Week 3 Eating Disorder Recovery Update (Wendy)

Week 3 goals/events were:

• Meet with the dietitian

• Increase meal intake

• Work on control issues

• Tie-Dye day

• Baking - Garden Loaf

• Work on ACT worksheets

How it went

We continued doing yoga and meditation in the mornings. My favourite meditation this week was GUIDED MEDITATION The Wishing Well of Abundance In yoga we have an opportunity to set our intentions for the day. I am not sure about Sam but doing this helps me to focus better throughout the day.

I found another series of videos made by a certified ED coach from Estonia: Follow the Intuition - YouTube. We watch these ones during some of our meals and snacks. It is nice to have bits and pieces of information all about recovery by yet another person who has been there and is now helping others.

Dietitian/Meal Increases

We started off the week with a Monday morning meeting. Friends of ours recommended to us a registered dietitian that lives in our area. The 3 of us reviewed our meal plan and we discussed Sam’s fear food list. Sam keeps a couple of journals. Her personal one and an open journal that can be shared with her caregivers. She does this because of her selective mutism, and I must say that it helps. Sam had her fear foods listed in her journal and broken down into 3 categories. Fears related to physical health, the nutritional value of foods, and ED/weight gain. Working off our current meal plan, a few tweaks were made such as changing some ingredients and a few add-ins. We are not working on fear foods at the moment but we will need to do that.

We found a few days the changes were very hard. Especially when we were dealing with 2 changes in the same day. Some issues could be attributed to the ED voice causing higher anxiety, and some were just due to difficulty handling the increase and the extreme full feeling. The good news is that there was no regression and only one meal where the increase was not accomplished. We look forward to the next meeting with our dietitian.

Control

First we worked on educating ourselves by watching many videos on the subject.

Parts and bits, feelings vs emotions, negative thoughts, noisy brain, mindfulness, let go of control, take control, mindset, rewiring, YIKES!

This is a big area to tackle. So much info, and many different resources on the web. A lot of sites with courses, self help info, and books for sale, all believing they have the key, the answers, the solution. All these sites basically sum it up the same way.

This is my take. It is very important to recognize unhealthy thoughts, challenge them, and change them. Your thoughts can be incorrect, hold you back, and cause you unwellness both physically and mentally. We are in control of our thoughts and our thoughts do not control us. One must take control of unhealthy thoughts, learn from them and reform them. Start your day with a positive intent or thought. Focus on what is good and going right. The bad stuff, recognize it, deal with it, and let it go.

Along with Sam's therapist, we worked on self esteem. Sam has always experienced low self esteem. She feels like she lets others down, that she is ugly, not good enough. The goal is to inspire Sam to look inward and recognize her good qualities, pay attention to negative self thoughts and rewrite them.

Sam and I talked about her good qualities and I put an affirmation message together for her and posted it in a few places around the house. I challenged her to read it every time she saw it. Then her therapist challenged her to expand on her good qualities and now she has a wall filled with affirmations over her workstation. So very nice to see and all so true. So now it is up to Sam to draw on these qualities, see them, read them and believe them. This is a hard and ongoing process, chipping away one negative thought at a time.

Tie-Dye day

So much learning, so much hard work everyday, it was nice to take a break and have some fun! I picked up a tie-dye kit from Wal-Mart that indicated it would do 20 garments. We picked some colours, got our shirts ready, and moved everything outside. We used up all of our colours, so we went back into our supplies and pulled out another. After finishing the dying process we bagged everything and let the garments sit for a day. The next day, a beautiful sunny day, we untied our garments and unveiled our creations. I love the colours and the patterns, each one unique which gave us more inspiring ideas for next time we get the chance to Tie-Dye.

Baking

We set aside an afternoon to do some baking. Sam has always been a great creative baker. She has made many personalized treats for her co-workers and both me and my husband.

One of the coolest creations Sam made was a chocolate beer cake. Inspired by a gift from a friend of a chocolate malt beer and her dad’s enjoyment of beer, she altered a recipe to make this creation for his birthday. And boy, did it taste good!

On today’s agenda was garden loaf or I should say garden muffins. She was the master chief and I was her slave. My main job was shredding the vegetables. We did have a few laughs, enjoyed our time in the kitchen and now have some muffins for morning snacks.

ACT worksheets

Last on our list of goals for the week was to work on ACT worksheets. Act stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I found these worksheets on The Happiness Trap website. We did the first 4 worksheets, which gets you to take a look at your values and how they are incorporated in your everyday life. They also direct you to look at the issues that are in the way of living those values. My issue is lack of focus. I jump from thing to thing trying to handle too many things at the same time and accomplishing very little. I need to clean up, refine and focus. Sam's obstruction is her social anxiety and mutism. Yikes! Tackling that one with her has been on my to do list for awhile. It looks like a great workbook and I look forward to working through it with Sam.

Other Activities

There are 3 places local to us where we love to shop. Picking up our must have staples for the week, Debra's chocolates, bread from Holton Bakery and wild blue barriers from Country Crops. Besides the shopping and cooking, both Sam and I like to go outside for some fresh air. The weather has been amazing as we enjoy walking around the yard, neighbor's field and in the bush.

Week 4 Goals/events

• Meeting with the Dietitian

• Sam - visit with her friend Bianca

• Meeting regarding autism

• Weigh-in

• Work on control

• Work on ACT worksheets

• Work on self esteem