Trust your instincts, learn to love your life
Letter to the Editor
This week is Eating Disorders Awareness Week and hopefully there will be numerous awareness events, information and discussions about eating disorders, their devastating effects and ways to change the trend. Because this has been said, I would like to mention a personal revelation about eating disorders that I believe might help.
Eating disorders are not about all of the statistics that characterize those individuals, not about society that make them feel they need to look a certain way and not about the serious statistics of eating disorders taking over many young lives ... eating disorders are about trust. Most people immediately assume that I mean trust in others, but I don't. I mean TRUST IN YOURSELF. Different than self-esteem, trust in yourself allows you to choose the right decisions for yourself, to feel your own limitations and allow no one else to define things for you. That limit may be, in terms of running, which is a favorite of mine, maybe three miles a day or maybe 15 but that is up to you, no one can define what that healthy limit is but you.
Information about eating disorders will tell you that the person trapped may need to feel that they can only control food in their lives or that food makes them feel superior to others ... this is all an effect of not trusting themselves. They don't trust themselves to control their own lives, they feel others control their life, they do not trust the activities and situations they do our the fact that they really want to do them but because others tell them to participate or not to. They let others judge if that is right for them, and so on ...
Although it has taken me five years I have finally come to this understanding myself. I always tried to mold my feelings into what the doctors, friends and psychologists told me were the symptoms or the reasons for my anorexia. But what I have found is that diagnosing myself and realizing that I could trust myself to know what was really wrong was the key to my victory over anorexia.
I don't believe that I ever would have found this had one person in my life not continued to force me to trust myself, let me make mistakes and let me decide for myself, even when I didn't want to or didn't think I should. So ... the point of this piece .. if you want to help your loved one overcome this horrible disorder, don't help. Make them help themselves, trust them to do it, continue to force them to trust themselves, let them make mistakes but stand behind them in any of these situations because for some reason they have lost their feeling to have feeling. Hope is free and the destination may not be far from their own heart and yours.
For those caught in the trap of an eating disorder try it for the next minute, try it the next meal, try it every time you do something — try trusting yourself. Even if you begin by trusting yourself in unhealthy ways, I started that way also, but I kept going and now I trust myself in the most healthy ways and I do healthy things. Maybe society doesn't always see them as the best way but I know they are right for me. I know where the limits are. I didn't know this before because I didn't feel myself. Never again though, because I have something now that I will never let go. I trust myself and I love my life!
JoAnna Deeter
Senior, Off-campus
February 15, 2000
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All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, February 17, 2000
