Eating Disorders - If you’ve never felt really positive about who you are during your whole life,
it’s a tall order to fill when you first start to want to feel good. Try right now to recall some memories of when you felt good. Maybe you remember feeling good when you ate ice cream with Dad. Or maybe you felt good from a lover’s touch or from a hot bath. Maybe you felt good after reaching a goal that’s taken months or years to accomplish. Maybe engaging in your favorite hobby or competing in a sport makes you feel good.

Eating Disorders Tip - Ask yourself the following questions:
“What feels good to me? What qualities would be part of an experience of feeling good?”
One woman started this exercise by listing the things she knew did not make her feel good—things she no longer wanted in her life. Her list looked like the following:

“What I Do Not Want” List

(1) No morbid thoughts about my body
(2) No more exhaustion
(3) No more stuffing myself until I sleep
(4) No more thoughts of hating myself or my mate
(5) No more abusing my body with purging or restricting
(6) No more stuffing my anger and not talking about it
(7) No more second-guessing or doubting myself in my thoughts or feelings
(8) No more isolating myself due to fear or grief
(9) No more reacting to guilt arising from habit, based on faulty beliefs—not true reality

These points of what she did not want in her life anymore were prompted by the 43 Symptoms to Heed in Chapter 2 of my book Not Your Mother's Diet. By practicing the following exercise, you can turn your “don’t wants” into affirmative keys that unlock knowing what you do want in your life.

Eating Disorders Tip - “What I Do Want” List

(1) “No more morbid thoughts about my body” transforms into “I choose to accept my body. I       choose to feel complete and at peace inside my body.”
(2) “No more exhaustion” transforms into “I choose to feel relaxed in my body. I choose to feel       balanced in all my activities.”
(3) “No more stuffing myself until I sleep” transforms into “I choose actions to make me feel       better about myself.”

Joyce never took the time to transform the statements into positive affirmations by completing the “do want list” part of the exercise. Her reaction at this point was to just quit: quit doing the affirmation exercises and quit striving for weight balance.

When old feelings of being overwhelmed, overwrought, inadequate, and guilt kick in, old behavioral coping mechanisms and habits automatically take over, unless you choose to act in a take-charge kind of way to change that right now.

Eating Disorders Tip - Start your own list. Change all the reasons why you can’t do it and want to quit into transformational statements of affirmation, such as, “I am choosing
to be open, prepared, and purposeful in my quest for weight balance success.” Choose to be open and on target with your actions—keep reading! You can do it by first taking a series of deep belly breaths. Belly breaths help center and relax you.

Eating Disorders Tip- Like a book, when we stay open, we have the opportunity to gain more tools, knowledge, and wisdom. If we’re closed, there is no way to gain these gifts of greater understanding from the universe or our Higher Power. This is a most important key. Stay open, keep clicking on this website or go to the link below to buy my book, Not Your Mother's Diet on Amazon.com.