved to Saskatchewan with my son when I was 26 and he was 3. Wow, how time flies! He's so almost grown now! I don't think teenagers these days realize how serious eating disorders are but I'm speaking from experience. I've been fighting with mine for over a decade and I don't want my son to end up with one so I'm going for help to break the cycle. I'm going for help before he develops one. This is NOT something to mess with, this is LIFE AND DEATH and I'M CHOOSING LIFE!

I hope whoever decides to read this gets the message that eating disorders kill. I'm just getting out before mine kills me. Life is worth living and I want to be there to see my son graduate from High School. I want to see him get married and I want to be able to hold my grandkids and watch them grow. SO I'm CHOOSING TO LIVE AND THAT MEANS I HAVE TO CHANGE MY EATING HABITS AND MY THINKING. It all starts in 4 weeks.

Bullying - Pink Shirt Day - February 29, 2012

I thought because Pink Shirt Day is February 29th in Canada for Bullying I'd write about bullying as I was bullied as a child.  My name is uncommon where I grew up and that is what I was bullied about.

Bullying - What Can Be Done?

 Bullying hasn't changed much over the years.  The only change that I have observed these days is that it has gained another avenue; the computer.  Bullies use name-calling, hitting, ignoring, and writing nasty things as ways of bullying.  This leaves the person being bullied feeling uncomfortable or scared and sometimes even sad.  People think that bullying only makes us stronger but it hurts us, it beats down our self esteem.  Bullying is repeated, intentional, aggressive behavior toward someone more vulnerable than the bully.

I moved four times while going to school, twice in the same grade.  I was halfway through grade three when we moved from our farm to the city so I went from a class of 15 to a class of 36.  I was the subject of bullying as I was the NEW kid and I also had very dry skin.  The kids made up this game of "I had fleas".  It was a game of tag where I was always "it" and whoever I touched got "my fleas" and was "it" with me until everyone had them.  I didn't feel like I was getting bullied until our teacher asked the class who was playing the game and asked the class to stop playing.

From that day forward, I played alone on the playground and was made fun of all the time until some of the girls started to ask me what I liked and found out I wasn't any different than them.  I just grew up in a different province.  I wanted to be a fairy princess when I grew up, I listened to Celine Dion and I LOVED playing with marbles.  I had two younger sisters who bugged the *ell out of me and another sibling on the way.  I was hoping for a boy so when he was older, we could beat the other two up.  They were quite a bit younger and SMALLER than me and with a boy, he'd grow to be bigger than the girls.

We moved again six weeks after my brother was born and six weeks before the school year was over.  Back to my home province and hometown.  I was happy, my old friends, my old school and my old classmates is what I wanted after the year I had in grade three.  I had passed grade three but my mom and dad had decided to keep me in grade three again because when we got home, which had a shorter school year, I was behind.  They only had two weeks of school left.  I had only started to learn how to do handwriting when we had left.  Everyone back home had been handwriting for two months already so I was behind in that aspect but that was the only way I was behind and the only reason I was kept behind.

The only way I was ever bullied was verbally (name-calling, teasing).  The only reason I was bullied was because of my name.  It's different and nobody in the town I grew up in had it.  Its that unique to that area.  I began to hate my name because the kids were making fun of me for it.  I lost count of how many times I asked my parents to change it as a child.

When I was fifteen, I moved in with my father and grandmother.  I had known at a very young age that my dad was my step-dad but he raised me and he is my dad and always will be because I only spent four years with my father and grandmother.  I was bullied at the school there too, but it wasn't because of my name.  It was because I liked to write in my spare time.  One recess, I had left one of my stories out on my desk  while I went to the washroom before class started and one of my classmates had got hold of it and when I got back to the classroom, he started to make fun of me for it.  I was so embarrassed, I left the classroom in tears and went and hid in one of the two girls washrooms in the school.  One of the girls from the classroom, who just happened to be really nice came to check on me minutes later and we sat down on a bench there because it was the change rooms up my the gym.  She talked to me and calmed me down and told me to ignore him.  He was just jealous because he couldn't write as well as that without a topic to write about.  She made me feel better and I never let him get to me again when it came to my writing.  I always got better marks than him in Language Arts all through High School because not only did I do my assignments but I wrote stories all the time so my writing was always better than his.

I was also bullied at home by my grandmother.  I look a lot like my mom and my grandmother didn't like my mom for some reason or another.  She never told me why.  While my mom was dating my father my grandmother would call my mom "purple tooth" (my grandmother told me this).  My mom had a dead front tooth back then and that is why it was purple, it is now a false tooth and has been a false tooth as long as I can remember.  Whenever my grandmother was mad at me she would call my "old mare" (just like your mother), "Cow" and she would also ignore me when I talked to her.  She wouldn't talk to me either and she would turn her back when she was walking by me.  She wouldn't look at me at all.  This hurt more than getting bullied at school because it was coming from family.  I never let her see that it got to me though.  The first time I did because I didn't know what to expect but after that I never did.

Some Ways To Combat Verbal Bullying Are:

• Ignore the bully and walk away.
• Hold the anger.
• Don't get physical
• Practice confidence.
• Take charge of your life.
• Talk about it.
• And find your (TRUE) friends.

I hope this has been informative and has shown you that bullying really does hurt.  It hurt me while growing up.  Am I a better person for it?  I don't know but I do know one thing, when I see and hear about other kids or my own child being bullied I jump at the chance to stop it because I know of the impact it will have on their lives later in life.

Encouragement!

Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 12:48 PM
subject
BCWI Response

Dear Daria,
Thanks so much for the message at Build Creative Writing Ideas! I understand how hard it must be to write about something so painful. Personally, I've had luck putting parts of my books on my website and I've even made a few sales as a result.
But it doesn't seem like your sales are the issue here. It's a matter of getting this dang thing out of your system and writing the first draft as fast as possible so that you don't even have time to let your fear catch up. I think if putting up this first chapter and sharing it with your friends and readers will help you to feel more comfortable telling the rest of your story, you should do it!
Good luck and let me know how everything goes.
Sincerely,
Bryan
--
Creatively stuck? ::: http://www.build-creative-writing-ideas.com
Like Nerdy Superheroes? ::: http://www.bryancohen.com




I've never had so many encouraging words from someone other than family or friends before.  Receiving this email from Bryan made my day and has me back writing my book like there is no tomorrow.  I write from 9-10am while I'm at my light therapy, take a short walk home.  Write from 11am-12pm, have my lunch, go outside on my step for a smoke and a lesuirely read from my Kobo.  Come inside, check my email, go onto Byran Cohen's website and read his latest post, and then wait for my son to get home from school.

Once my son is home, we do his homework if he has any, he goes down in the basement for a half hour to practice his clarient, while I prepare supper unless its steak or pork chops then it's up to my fiancee when he gets home from work.  At 7, we have supper, and after that my son has free time until 8:30.  Once he is in bed I write for another hour some nights if I feel the creative juices flowing but most days I just get two hours of writing time in.

A housewife's work is never done, we have laundry and rooms in the house to clean before we go to bed every night.  Before school every morning we have lunches to pack and agendas to sign and make sure they have everything in their backpacks they need for school.