That may sound like a stupid question, but for some of us it’s gotten a little distorted.

“Hunger is a physical cue that you need energy,” says Dawn Jackson Blatner, RD.

It’s important to be mindfull about what you’re eating and why you’re eating. In the recovery process it can definitely help to be able to look at your hunger as something not born out of just desire, but rather out of necessity for the body to be able to run properly.  For me, a big part of my eating disorder was based around feelings of guilt and this desire to curb my own desires, but when I look at eating as a basic function of the body in order to run..ie, energy, it makes it a little easier to justify to my mind why I need to do it.

On that note, below are six stages of hunger that help identify when to eat and when not to…

Learn to identify your spot on the hunger scale:

Do you really know what hunger feels like? Before you can rein it in, you must learn to recognize the physical cues that signal a true need for nourishment. Prior to eating, use our hunger scale below to help figure out your true food needs:

Starving
An uncomfortable, empty feeling that may be accompanied by light-headedness or jitteriness caused by low blood sugar levels from lack of food. Binge risk: high.

Hungry
Your next meal is on your mind. If you don’t eat within the hour, you enter dangerous “starving” territory.

Moderately hungry
Your stomach may be growling, and you’re planning how you’ll put an end to that nagging feeling. This is optimal eating time.

Satisfied
You’re satiated, not full but not hungry either. You’re relaxed and comfortable and can wait to nosh.

Full
If you’re still eating, it’s more out of momentum than actual hunger. Your belly feels slightly bloated, and the food does not taste as good as it did in the first few bites.

Stuffed
You feel uncomfortable and might even have mild heartburn from your stomach acids creeping back up into your esophagus.

I took a dangerous trip back to memory lane by visiting a past ed journal that  I kept on livejournal. Usually if I revisit, I keep it contained to my personal journal, where only my past thoughts are open to torture me; however today I took a perilous step into my “friends” page and was assulted by post after post of the pro-ana propaganda and thinspiration pictures that I had once  used to fuel my fire so many times while in the throwes of my eating disorder.

This time I at least had the common sense to walk away when I started feeling those pangs. I will admit that I was tempted to look, to see the hudreds of pictures of girls who are so much thinner than I am, to wonder how they do it, and feel those all too familiar feelings of competitive drive to prove to myself and the world that I too, could starve myself back to perfection.

But I DIDN’T look, because I know that none of that is real. None of it. All of that competion to be the thinnest, is really about trying to prove that I have control and all the starving and purging is just a clever disguise for all of the  anger I have deep inside me that I don’t know what to do with. Some people take their anger out on others, I take it out on myself.

I know there’s a better way, and it comes down to being honest with myself, sometimes that’s just harder to do than others.

When it’s all said and done though, even after all the crap I put myself through to get down to the perfect weight, I didn’t feel any better about myself than I did before I lost it. I’m at a better, happier, and healthier place than I’ve ever been right now, and those damn pictures are not going to suck me in this time.

Apparently in Brazil this is what a fat woman looks like… 

Disgusting right? Wrong…but poor Karolina Kurkova is being blasted by the media for having the nerve to show up to a fashion show looking so “disappointing”. The audience was “shocked” and “distubed”  by the cellulite on her ass, and the supposed back fat hanging from the sides of her bikini.

See this article for all the grusome details…

http://www.theimproper.com/Template_Article.aspx?IssueId=4&ArticleId=1781

I don’t know about you, but if this is a disgrace to the perfect ideal someone else needs to take charge. The same people who produce a generation of models like  Ana Carolina Reston,

who is mentioned in the article as a Brazillian representation of perfection and also just happened to die of starvation, have the audacity to critisize the beautiful Karolina as if she’s committed a sin by indulging in a meal from time to time.

Whats sick about this is that she is still most certainly below the healthy weight range for her height, and is thinner than 90% of the population, yet is apparently too fat to represent the ideal. I wouldn’t be surprised if right this moment she is deciding which starvation diet to go with in order to get back to an acceptable weight for the media. 

Not to mention how this story must be circulating around pro ana groups as evidence that a meal will most certailnly destroy their dreams of perfection.  If you’re reading this Karolina, call me and we’ll go out and get  a burger together and tell the world to *uck off.

Yesterday I was recruited to go wedding dress shopping with a gal who works across the hall from my office, and I actually had a pretty great time ohhing and awwing over her and taking a ridiclious amount of pictures of her in each and every dress.  The thing that caught my attention about the whole ordeal however, was how size oriented  the event was from the moment we stepped in the door until we packed up and left.

They ask – What size pants do you wear? What’s your bra size? Shoe size?

They then proceed to inform us that wedding dresses run a size larger, and tried ( unconvincingly) to make her  feel better about that dire fact.  Really, why the hell would wedding dress designers do that to women? Why? Why? Why?  Isn’t that a bit cruel? Scratch that- it’s  downright loathsome of them.

 So a woman who is already swept up in all of the stress of trying to make her wedding the perfect day and who undoubtedly is already more than concerned about trying to lose weight to fit into her dream dress really needs to hear that her dress will already be a size higher than she had planned for? What the hell is wrong with these people?

 It reminds me of the one skit where Garfield says ” whoever invented that should be drug out into the street and shot”.

Now don’t get me wrong I get it; i understand that logically you need to know what size  a woman is in order to find her dress. Great.  But I also know how uncomfortable it can be to be flat out asked in a store full of women what size you wear. It feels like you’re about to be pounced on by some weight monster thats hiding in the shadows.  And then to get the “Oh wait, your dress will be a size higher than that too”…Jesus.

This particular friend happens to be a size 14, she also happens to have had a baby not more than three months ago, and she looks perfectly healthy for her circumstances.  After trying on all of her size (16) dresses she finally found the perfect one- I mean this dress was calling to her, and it was singing a sweet song. We top it off with a veil and the chick who was assisting us starts nagging my friend about the fit and telling stories about brides who have come in one size and then come back a month or so later having dropped 2 to 3 sizes. Thats right two to three sizes in a month just to get a smaller number looking back at them from the size tag.

Soon my friend is staring in the mirror unsatisfied with the bit of flab over the top of the dress and going on and on about how she intends to lose the weight, and that now that she has picked the dress she has more motivation to lose the weight so that she can come back in a few months and order ir in a smaller size.

In a millisecond she went from being on a cloud of happiness about finding her dream dress to feeling inadequite and motivated to change her body to be more “acceptable”  size.

So I guess my point is that I think its sad. Sad that at what is supposed to be one of the happiest times in most women’s lives they feel the pressure to completely change everything about themselves. Sad that even though they’ve found a guy who loves them the way they are- enough to ask them to spend the rest of their lives with them -they still feel like they aren’t good enough as they are.  It all comes down to the things that shouldn’t really matter, a picture that proves that at one point in time they really were that small ( even if they balloon up right after the wedding) , a dress size that proves they were the right size, and a lot of unhappiness wrapped up in a little boquet of self loathing.

If it wasn’t that important to lose the weight before he popped the question why oh why is it so important to lose it after the fact?

Divided.

If you are what you feel, than that is what I am…divided, perhaps for eternity… I hope not.

I feel like i have spent my whole life trying to dissappear.

It’s just as sad and complicated as it sounds, and it drains the soul like a spaghetti strainer. Again, divided. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of hating everything about myself, and so I’m trudging along my own path, trying to sift the gold from the shit.

It’s an interesting experience sitting here thinking about trying to write about health, self acceptance, and maybe trying to provide thought provoking information to women who I feel must need a guide as much as I do. I ask myself; So who am I to advise women who may be better or worse off than I am? Who am I to say how to live when I can’t even get my act together? Good question.

A better question is why I would want to. It’s hard, and thinking about the core of it is harder. I look through old journals for inspiration on how I could help and find myself overwhelmed by the nastiness and self hatred that runs through the veins of their pages.

In one of the last entries in my ed journal the beginning sentence is “this journal feels like a graveyard” and indeed they do.

I went into this thinking I would be able to help my readers find some peace, find some understanding, find some reason to keep trying in their personal journey’s towards recovery.

But now as I am writing this I realize that while yes, I may help others to do those things, what I am really searching for is that for myself. I guess it all comes down to a kind of “ I’ll rub your back if you rub mine” philosophy. There could be worse things in the world right?