#disorders

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

#eating #eating-disorders #health #change

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#body-image #culture #dieting #eating-disorders #society

If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#body-image #culture #eating-disorders #thinness #weight

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

#eating #eating-disorders #health #change

Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors. ↗

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

#eating-disorder #eating-disorders #mirrors #poetry #self-esteem

Well, unless you've suffered from panic attacks and social anxiety disorders, which is what I was diagnosed as having, it's hard to explain it. But you go on stage knowing you're actually physically going to die. You will keel over and die. ↗

— Donny Osmond

#anxiety #attacks #diagnosed #die #disorders

Hate is able to provoke disorders, to ruin a social organization, to cast a country into a period of bloody revolutions; but it produces nothing. ↗

— Georges Sorel

#bloody #cast #country #disorders #hate

A quick glance at the American left reveals a movement in the midst of a nervous breakdown, displaying behavior that goes beyond inconsistency into the realm of bipolar moods and multiple personality disorders. ↗

— Michael Medved

#behavior #beyond #bipolar #breakdown #disorders

The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones. ↗

— Jon Ronson

#mental-health #psychology #mental-health

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#body-image #diet-industry #eating-disorders #self-esteem #weight