WHAT NOT TO SAY TO A STARVING PERSON:

When I began this journey, I made the decision to have a public Facebook page hoping that it might help another sufferer. However, I find that it also keeps me accountable to the goal of Eating Freely.

This is the short list of my original names for the page:
Fat and Starving
Desiring the Small Footprint
Stickperson
Invisible

All very negative and restricting!

Then came the RULES:

Measuring/weighing/counting food
Restricting portion size
Bad food or good food
Weighing or measuring myself
Exercising except for pleasure
Reducing/stopping medications

The Vow:
Just once in my life, I want to be a stick person.

Beware of making a vow even or especially to oneself. My descent into end stage anorexic behavior began with this vow. Already living in a body riddled by auto-immune disease, I became obsessed with the desire to be stick thin. I was willing to trade my health and, as it turned out, almost my life to realize this ambition.

Eating Disorders are spread out over a continuum; from the person who eats nothing in order to exercise control over her body to the person who eats everything in order to feed an unquenchable hunger.

Thoughts and feelings feed the behaviors behind the eating or lack of eating. Fostering love and self-acceptance of ourselves and our bodies as we are in the moment is the only path bath back from the abyss we face when living with disordered eating.

I love myself when I....
Eat a variety of foods often
Choose foods I feel like eating
Replace "I should eat" w "I am hungry"
Accept my body in the moment
Express love and gratitude to my body
Pamper myself w massage, nails, etc.