What Are The Challenges with Bulimia Recovery?

Getting bulimia treatment is only half the story, your greatest challenge and growth towards a bulimia free life will come from mastering everyday challenges, developing new habits & behaviors, emotional management and increasing your comfort zone to adopt new ways of life that weans you of bingeing and purging.

Your bulimia recovery will start with understanding the specific causes and risks that make you bulimic in the first place. Binge eating is something universal to all of us throughout our lives at some point, and it is appreciating this point that can liberate you from your struggle with food and an eating disorder, like bulimia.

It may help to view your recovery as a continuous process, which aims to understand and master the shift in all three vital areas of your life: your body, your mind and your emotions. Too many people attempt to fix one aspect without much long term success, because there’s a part of them with a blind spot which ignores other issues. Bulimia treatment will expose you to these pit falls, as well as your strengths so you can be better equipped to make your recovery a lasting one.

Generally, undetected stress, depression, poor health, anxiety, poor assertiveness skills, lack of self awareness and self care can hinder your bulimia treatment as well as your bulimia recovery. Many also fail to make that lasting change due to a lack of vision, clarity of what is expected of them, skills to follow through, and strong reasons to recover in the first place. This combined with the problem such as not having the right person or people to support your ongoing recovery work, looking for short cuts or quick weight related outcomes can all stop you from succeeding with your bulimia recovery.

In our experience here at Bulimia Hope, what helps your treatment and recovery are: knowledge and skills to motivate you, especially when the going gets tough; your ability to honor yourself and work on your body confidence and self-esteem; effectively manage co-existing conditions such as depression, anxiety or panic disorders; developing realistic and achievable step by step goals that you can review and build as you grow as a person; become more in touch with what you need, what you want, and what you can realistically get out of life; a sense of balance and centeredness in all aspects of your life. These are some of the major components to a successful bulimia recovery plan.

As you begin to master the art of reducing your bingeing and purging, you will also learn how to adopt coping mechanisms that take a positive look at lapses that appear in your recovery journey. Rather than view them as a disaster and give up too soon, you will find at Bulimia Hope we will guide you, give you the information and the tools to learn from these minor lapses and turn them around so you will never suffer from that same mistake again. That will help you regain the control you lost to Bulimia, and firmly hand over personal power back to you!

Learn about the different Bulimia Treatments

Bulimia and Body Image

• Do you want to make changes to your body?
• Do you want to make changes to your eating habits to insure you are getting the proper nutrition?
• Do you need to exercise more?

Almost everyone will answer yes to these questions. People who suffer with bulimia are no different than most other people in possessing a desire to improve themselves. The problem is that bulimics just need to adopt the right habits, which will enable them to feel happy about their body image. They need to learn where to go to find help that is right for them.

Our body is our home. It requires maintenance, repair and renewal to insure that it is fine-tuned and working properly to serve our physical, emotional and intellectual needs. It is impossible to move out of our bodies, so we need to maintain it properly. No one’s body is perfect. Even the most beautiful and physically attractive people have areas that they want to improve. The first lesson a bulimic must learn is that no one is perfect. The second lesson is to recognize that changes can be made to improve ourselves. Making changes to bulimia habits that are a cause of discontent is often difficult.

It is not an overnight process. It requires commitment, motivation, hard work and a recognition that it takes time to complete the change. The good news is that you can beat bulimia. Many have beaten bulimia. Large dramatic changes are possible and likely for someone that recognizes and celebrates each small change.

Bulimia and Self-esteem

Self-esteem cannot be put in a backpack or purse and be carried with us. It is a sense of worth that we have about ourselves. It is present in our minds and souls and can serve us well if it is healthy or cause significant pain if it needs maintenance or repair. Self-esteem is created through hard work and effort. It is a function of dedication, motivation and education. The more we learn about it, the better prepared we are to make the modifications necessary to insure that it is operating at peak efficiency. A strong image of oneself is vital to insure that each of us achieves our potential and are able to beat bulimia.

If your self-esteem is not satisfactory, it needs to be changed. The fact is that it can be changed and people that have adopted changes in their lifestyle have also noted that they feel more comfortable with themselves and their self-esteem has been improved substantially. They also find it much easier to beat bulimia.

The connection

Self-esteem and body image are inextricably linked. That means that they mutually support each other. A positive change in our view of our bodies will make a simultaneous positive change in our self worth and self-esteem. These changes also result in many additional benefits such as improved relationships, less stress, more efficient work, less troubling thoughts and a desire to stand up to bulimia rather than to seek shelter and hide from encounters.

The bulimia struggle and where to get help

The effects of bulimia make the struggle for change complicated. I said complicated, not impossible or even improbable. Education, instruction, coaching and mentoring are available to enable an individual to conquer the effects of bulimia. Abandoning bulimic behavior will result in a much more healthy and fulfilling life.

At Bulimiahope.com we offer real life solutions to enable a bulimia sufferer to initiate the change that is necessary to improve body image, develop positive self-esteem, strengthen relationships and adopt healthy eating habits and exercise program to insure that we obtain the most joy that life can offer.

Learn about the different Bulimia Treatments

Are You A Victim Of Bulimia And Want To Learn How To Cope With The Stresses Of Life?

Is bulimia stressful for you, if so, how do you cope? Do you want to experience being bulimia free? Do you want to abandon binging and purging?

Life’s little ups and downs can be a test for the toughest among us! If you are a victim of bulimia, it is more of a challenge. Bulimia and binging is often brought on by stress. However, thousands have conquered bulimia and experienced being bulimia free. You can be bulimia free too!

Stress is a fact of life for everyone. It applies to those with bulimia and those without. It prepares your mind and body for what ever you are about to encounter. Adrenalin produced in the right amount can help you perform better during interviews or exams, when speaking, in public, being creative, finishing a project or dealing with a difficult person. It helps to push you beyond your comfort zone and enables you to achieve greater success. You can be successful in conquering bulimia and experience being bulimia free if you learn to deal more effectively with stress.

Look Below to Assess Your Coping Style

Think about a recent stressful situation that triggered a binging episode due to bulimia.

This could be a situation that was difficult to handle or perhaps something that was troubling you. You may have felt distressed about something that happened to you or you had to deal with something that required a considerable amount of effort. It could be a situation that has pushed you to binging on numerous occasions in the past.

Once you have an event in mind, assess your coping style by completing the exercise below: This will lead you on a path to understand how to defeat bulimia abandon binging and purging.

While keeping your stressful event in mind, read the list of strategies below and score them 0 – 3, ranking them in terms of how much you used them in that situation:

0= NOT USED
1 = USED SOMEWHAT
2 = USED QUITE A BIT
3 = USED A GREAT DEAL

1. I did something that I didn’t think would work, but at least I was doing something.
2. I tried to get the person responsible to change his or her mind.
3. I slept more than usual or drank or smoked more.
4. I expressed anger to the person(s), who caused the problem.
5. I tried to make myself feel better by binging and later vomiting.
6. I took a big chance or did something very risky to solve a problem.
7. I stood my ground and fought for what I wanted.
8. I took it out on other people (partner, parent, friend etc).
9. I refused to believe that it had happened.
10. I had fantasies or wishes about how things might turn out.

Scoring:

• Now add up your scores for questions: 1, 2, 4, 6, 7
• Add up your scores for questions 3, 5, 8, 9 & 10

If your score is higher for the 1st group of questions, then you tend to favor “CONFRONTATIONAL COPING”.

Confrontational coping is typified by positive efforts to alter the situation and can involve some degree of aggression and risk-taking. This type of coping skill indicates that bulimia can be conquered, binging can be curtailed and bulimia healing can begin with a little less effort than coping using escape-avoidance.

If you scored higher on the 2nd group, then you are more likely to employ “ESCAPE-AVOIDANCE” as a coping mechanism.

Escape-avoidance is based on wishful thinking and efforts to escape or avoid a problem altogether.

Most bulimia sufferers tend to adopt an escape-avoidance coping style through binging and food abuse. Overcoming bulimia is generally not as easy as those that deal with matters confrontationally.

Learn about the different Bulimia Treatments