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Thanksgiving can be a very stressful holiday for anyone who has eating issues. It’s a food-based holiday, and often brings up lots of insecurities and discomfort.

To help yourself, your child(ren) and loved ones have a happier Thanksgiving, take the focus off the food and invest instead in opportunities to connect with each other.

Four great ideas are:

1. Get outside - go for a walk, explore a new park, look at trees, make snow angels, analyze clouds. Just get out of the house and into nature together.

2. Play a game - pull out the board games and set ground rules for fair play and good behavior. Pull out the wiffle balls and plastic bats or turn the patio table into table tennis. Play for fun, and play with love!

3. Get crafty - grab construction paper, pens, paper, scissors, glue, feathers, pom poms, glitter, and googly eyes. Buy everyone a mini pumpkin and carve away. Draw silly portraits of each other. Get messy and have fun! Yes, this is for both kids and grownups!

4. Volunteer together - find a cause you care about and do something meaningful. Serve food for the homeless, muck out stalls at an animal sanctuary, pick up trash, make cards for service people overseas, or plan a fundraiser for a Native American organization.
🍁🍁🍁

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Our children can feel our disapproval, and when parents disapprove of a child's body, children internalize the idea that they are wrong, bad, and inappropriate.

Even if parents don't say anything out loud about a child's weight, if they feel that their child's body is a problem, the child knows.

Weight stigma is pervasive and constantly reinforced in our society. It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.

Yes, it's uncomfortable, and yes, we still need to talk about it.

Parents, please learn about weight stigma and internalize Health at Every Size principles to avoid unconsciously passing along feelings of inadequacy to children 💕

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If you ask a female child what type of body she wants, most of the time she will say “thin.” If you ask a male child what type of body he wants, most of the time he will say “big and strong!” But the maddening thing is that they have already been duped.

First, there no such thing as an ideal body type. There is only the body type that society currently tells us is ideal.

Next, we don’t get to choose our body type. We just have it.

Popular culture tells us that anyone can achieve the body that the culture tells us is ideal, but it’s just not true. And many people who do fight to achieve the current ideal body do so through disordered eating and exercise practices.

It’s time for parents to explicitly tell our children that there is no ideal body type and that the vast majority of people cannot achieve the current physical “ideal.” Here’s what I say: Your body is your body. No need to starve it or go to great lengths to control it. Just be kind to it - sleep, eat, move, and get some sunlight. You’re gonna be OK💕

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A teen may cry for help with self-harm, starving, binge eating, purging, substance abuse, promiscuity, shoplifting, or any alarming behavior.

And adults often say “they’re just looking for attention.” Or “it was just a cry for help - nothing serious.” Um. No. That’s not how it works.

When a teen cries for help, we should respond immediately and compassionately. The stakes are very high.

We should jump to their aid and work deeply and for a significant amount of time to uncover what the cry was for.

At first it may seem obvious - a breakup, a loss, a bad grade. But dig deeper, and you will find a wound that needs to be healed by a loving, attentive adult.

Don’t stop when the first explanation arises. Don’t stop when the behavior stops. Don’t stop until you have treated the deep wound.

Only then have you actually resolved the reason behind the cry for help. And that can be life saving💕

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Recovery awakens our true selves. It releases our trapped needs, wants, and desires. We become more assertive, and in the process of doing so may sometimes err on the side of aggression because stating our needs clearly is something we are learning.

This process of awakening can be very hard on our loved ones. They didn’t know what we were hiding with our eating disorder, and it can be a shock to see us emerge and blossom into our whole unbridled selves.

This is why parents who have kids who have eating disorders benefit from therapy and support. Parents need guidance as they discover the child within the child they have known. It takes time and patience, but the recovered child will bring so much joy and peace if parents can learn to accommodate them.💕

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Every parent has “stuff.” If we don’t work on our stuff, we risk passing it on to our kids. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be good parents if we have/had an eating disorder. In some ways, at least we know we have stuff - many parents don’t think about it.

We are highly sensitive, intelligent, very committed people, and we can be great parents, especially if we are working towards mental health, practice mental hygiene, and, ideally, have professional support.

An eating disorder does not mean we can’t be the parents we want to be. It does not mean we are destined to raise disordered kids.

There is no such thing as a recovery fairy who will one day deem us ready to parent. What we need is the self-awareness to own our stuff and work on it diligently as we actively work to be the best parents we can be.💕

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We can stop our eating disorder behaviors through force of willpower - for a while, at least.

But true healing comes from knowing that our true self, our inner child, that sweet, traumatized little one, is seen, heard, and accepted.

Full recovery comes when we trust that we deserve love and are worthy regardless of what we do, what we look like, and how big and unruly our feelings get.

It is through relational safety - feeling emotionally safe with at least one person - that we come home to our bodies and believe we can live free of our eating disorder behaviors and the beliefs that drive them.

If you have a child who has an eating disorder, what can you do to see and welcome their hurting inner child? What can you do to support their sense of worthiness at any weight, with any grades or career, and as a whole, independent being who is separate from you? These are good questions to ask as you support your child’s healing journey.💕

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Our eating disorders can be a deep, primal cry for help. They may be our child-selves begging for healthy relational nourishment.

When we see the suffering child within, and get care for that child, we may find our healing path.
💕
I am forever thankful for
@gabormatemd and his books, lectures, and articles like this one in @fix_addiction_recovery

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1. Most eating disorders begin in adolescence.

2. Adolescence is a time when we undergo massive body and brain changes.

3. So many parents dread the teenage years and complain that teenage girls are difficult, dramatic, and terrible.

Is there a correlation between these three things? Possibly.

Let’s be kind to teens and respect the journey they are on.

Let’s support parents who have teens, not by agreeing that teens are terrible, but by reminding parents that teens are still children who are usually the most challenging in the exact moments when they need more love 💕

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Eating disorder behaviors are not just because we can’t help ourselves.

The eating disorder behaviors are how we try to help ourselves.

Our eating disorder behaviors are not the problem. They are the solution we have found to help us feel better.

When we get to the root pain of why we feel so bad, full recovery is there waiting for us.

When we heal the emotional distress, which is never as simple as food and body issues, we solve the eating disorder’s problem and it can go away.💕

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Sometimes an eating disorder is a way to have a voice when we feel powerless and pissed off.

Sometimes an eating disorder feels so right because it is the only way we can possibly tolerate the way we believe we have to live to be loved.

Sometimes our food behaviors are the only way we can express how shitty it feels to exist in our society.

I wish we could all be free of the bullshit that makes us so angry and sad that we have to take it out on our own bodies💕

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Parents have a huge impact on kids’ development. And yet when something goes wrong, we tend to look at the child and ask what’s wrong with them instead of wondering about ourselves and the family environment in which our children live.

With compassion and the understanding that this is hard, I implore all parents who have kids who are behaving dangerously - with eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harm, and more - to seek therapy for themselves.

When a child acts out with dangerous behaviors, it doesn’t come from nowhere.

This isn’t parent blaming - this is parent empowerment! You want your child to get better! You can help!

You are a good and loving parent who deserves help so you can build the optimal environment for your child’s recovery. Therapy is not a punishment, but an opportunity💕

Full article on More-Love.org: Why do I need therapy if my child is the one with a problem?❤️❤️

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Recovery is a return to self, often a larger, more assertive and complex self than the one that used eating behaviors to numb our emotional needs.

Recovery doesn’t give us back a previous version of ourselves. It gives us a fuller, more present, and more assertive person than before.

But we recover into the very same family and society that seeded our desire to stay small and numb. This is why stopping eating disorder behaviors can be relatively easy short-term, but harder to maintain.

Sometimes the question is not can we recover, but can our loved ones accommodate who we become when we recover.💕

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Parents who heal themselves help their children heal.

We don’t need to be perfect parents to be great parents. What’s most important is that we take time to reflect on how our mental models, disorders, attachment style, and behaviors impact our kids. The simple act of reflection can transform our parenting.

Too often, we get stuck in our own automatic ways of thinking. If we were victims as children, automatic thinking can easily lead us to think our kids are victimizing us with their behaviors.

Our kids are not victimizing us with their behaviors. They are only seeking ways to gain our love, attention, and affection. It may seem like a bizarre and hurtful way to go about it, but it’s completely subconscious and perfectly human.

Taking the time to reflect on our parenting propels us to be better parents. If we just take one step towards helping our kids live fulfilling lives, this is it.💕

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You want to do something! You want to get this parenting thing right! I get it! I do too!

But here’s the thing: we have spent waaaayyyy too much time as a culture thinking about “healthy food” and keeping our kids at “healthy weight” and not nearly enough time thinking about healthy relationships.

Parent-child attachment is deeply, fundamentally tied to lifetime health. Scientifically, attachment science is clear and unequivocal. Meanwhile, nutrition science is constantly changing due to the inherent challenges of measuring nutrition.

Parents who build healthy attachment with their kids will have healthier kids. Period.

And the good news is that if you know how to sneak spinach into a smoothie, you can definitely sneak healthy attachment into your relationships.

It’s liberating to find out that we parents can do something to positively impact our kids’ lifetime health! Yay! So go forth and learn about attachment!

A great podcast for more information about attachment is Therapy Uncensored. Start with episodes 59, 60, and 61🎧

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An eating disorder seems like it’s about food behavior and body image, but it’s a mental disorder based on mental distortions.

We have huge rates of treatment failure and iatrogenic (medically-caused) exacerbation of eating disorders based on the fact that we continue to treat the behavior as the path to healing.

For parents, the behavior is terrifying and scary. It’s natural to want to stop the behavior so that we can stop worrying about our child’s health and safety.

Education about eating and building trust with food and the body is important, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that we don’t heal if the only intervention is food and body image work.

The behavior is a symptom. The disorder is how the person has learned to survive as a self and as a child in a family system.

Treating the symptoms of an eating disorder is not the same thing as treating an eating disorder.💕

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It makes sense that we think what we feed our kids matters so much. The media, doctors, and well-meaning educators and parents everywhere are eager to talk about sneaking kale into smoothies, banning sugar, insisting on organic foods, and other nutrition and feeding strategies.

But it turns out that beyond meeting basic caloric and nutritional needs, the food we feed our kids matters much less to their lifelong health and wellness than the love we feed our kids.

A cultural over-emphasis on food is skewing the way our kids feel about food. It also fools us into thinking that the best way to show our love is through food.

It’s complicated. But here’s the thing: If you have time and resources to grocery shop and prep and cook and serve all that fresh food, go for it. But it’s also OK if we serve frozen foods, packaged foods, and simple, repetitive foods. And it’s better if we don’t glorify certain foods and demonize others.

Minimize food stress, planning and prep and invest that time being with your kids, telling them what you admire about them, recognizing their five distinct laughs, holding them when they cry, knowing their friends’ names and the current dramas unfolding, and being a constant, secure base they know they can rely on and trust.

Build your relationship every day. Don’t stress if the food doesn’t meet Instagram faux-wellness standards.

Your affection and attention make the single biggest impact on their lifetime health and happiness. Don’t worry so much about the food.

A connected relationship with you is what’s really, really, super-healthy for your kids💕

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