Welcome to The Eating Disorder Institute

The Main Questions You Must Ask Yourself in order to Cure Your Eating Disorder.

We have already discussed what eating disorders are about. They are about coping, relationships, life-style, thoughts and feelings.

Sufferers become slaves to their disorder.  They do everything possible to be able to act out their compulsions (binging-purging, starving, overexercising, taking laxatives etc.)  The ED becomes a substitute for the most valuable things in their lives like friendship and lifestyle.

Think about it– would you have turned to an eating disorder if you had good coping strategies, were able to manage your emotions better and had good relationships with people? Probably not, because eating disorders are always caused by discomfort and discomfort comes from paying too much attention to the problem that caused the discomfort in the first place.

1st  question: What would you be doing right now, if you had absolutely no limitations, you were a billionaire, and you knew you could not fail?

2nd question: What would you share with the world, if your message were to be broadcast throughout all of the world’s television stations for 5 minutes? What would you say, what would your message be?

Did you answer these questions?  If not stop reading and answer them first… Why?
Because knowing the answer to these two questions are very important to conquer your ED.

As we know eating disorders are disorders of:
-     life style,
-    relationships,
-    coping ,
-    thoughts and feelings.

So basically what is holding you back from a better life is only a bunch of negative feelings and emotions that appear to be your eating disorder.  You really have to think of why this is, what good is it doing you to be held back by something that is not real and thoughts and negative emotion are not real.

They are just how you perceive them to be, ask someone else about these feelings and see what they think. The answer would probably be: so what, what’s the big deal, just laugh them off and get on with life. They are not trying to be mean to you or put your feelings down; they really are not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. So why are you letting them ruin your life: it just doesn’t make sense?

But now let’s go to your answers for the questions above. Did you find the questions difficult? Or you just can’t believe in that they are possible? If this is the case, please open your mind, accept the possibility without the proof and discover the real you that hides in the shadows of your eating disorder.

Every experience we have had in the past, or will have in the future, always, without exception, has an emotional element attached to it. You got your eating disorder because you started attaching too many emotions to your body image and yourself in general. This emotional component took up most of you attention.

OK there may have been some really bad things that got you to where you are, but you can’t change the past. Is the person responsible for these bad things suffering?

I don’t think so?

So let me ask you this: why are you???

Don’t let these misguided misplaced feelings and emotions ruin your life: it is time for you to change and neuroplasticity will certainly do this for you.

Eating disorders are result of “plastic paradox” – when neuroplasticity goes off track.

Neuroplasticity has the power to produce a more flexible and productive behaviour and even completely change your life from bad to phenomenal success. But neuroplasticity is not only a good news story.  Sometimes it can produce more rigid and inflexible behaviours.

This phenomenon Dr Norman Doidge calls “the plastic paradox”.  In his book “The Brain That Changes itself” he said: “Ironically, some of our most stubborn habits and disorders are products of our plasticity. Once a particular plastic change occurs in the brain and becomes well established, it can prevent other changes from occurring. It is by understanding both the positive and negative effects of plasticity that we can truly understand the extent of human possibilities.”

Let’s go back in time to when your eating disorder first got started. For instance, your trigger, lets say in the beginning of your ED you were being bulled at school for being slightly overweight or maybe your sport coach told you to lose weight in order to be fit for competition. You were very emotional about these episodes. You were thinking about it all day and night trying to find a solution to lose weight faster. As a result of your emotional thoughts you changed your behaviour. You cut down on the amount of food you ate, overexercised etc. You continued this routine for some time.

And what happen then? – As a consequence of your new behaviour you changed your brain, you developed new neuronal pathways which were then responsible for not-eating, purging, overexercising and taking laxatives.

When neuronal pathways are developing, they get activated even without your conscious awareness that it is happening. This is why the anorexic or bulimic person continue to starve, binge-purge, overexercise, take laxatives even though they know they should stop doing it.

There is saying: “Our life today is truly the product of our thoughts from yesterday”.  And eating disorders prove this saying to be extremely true .  This is because in the past you had a lot of thoughts about dissatisfaction with your weight – today you have an eating disorder.

But the good news is that an eating disorder is not a death or a life sentence. You can stop one by changing the structure of your brain and developing new neuronal pathways which will override the old ones.  And neuroplasticity will help you to do this.

Here is a visual example of how neuroplasticity works in the brain.

Basic neuroplastic change (restructure of the brain) occurs approximately in 3 weeks after starting a new regime.  Of course, stubborn habits and bad disorders will take longer than 3 weeks to change, especially if they are long standing ones. Also there are structural brain changes that can occur faster than 3 weeks. Usually these kinds of changes are influenced by extremely strong emotions like fear, anger,
or bereavement and can also occur by involve emotional trauma or a nervous breakdown. 

For example, look at the picture on the right. This is the kind of brain structure you may have now if you are a sufferer.  Let’s assume that these connections of brain cells is responsible for your binging –purging or starving yourself episodes. You see how the endings of the neurons are connected to each other.

Then after three weeks of trying to stop the binging-purging episodes using other behaviours (like listening to a nice music at the time of binging urges, watching a movie instead of binging, joining a fun club or group, painting or playing piano , doing a course and learning something , etc.) , you see the area in the brain which was responsible for binging-purging behaviour becomes more saturated with brain cell connections. It is because your brain has formed other neuronal connections on the top of the old ones.  Now, if you continue to perform these new constructive behaviours, the neuronal connections responsible for this behaviour will grow more and more eventually replacing the old negative behaviour pathways.

But if you choose to perform your bad behaviours instead (binging-purging or continue to starve) – the old negative pathways take over and the new positive pathways will fade away.

So if your are serious and really want to beat your ED then it is not impossible, we have developed a book at the Institute that will help you return to health.

Tips to Increase Neurogenesis (Growing New Neurons) in Adult Brain in order to stop your Eating Disorder.This is what neuroplasticity is all about.  Now, let’s look at 11 major principles of how we can facilitate the processes of neurogenesis (growing new brain cells) in order to stop your eating disorder. 

Neurogenesis  is  growing new brain cells (neurons).

By now you probably know that eating disorders are problems related to emotions, perception and specific neuronal pathways in your brain which related to eating disorder behaviour. And that in order to stop your eating disorder  you need  to create new neuronal pathways responsible for  good constructive behaviour to replace  the faulty neuronal pathways.

1. Learn everything you can about how the brain works. Even some basic understanding will help you to appreciate your brain’s beauty as a living and constantly-developing structure with billions of neurons and its connections. When you understand what happens in your brain while you binge-purge or starve yourself – you will have an idea of how to reverse it.  Until you understand this process you are like a blind person who is trying to find his way home walking through the debris in the wilderness.

2. Take care of your nutrition. Your brain consumes 20% of all the oxygen, nutrients and energy you consume. If you are an anorexic and don’t eat (or eat little) your brain starves. It can not function properly and that’s why people with anorexia stop seeing a clear picture of reality that other people see. They see themselves fatter than they are, they judge others by the way they look and how skinny they are. And their starving brain is a big contributor to it.  The Brain can only function at its best when it has enough energy and nutrition to process the information.

3.  Moderate physical exercise enhances neurogenesis (production of brain cells). But eating disorder sufferers have to be careful not to over exercise because many of them already do overexercise. Always remember that when you exercise the spending of energy increases rapidly and body needs energy to burn. Energy comes from the food we eat but when there is not enough energy from food, the body starts consuming its own tissue as an energy source. Fat burns first. But if a person does not have fat (or has very little) like an eating disorder sufferer, the body start burning muscles and other body tissues.  And that is a dangerous process. It can lead to dystrophy and caxechia – the syndrome is what a person looks like who has just come from a concentration camp we have all seen the pictures. Please Remember: moderate exercise is great; I don’t mean running 10 miles a day. But you need to make sure that you have something to burn – not just burn your muscles and brain tissue as an energy source.

4.  Practice positive, future-oriented thoughts, until they become your mindset. Look forward to every new day in a constructive way. Find and follow your main purpose in life.
Stress and anxiety, no matter whether induced by external events or by your own thoughts, actually kills neurons and prevents the creation of new ones. You can think of chronic stress as the opposite of exercise: it prevents the creation of new neurons.

5. Get excited and thrive on learning and mental challenges. You have probably heard the expression “Use it or lose it.” And – yes it does apply to the brain also. What relation this principle has on eating disorders, you may ask. The answer is – everything.  You see, the brain of an anorexic – bulimic person is full of faulty neuronal pathways which are responsible for their anorexic-bulimic behaviours. There are pathways for binging-purging, for starving, for taking laxatives and diuretics, over exercising etc. When you start learning new constructive thing – like for example, how your brain works, its anatomy and physiology etc. – you actually will produce new neuronal pathways in your brain which will take the place of your old pathways and replace them.
Learning can be about anything you want to learn but it has to be good, positive and constructive. Something you can share with others and teach them to do the same. The more you learn this new thing the more it becomes your new mindset and the closer you became to eating disorder recovery.

6. Find a purpose. Aim high. As far as we know humans are the only self-directed organisms on this planet. This means we are the only ones who can make decision and exercise our own will.
If you don’t know what your purpose in life is – don’t worry. It will come if you keep focusing on finding it. And don’t forget to learn about how your brain works – it also will give understanding on how life has a purpose which is already created and imbedded in your mind.

7. Explore and travel. It has been proved that travelling to new locations forces you to pay more attention to your environment.  This will pull your attention away from your eating disorder and help you to develop new neuronal pathways in the brain – different from what the eating disorder has created.  It can also help to produce more good chemicals in the brain (neurotransmitters) which are responsible for your attention span. More attention will make your learning of new things easier.

8. Don’t succumb to the opinions of others. Don’t think that what is in the media, something said by your neighbour or what politicians say are true. Have your own opinion. Remember that media makes billion of dollars every week to program people’s mind by displaying woman’s body images that are impossible to achieve by any normal person. Most diets and other health care products which claim to improve your health don’t work or work on a placebo effect only.

 
9. Develop and maintain stimulating friendship. This is very important for eating disorder sufferers because generally eating disorder sufferers are withdrawn from others and prefer to spend time alone with their eating disorders. By
spending your time with good friends you take yourself away from the eating disorder. You will also develop different neuronal pathways which if exercised regularly can replace the eating disorder pathways.

10. Remember: Laughter is the best medicine. Spend more time laughing – it is healing and puts you in a different state of mind. I recommend you even to find jokes about weight and food , laugh at it and look at the funny side of it.  For example, when you see the funny side of being anorexic or bulimic you will change your attitude to your abnormal behaviour. Laughter also improves hormonal status in the body – which normally suffers in anorexic-bulimic people. Laughter also helps to release good chemicals in the brain which can change your brain for the better.

11. Love. Love more, learn about what love is and how you can feel love and be loved. Learn how to give your love to people and receive the love back. I am not talking here just about romantic love (although this is the love too). I am talking about love as a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection and attachment.

Eating disorder sufferers don’t know exactly what these feelings are – and it is one of the reasons they have their eating disorders.  So start educating yourself about this topic and you will discover miracles.

The 3 main mechanisms of how neuroplastic changes occur in the brain?

Biologically it can happen in a few ways:

1. By sprouting new endings from the body of the neuron and connecting them differently to the different neurons.

2. Changing the levels of brain chemicals (neurotransmitters)
 
3. Growing new neurons  (this process is called neurogenesis)

Let’s quickly look through them one by one.

1. Sprouting of new neuronal endings will occur when you start doing new behaviors or new actions. These new behaviors have to be done repeatedly and regularly in order to sprout new endings.

For example, when you start regularly performing the act of binging, purging or starving oneself your brain cells (neurons) sprout new endings forming eating disorder pathways. These are then responsible for the binge, purge and starving episodes.

You continue because the urge is so strong as you have built these faulty neuronal pathways in your brain.

You may feel that it is impossible for you to stop these abnormal actions but the truth is that you can stop these bad actions by sprouting new neuronal endings and forming new neuronal pathways which can replace the old ones. The mechanism for sprouting these new endings (good one) is exactly the same – you should start performing new constructive behaviors regularly; ones not based on food abuse.

2. Changing the level of brain chemicals (neurotransmitters) – can also occur with different behaviors you do. Some certain behaviors we do because the level of brain chemicals remains too high or too low. 

For example, neurotransmitter acetylcholine gets produced when people start learning and paying more attention to things they are learning. 

Acetylcholine is your attention getter. It gets produced when you pay attention to things and you became more attentive and learn better when you have a sufficient level of acetylcholine being produced.  So, memorizing poetry, learning a foreign language, solving math problems, writing an essay, learning about how your brain works and etc. – all these activity will improve the level of acetylcholine in your brain.

People with eating disorders often can’t concentrate. It is because the level of the brain chemical acetylcholine is too low. But to improve it you must force yourself to focus and concentrate on something useful. Then your concentration will become better because by initial forcing yourself to concentrate you improve the level of this important chemical in your brain.

3. Growing new neurons. Recent research shows growing evidence that the adult human brain creates new neurons, a process known as neurogenesis. Now scientists have found that the areas in the brain where these new neurons grow can be stimulated by actions and neurogenesis occurs.  One of the most important areas where neurogenesis occurs is in the hippocampus.

The hippocampus is the middle part of the brain and it forms one part of limbic system. The hippocampus is directly responsible for memory and our emotions.

People with eating disorders most likely have a chemical imbalance in hippocampus. Eating disorder sufferers store lots of memories of hurts and dissatisfaction with themselves in hippocampus. And their bad emotions come from these memories.

The conclusion is that by growing new neurons in the hippocampus you may help stop your distractive eating disorder behaviour.

Now you are probably interested in how you can stimulate the processes of neurogenesis.

Our next article will explain it all.