Don’t…

• Body check

  Make a decision to catch yourself and stop. Body checking keeps the system of feeling fat alive, even if at times it is reassuring. Replace body checking with a phrase that you choose to use, one that is reassuring and calming.

• Look in mirrors

  Simply cover them or allow yourself only a quick glance and then out the door. It will change your life!

• Try on clothes to see if they fit

  If they were your “thin clothes,” do not create drama by trying them on. Take responsibility for making yourself calm or afraid by engaging in behaviors that feed negative judgmental thoughts about your self. Once you are safe to live with (inside yourself), you reach your dreams…

• Go on Facebook

  If it’s just going to trigger you with photos, or any platform that triggers comparison and judgment with photos. Consider replacing with a search for good music or a new poem, or giving attention to an animal.

• Talk about your weight, diet, or dieting or listen to others talk about it

  Take charge of conversations and direct them toward more interesting subjects.

  If you are in a romantic relationship, any negative body image talk on your part is a direct turn-off. Partners are attracted to your core self, and confidence, as well as vulnerability. Ongoing fretting about body image eventually kills most relationships!

• Plan the day ahead in terms of what you want to restrict your diet to

  Counting calories in meals that are still to come – don’t calculate the size of future meals at all. Stay in the moment. When your mind starts thinking ahead to what you might have later and starts worrying about what to eat now according to what you will eat later – YOU ARE IN TROUBLE. Climb back into present time and eat the amount that your team assigned or that you know will truly satisfy you.

  If you are healing from a restrictive disorder, do not think you will make it up later if you skimp at a meal or snack. You most likely wont if that’s been true in your past. Eat now for now.

• Get on the Internet and look at anything related to nutrition, calories, or health

  And never visit the eating disorder sites. You are learning to trust your team, to trust your body’s physiology and your own psychology. This trust is built over time. Every time you seek information outside of your team resources, by looking up things online, weighing yourself, or asking someone else how you look, the building blocks of self trust topple over.

• Get down on yourself when you slip in any way

  Get compassionate, keep a sense of humor! You will make it.

Do…

• Shop ahead for the new foods you will need for next few days

  Follow the full amounts suggested if you are restricting and on a meal plan to boost nutrients and calories – any less can trigger control loss.

• Believe in yourself

  Your body is something you can trust and re-teach to feel normal hunger and normal fullness and enjoy food again.

• Follow the path within Intuitive Eating or Breaking Free from Emotional Eating

  …if you have a history of dieting and are overeating as a result of a lack of self- trust. It is the first in many discovery stages of reclaiming self- trust.

• Know that most people recovering from restrictive disorders are terrified deep down of being an “overeater”

  …and all that goes with this. The fact is restricting drives over eating, and besides, over eating disorders are also totally treatable.!

• Catch irrational and self-critical thoughts about food and weight.

  Realize how you scare yourself with your own thoughts. We create our own anxiety!

• Find 5-10 things you really enjoy but don’t often allow yourself to do.

  Every day while giving up purging, you will have more unstructured time. So people find they have to plan interesting, adventurous activities – from doing art projects, to visiting different thrift stores, to taking their homework or studies to a different place to learn, to shutting off the Internet and Facebook and instead laying in the grass and looking at the sky.

• Delete all apps from your phone and computer that calculate calories or drive eating disorder thoughts and behaviors.

  Read great books: Eating in the Light of the Moon by Anita Johnston, Eight Keys to Recovery by Carolyn Costin & Gwen Grabb, Desperately Seeking Self by V. Fudor, Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore, Breaking Free from Emotional Eating by Geneen Roth (and Women, Food and God)… and Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch
  — Or read a good novels

  — Or other excellent psychological and spiritual authors: Echart Tolle, Byron Katie, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Pema Chodron, etc.

• Put on wonderful music, keep yourself inspired, find a spiritual path or philosophy you wish to explore, re-arrange your room or part of your house to reflect more beauty or fun, find all sorts of humor wherever you can…