Eating Disorders Quotes

Your body is the piece of the universe you've been given; as long as you have a pulse, it presents you with an ongoing shower of immediate sensate experiences.

~ Geneen Roth

I long ago came to the understanding that the problems I once had with food were not merely about food. Eating was a way of trying to fill up the emptiness, to provide comfort. It was a substitute for love. I'm not referring to the love that comes from someone else. The love that was missing from my life was self-love. With age I've discovered a sense of worth that makes me less hungry. A piece of cake is just a piece of cake.

~ Valerie Harper

As the helpless vampire watched the transformation, it started screaming. It was still screaming when his rows of razor sharp teeth sank into its throat.

~ Alan Kinross

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories, sensations, and experience of the sexual abuse through starving, bingeing, purging, or exercising. They keep the focus on food, body image, weight, fat, calories, diets, miles, and other factors that women focus on during the course of an eating disorder. These disorders also have the ability to numb a woman from the overwhelming emotions resulting from the sexual abuse — especially loss of control, terror, and shame about her body. Women often have a combination of eating disorders in in their history. Some women are anorexic during one period of their life, bulimic during another, and compulsive eaters at yet another stage.

~ Karen A. Duncan

In yet another paradox, bulimia nervosa serves as both an expression of feelings and a defense against experiencing feelings, particularly shame, anger, loneliness, sadness, envy, and guilt. A person with bulimia nervosa fear, whether consciously or unconsciously, that painful feelings would be unbearable, even annihilating.

~ Sheila M. Reindl

I breathe in slowly. Food is life. I exhale, take another breath. Food is life. And that's the problem. When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out. But it's a lie.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.

~ Marya Hornbacher

It's the soul that's starving, not the body

~ Shoshana Kobrin

You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won't discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself. (p. 84)

~ Geneen Roth

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself -- that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control (p.82-83)

~ Geneen Roth

. . . hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else . . . . Wanting life to be different from what it is. That's also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It's as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first. (p. 44)

~ Geneen Roth

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do, it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can't have it. (p. 163)

~ Geneen Roth

...compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting -- of leaving ourselves -- hundreds of times a day.

~ Geneen Roth

It's never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around. When we start defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels. We don't want to EAT hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes. We want to come home to ourselves. (p. 174-5)

~ Geneen Roth

Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way -- and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it. (p. 53)

~ Geneen Roth

Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. (p. 80-81)

~ Geneen Roth

I don’t need anyone else to distract me from myself anymore, like I always thought I would.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

I drift into the armpits of strangers, tasting their manic salt, and sleep to forget everything.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I'm just scared I won't run as fast as I did my freshman year,' I admitted, choking back tears.Coach Woj looked at me for a moment, his eye gentle.'You don't have to.

~ Rachael Rose Steil

So many stories lived behind my eyes. I carried the people I hurt, the lies I told, my sick relationship with food, wherever I went. My mind was rarely grounded in the moment. My past was heavy and constant; my thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone. But when I was with the shelter dogs, I didn’t have anything to hide. Sometimes what existed behind my eyes fell away. I wasn’t bulimic or unlovable or fat or a liar. I was a part of life again. I was an observer, and to more than just the dark cyclical patterns of the mind—here was the strong, sturdy presence of another—the breath moving in and out of Angel’s chest, the beating of her heart, the force of life moving through her and through me.

~ Shannon Kopp

Killing yourself slowly is still killing yourself. Wanting to die is not the same as wanting to come home. Recovery is hard work. Not wanting to die is hard work.

~ Blythe Baird

To actually accept that you have an eating disorder or a mental health issue is actually a sign of great, great strength. It is not a sign of weakness at all.

~ Nigel Owens

We are all a collection of lost causes, stashed here so no one has to see just how wounded we are.

~ Meg Haston

I was always a good girl. I was a straight-A student, top of my class. I did as I was told. I was polite to my elders. I was good to my siblings. I went to church. It was very easy to hide how very bad I was becoming from my family, from everyone. Being good is the best way to be bad.

~ Roxane Gay

The SCID-D may be used to assess the nature and severity of dissociative symptoms in a variety of Axis I and II psychiatric disorders, including the Anxiety Disorders (such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] and Acute Stress Disorder), Affective Disorders, Psychotic Disorders, Eating Disorders, and Personality Disorders.The SCID-D was developed to reduce variability in clinical diagnostic procedures and was designed for use with psychiatric patients as well as with nonpatients (community subjects or research subjects in primary care).

~ Marlene Steinberg

No. Absolutely not. I forbid it. You'll have nightmares. She was my friend! You must allow me. Why are you so horrid? As soon as the angry words were out of my mouth, I knew I had gone too far. Matilda! Mother rose from her chair. You are forbidden to pseak to me in that tone! Apologize at once.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I am made of a thousand ghosts, only you can shoot me down.

~ Bella James

Sometimes, I worry I'm winning.

~ Kris Kidd

Your lowest moment and life can be your best if you survive it and learn from it

~ Brian Cuban

Find YOUR Balance.

~ Kayla Rose Kotecki

Let go of toxic control, in order to regain healthy control.

~ Kayla Rose Kotecki

Find Your Balance.

~ Kayla Kotecki

Somewhere I read that anorexia recovery is more painful for the sufferer than actively engaging in the eating disordered behaviours

~ Nancy Tucker

Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one's self, to attune to one's subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience. These woman's core sense of shame and their difficulty tolerating painful emotions had led them to avoid turning their attention inward to their internal sense of things. In recovering, they came to their senses and learned to trust their sensed experience, in particular their sense of enoughness.

~ Sheila M. Reindl

Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March..........I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world...I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness...Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.I am thawing.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy...

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I'm learning how to taste everything.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

You are the writer, producer, and director of your own mind programs.

~ Elizabeth Bohorquez

I would not encourage you to go through the sweat, blood, and tears of the recovery process only to reach some kind of mediocre state where you were just ‘managing’ the illness. It is possible to live without Ed.

~ Jenni Schaefer

One of the most dangerous myths surrounding eating disorders is that they are a life sentence.

~ Lynn Crilly