“After overeating, cleansing with an enema.” A personal story about an unhealthy relationship with food

business psychologist and transformational coach

“After having a baby, I started gaining weight. I went to the gym and started looking for information about nutrition for weight loss. I easily lost about 20 kg, made a cool body. Then I gave up exercising and calorie counting, and gradually gained about 10 kilograms of extra weight.

After the birth of my second child, I gained weight again. I remembered what I had done the first time: I started counting calories and began to train. But the weight did not hurry to leave me, so I increased the number of sports and started to eat less. It came to the point that I experienced extreme diets and fasting.

Now I realize that my whole life became a struggle with weight and food. Every day was evaluated as good – if I managed to hold out on a strict diet, and bad – if there was a breakdown, when I ate too much flour and sweets. The basic diet was reduced to a meager set of products – chicken breast, porridge, egg whites, low-fat cottage cheese, PP-sweets. I didn’t even eat fruit.

As I realized later, I was bulimic. Overeating was followed by cleansing with enema or working out with sports. I would exhaust myself doing cardio and exercise. At the same time, relations in the family only worsened, because she perceived the household as a hindrance to achieving the ideal body. Any peace of mind and happiness was out of the question.

The turning point was the study of psychology. When I began to dig deeper into the reasons for my obsession with the “ideal body” and began working with a psychotherapist. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and was prescribed pharmacotherapy.

Now, many years later, I have changed dramatically. I exercise and eat consciously, for my health. To be able to enjoy life and have lots of strength and energy. The time I spend eating and working out has decreased a lot compared to back then. It’s just part of life, like brushing my teeth.

Now I don’t divide food into good and bad, I don’t count calories. Moreover, I am an expert in the field of RPP and weight loss and help people to get out of the circle of diets and restrictions.

Physician’s Opinion

Doctor of nutritionist, gastroenterologist, candidate of medical sciences, clinical pharmacologist

“A healthy lifestyle – that’s why it’s an ‘image’, because it’s not a separate part of our day, it is the day. When a person fixates on the importance of “working off” calories or that nothing extra in the mouth – the behavior becomes a disorder. And here it is already necessary to involve therapy with a psychologist, as correctly and did the heroine”.

An anxiety disorder can lead to an eating disorder – the cause of both malnutrition and overeating. In either case, either disorder needs to be worked with in conjunction with a therapist.

As a physician, I recommend that anyone who wants to get in shape see a nutritionist and develop a system that will become the foundation of life. First, it will be a guarantee of safety, the diet will be balanced and comfortable. In addition, only a competent person can assess the needs of a certain organism. After all, we are all different, not everyone will suit buckwheat with kefir for dinner.

Opinion of a psychologist

Psychologist, certified psycholinguist and counselor with international certification ICF

“An anxiety disorder directly affects overeating because it causes a number of negative consequences: physical and emotional stress, poor sleep, and the production of a certain group of hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.”

When there is muscular and mental tension, the body needs to produce a lot of energy. And the easiest way to do that is to eat. The fact is that stress is a kind of certain fear of expectation of something negative, which takes a huge amount of energy. A person at this moment can not act normally: all his inner focus is directed to this state.

Instead, it is important to perform healthier activities, such as breathing exercises, changing activities, going for walks, shifting attention, working with body temperature, such as going to a bath.

In the case of the heroine, it is a matter of fully compensating for the emotions. That is, instead of doing healthier activities such as breathing exercises, changing activities, walking, shifting attention, dealing with body temperature, such as going to the bathhouse, she just ate.

It’s good that she’s already working through all of this with a therapist and has started to look into it herself. After all, overweight problems have many unconscious causes, and eating is just one of them.

And it must be said that anxiety disorder always keeps the body and psyche stressed, leading to insomnia. And when we don’t get enough sleep, we crave carbohydrates. This can also be seen in the example of the heroine, who abused sweets and flour. So it’s important to remember:

Overeating is one possible consequence of an anxiety disorder.