ANAD Western Maryland Eating Disorder Support Group--
"We Chose To Live" is an open support group for those struggling with eating disorders and for there friends and family. The group is based off of the experiences of those whom have been through treatment and understand that there is great strength in numbers. Patrick, the group leader went to treatment at Canopy Cove, and there are others who have been to centers such as Remuda Ranch, Renfrew, and Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Join us in the fight for recovery and to experience the joy of life free from eating disorders. We did not choose this fate, but you can choose to recover. Recovery is a process, but it is very possible.
Together we can recover life.
Support Group
Every Tuesday 7pm-9m
Located at Transitions LLC
20 N Broadway St
Hagerstown, MD
Contact: Patrick patrickb@ichosetolive.com
For Love, Life, and Liberty from ED!
Choose to Live!
2 comments:
My daughter has Body Dysmorphic Disorder, which started with a serious bout of anorexia when she was 14 and a freshman in high school.
She had started a new high school, but was extremely shy and wasn't making many friends. She was also slightly overweight - she was 5'3" and weighed about 135 pounds - and had been slightly pudgy since the 4th grade and extremely self-conscious about it since the 6th grade. When she started high school, she joined the soccer team and went straight to practice, where the girls had a three-hour intense workout, then came home saying she had worked too hard to be hungry. She dropped 10 pounds and was really happy, but by mid-October, I realized she wasn't eating.
We went to her pediatrician, but I wasn't able to get an appointment with the eating disorders specialist at the university hospital in our town - a resource we were really fortunate to have -- until mid-December.
My daughter almost starved herself to death before that appointment. That year, she spent two weeks in the hospital over Christmas and New Year's, during which the doctor tried feeding her through a nose tube, a treatment that was ultimately unsuccessful because she compulsively exercised in bed. When they released her, I feared we were taking her home to die.
We had another very tough month before she decided to start eating. I don't say, 'recover' because, quite honestly, she still hasn't completely recovered, and I don't know if she ever will.
She later told me that she decided to start eating because she didn't want to die, and she understood that this was a possibility. I had decided against sending her to an inpatient facility because of the staggering expense combined with my feeling that the competitive mindset of anorexics would only be reinforced in a facility filled with other anorexics.
What that decision did - which I think was positive - was make her realize recovery was up to her. However, I also believe it resulted in anger on her part that I was not willing to spend everything our family had to buy treatment that might save her, whatever my judgment about its efficacy, and I wonder if this is an issue with other eating disorders patients early on - there is a side of them that WANTS to see how much their parents will do to save them, and by the time they realize their parents will do anything, they're caught in the downward trap of anorexia and they can't do what my daughter did, compartmentalize in a way I don't understand but an ability which I think explains a lot about eating disorders, and start eating.
My daughter didn't like herself, and her physical self was the only self she accepted as valid. She also desperately needed to know that we valued her, perhaps enough to spend everything we had to save her. While my decision NOT to do that - based on my serious questions about the type of therapy available, the potentially harmful and reinforcing influence of the other patients as well as the cost -- sparked her recovery, I also think it has resulted in a lasting resentment.
Fast forward five years -- my daughter is now a healthy junior in college, but still has serious eating issues. Her recovery from anorexia was effected by late-night binging. She started binge-eating (not as badly as some bingers I've read about in my quest to learn the various and depressing pathologies of eating disoders) in the fifth month after her anorexic episode, and her weight balooned from 90 pounds - her low - to somewhere between 170 or 180 pounds (I never knew, so that if she asked, I could honestly say I didn't know) by the end of that summer.
She now weighs 165, which I think she knows. But she doesn't have a realistic body image -- she ordered size 0 jeans on eBay this year. She also lives on sugar and starch. She had never like vegetables and fruits, but forced herself to eat lettuce and apples (in bits and pieces) during her anorexic episode. Now, I think there's a part of her that rejects them along with the anorexia, as that episode cost her one of her closest high school friends and eliminated any sort of social life for more than a year (her behavior was really aberrant for months; she dressed oddly in sweats and an ugly wool hat, spoke to no one, put green masque on her face and went out without having washed all of it off, reacted furiously if I said anything about the flecks of masque on her face, and - as she gained weight - wore the sort of baggy stretchy clothes a much older woman would wear).
My daughter has a truly beautiful face, and has dressed "normally" for teenaged girls since her senior year. In fact, there's been a reversal - now, she wants to flaunt her body, and does so inappropriately (in my motherly opinion) by wearing dresses and tops that are too short and too tight and what my younger daughter privately calls "plumber pants." When she's home and goes out dressed inappropriately, I'm absolutely in pain, and I'm also afraid to say anything.
So that's the story, and here are my comments: It is really, really hard to put together a treatment team for an eating disordered patient. My daughter spent her high school years going to the eating disorders specialist, who was terrific and thankfully an internist, as my medical insurance would not pay for psychiatric care of any sort. We paid out of pocket for a counselor and a nutritionist. She still sees the specialist (a new one - her original doctor moved to an inpatient facility), but not the counselor or nutritionist. She agrees that she has BDD, not anorexia, and she takes Lexapro and buspar to help avoid a recurrence of anorexia.
But I still feel like we're navigating in a wilderness to find the right treatment - cognitive and drug therapy - that will address the BDD and enable her to live a normal life.
Rebecca-- Thanks for the message and I am so sorry to hear of your daughters struggle. Eating disorders and BDD can be so complicated and destructive. However, there is hope, and recovery is more than possible. Being a strong male athlete, I thought I was lost when I was dianoised with anorexia nervosa and given one year to live. However, I chose to fight back, and my life has been changed forever. Never give up hope or on your daughter. Also, know that when she acts out, this is not her. She is more or less acting off of her illness. I was a different person when I was stuck in the grips of my ED, but I made it out with the love and support of my friends and family. We are never alone in this. Stay strong in all you do, and feel free to write anytime. Life is a journey of learning and growing. Live your life and learn from adversity. Many of the greatest success stories are only because they struggled first. Fail forward and keep fighting.
Believe,
Patrick
patrickb@ichosetolive.com
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