Health & Recovery – re-modelED

Resolutions

December 31, 2014

2014 is officially over and it’s time to kick off a new year! New Years is one of the best times of the year because this is when everyone gets a fresh start and a chance to make the most out of the next twelve months. I love looking back on the year to see how I’ve grown and to start looking towards all that I want to accomplish in the upcoming year.

There is really nothing special about December 31^st. It’s just another day like all of the others, but it always brings with it that feeling of another chance to either finish something you didn’t get to complete or start something you never got around to over the year. New Year’s Eve is all about new beginnings and new experiences and this year I am super excited for both.

For many years with my eating disorder (ED), New Year’s never felt like the beginning to a fresh start or a time where I could improve on myself. It was just another day where I felt like I was trapped in one place with my eating disorder and it was hard to focus on anything else. Even with the promise of a new year, everything ahead was centered on obsessing and worrying about calories and food.

When you’re in the middle of an eating disorder or just starting out in recovery, it feels like you are attempting to learn another language. The idea of relearning positive eating behaviors and seeing yourself in a positive light is completely foreign and unnatural. All I could see for the New Year was more of the same and I couldn’t see past the hold of my eating disorder to push past it all and view the New Year as something to look forward to.

I started my recovery around New Years a few years ago and I felt like I had nowhere to look for direction. I was meeting with therapists and nutritionists and I had the support of family and friends, but despite their guidance, I still felt lost. It seemed a lot easier to sink back into old destructive habits that were comfortable than to branch out into this new world of recovery outside of my eating disorder. After months of small improvements in the right direction, it all started to feel more normal. Taking care of me and doing it the right way started to feel natural. It all started coming together and pretty soon the New Year brought with it the promise of knowing how to love myself again.

So what will you do with this promise of a new year and how do you plan to take the first step? It’s pretty common to make the annual list of “Resolutions”, “To Do’s” and “Self Improvements” for the upcoming year. This time of the year forces most of us to stop looking in the past and start concentrating on what’s ahead. Whether it’s your physical or emotional health that you want to improve on or relationship or life goals to work towards…we all have the promise of the New Year to make it happen.

The one thing that I have learned from my recovery is that it’s always best to take baby steps. It wasn’t until I took the pressure off of myself and started working towards little improvements that I started seeing progress. Many of you might be planning your New Year’s resolutions around your eating disorder or plans for recovery. That was definitely the center of mine the last few years. This year, thankfully, I’m trying to look past all of that and work towards a new set of goals that aren’t ED related. It feels good to look ahead for all that is out there for me without being held back from the lies of my eating disorder.

No matter where you are with your eating disorder or what your New Year’s resolutions are, here are some tips to help you get started in making baby steps towards a new beginning and a new you:

Make monthly goals: Have something small to work towards each month that will lead you in the right direction. Make it manageable and something that is realistic. For me, during my eating disorder, one of my monthly goals was to branch outside of my safe foods list and try one or two dishes that I was scared of eating.
Stay positive: This one seems obvious, but it can be one of the hardest things to do. Having a positive mindset is one of the greatest ways to help you keep working towards your goals. During my recovery, I wrote notes of affirmation around my room and on my bathroom mirror. Most of the time, I was my own worst enemy with all of the negative thoughts constantly going through my head. Remember that a positive outlook usually starts with your own self-talk and a positive thought life. If this sort of thinking doesn’t come naturally, the notes will be good reminders to love yourself and keep things positive!
Realize you’re going to mess up: You are not going to do things perfectly every time. If you mess up, you have to know that it is okay. Take each mistake as a way to learn and grow from it. Be as kind and forgiving to yourself as you would to someone you love! Give yourself a break! Realize that you’re only human and messing up once isn’t the set up to continuing the same mistakes…learn from them and move on and try to improve the next day.
Imagine yourself reaching your goal: Always keep your end goal in mind. Imagine looking back and seeing the improvement and hard work that went into accomplishing the goal. When things get tough, picture the finish line and keep going!
Keep moving forward: There are going to be many times when you feel like you can’t keep going, but have your goal in sight. Never give up no matter what comes your way. Anyone can make lists, but goals are only accomplished when you turn your list into actions!

My ED-Free New Year’s Resolutions 2015:

Be more spontaneous.
Give thanks in all circumstances.
Surround myself with positive people
Have patience and stay positive.
Work on being more selfless.

One of the main road blocks to accomplishing your goals will always be fear. Don’t let the fear of trying something new keep you from working towards a better you. No matter what your resolutions are, try to take everything one step at a time and keep moving forward. Here is to all things new, a fresh start and a happy and healthy 2015!

Blog, Health & Recovery

Whatever

October 5, 2014

Add up the number of hours that you’ve been awake…got the number? Take that number and multiply it by 2,500. That is the number of thoughts you have had with yourself since you’ve been out of the bed. Now take the same amount of hours and multiply that number by 2,000. That’s how many negative thoughts you’ve had today.

For all of you visual thinkers out there – imagine that one person you know that brings you down the most. This is that person that never has anything positive to say and makes you feel terrible about yourself. Now imagine them walking around with you constantly throughout your day, all while whispering something negative in your ear 2,000 times an hour! That’s a lot of negative thinking! According to studies done on our brains, whether we are talkers or listeners, we are all hearing our own thoughts as we talk to ourselves throughout the day.

Would you consider yourself more of a talker or more of a listener? I am most definitely an introvert and I naturally just listen more than I speak. Don’t get me wrong, I love laughing, sharing and talking with my friends and family, meeting new people and hearing their stories. But, I guess I’m just wired as more of a listener. Listeners and talkers both have their strengths and weaknesses but no one wins when they start believing their own discouraging thoughts.

With an eating disorder, your outside appearance doesn’t always reflect what is going on inside your mind. As I started recovery, people told me I looked better, but my mind was still in a very unhealthy place. It took my mind some time to catch up with my body’s recovery. The only way I was able to move forward and start cleaning out all of the junk in my thought life was to find a standard of positive thinking to hold all of my thoughts up to. The standard I used was Philippians 4:8 – “…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.” I soon started filtering my thoughts through this verse. If what I was thinking about myself didn’t match up to this standard, then I knew those thoughts had to go and I knew that I shouldn’t dwell on them.

Now (above)

After a few years of trying to renew my mind and filter my thoughts, I feel like I’m at a good place with what goes on in my mind. Everyone will experience negative thoughts and I still have them at times but now I’m able to see the difference between the truth and the lies. Changing the way you think about yourself takes time and constant effort. Wherever you are in your life, it’s worth it to get control of your thoughts. There is no way to move forward in a positive direction without first having positive thoughts.

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.”

– Helen Keller

“You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.”

– Joyce Meyer

Blog, Health & Recovery

New Growth

September 5, 2014

I am so excited to share with you the new and updated look to my blog, www.life-remodeled.org. I felt it was time to revise the logo to help better show the purpose for my blog. The sprout has a lot of meaning behind it for me and symbolizes visually, the growth in my own life and from my eating disorder recovery.

Growth is always positive and even if it’s just a tiny sprout of change, I know I’m moving in the right direction. So many areas of my life have been impacted by this tiny sprout and I’m working on continuing to grow and share what I’m learning.

“Look! I’m doing a new thing; now it sprouts up;

don’t you recognize it? I’m making a way

in the desert, paths in the wilderness.”

~Isaiah 43:19

In the beginning of my recovery, my agent had a wonderful idea to have me plant a seed and learn to take care of it as it grew. This helped me to learn how important it was to take care of my own body and my mind. As I saw new growth in what I planted, I was also seeing new growth in myself. Honestly, a few of my plants didn’t make it; growth is not always easy. Like taking care of a plant, recovery and transforming your mind is a daily process. Even after the plant has grown, you still have to take care of it on a regular basis. There were days that I wasn’t sure I would ever see any change, but like my little plant, soon the soil opened up and new growth began.

Life-remodeled.org has a new look but continues with the same purpose of sharing the importance of a clean and balanced way of eating; spreading awareness about eating disorder recovery; promoting a positive body image; and sharing healthy and delicious recipes.

Health & Recovery, Uncategorized

Hope

July 22, 2014

For the longest time throughout my eating disorder and a while during my recovery, I didn’t have any hope that I was going to get better. To me, it felt like my eating disorder would always take over my life and I would never have any freedom from the lies and abuse I was putting my body and mind through. I couldn’t even imagine a life without constantly obsessing over calories, hating how I looked, and feeling completely worthless. There seemed to be no light at the end of this tunnel. I was on one path with my eating disorder and I didn’t know how to turn around and walk in the other direction. I felt like I was completely without hope.

If there is one thing you need to know about me, it’s that I’m not a quitter. If I want to achieve something, then I will try my hardest to accomplish it and won’t stop until I’ve reached my goal. Although I suffered through severe depression, I felt like I had nothing else to lose except to keep trying and pray that eventually, things would start to improve. Of course, there were countless times when I didn’t want to get up out of bed in the morning. I didn’t want to face the reality of my eating disorder and the effort I was going to have to put into getting better. A lot of the time, it seemed unattainable, especially while trying to change the view of myself from a failure to someone that is beautiful and worthy. It seemed nearly impossible.

Recovery was the most difficult thing I have ever gone through, but in the end, it was completely worth it. It has been almost two years since the beginning of my recovery and I am thankful every day that I never gave up.

I never thought I would finally feel free from my eating disorder. Recovery does not happen overnight, and honestly, I believe that you can never fully recover from something like an eating disorder. Those tendencies are with you forever, but your mindset and how you view your body can be completely transformed through patience and constantly working towards improvement.

Blog, Health & Recovery

Triggers

June 1, 2014

Triggers are a stimulus that causes a reaction. They can create insecurity, low self-esteem, shame, panic attacks, negative body image, and stress, which in turn, cause us to react. Triggers can pull out bad habits and addictive behaviors in all of us. In my life, triggers always seemed to conjure up some type of food related response. When I think about it, reacting to circumstances in a negative way with food is not controlling the situation, it’s controlling me.

When feelings of low self-esteem, stress, and shame start to surface inside of you and you want to react to triggers, ask yourself,

Do the circumstances around me have to control the way I view myself?
Is my reaction to the trigger helpful or harmful to myself?
If someone else were in my place, how would I suggest they react?

Responding to triggers in a negative way is really just learned behavior. It can become an easy habit to connect the trigger with the reaction. Find some new ways to cope with your triggers. Go for a walk or call a good friend and talk through how you feel. It might take some time to retrain your brain when you encounter a trigger. Remember the hardest part is identifying a trigger and replacing the negative thoughts with positive ones instead of reacting in a way that is destructive.

Health & Recovery

Don’t Believe Everything You Think

May 14, 2014

For me, throughout my eating disorder, I’ve been terrified of scales. Even now, a trip to the doctor gives me anxiety knowing I have to be weighed. I used to have my mom call the doctor and remind them not to ask me to step on the scale. Now, I just face the other way and ask them not to tell me my weight. Numbers have always been a trigger for me with my eating. Numbers determined my mood and my mindset for that day.

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend Scrap Your Scale in Atlanta. The event was sponsored by Atlanta Center for Eating Disorders (Ace) and Eating Disorder Information Network (EDIN). It was so liberating and freeing to physically destroy a scale; something that I’ve been a slave to for so long. Men and women showed up with their scale in hand and we all took turns smashing them with sledge hammers and an ax.

I decorated my scale with measuring tapes and pictures to symbolize what I’ve been through with my eating disorder and how numbers twist the way we see ourselves. It felt wonderful to smash the stickers that described the abusive relationship that I had with my eating disorder (ED). My favorite addition to the scale was covering the numbers with the words, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think.” I wish we could all have that reminder when we step on a scale.

I’m on the Junior Board of EDIN with some amazing girls helping to spread awareness about eating disorders. Along with Scrap Your Scale, EDIN has other helpful events coming up and you can check out their website at www.myedin.org.

Blog, Health & Recovery

The Girl in the Mirror

April 11, 2014

As a kid, when I used to look in the mirror, I saw me as me. I saw a quiet, timid girl who was a stickler for rules, but was also eager for adventure and fun. As I grew older, this reflection in the mirror slowly began to change. All I began to see were the imperfections, the things I needed to fix and modify about myself. By the time I was a teenager, this image of myself started to focus more on my physical self and continued to transform until I only saw a body with no person attached…just an imperfect body that needed to be fixed.

This body I saw was morphed and almost blurry. I couldn’t see what was really there. All I knew was that whatever was there, it needed to be altered. This is a very common struggle for those with eating disorders (ED), and although they might not be as extreme, these types of thoughts have entered everyone’s head at some point in time.

We are so harsh on our bodies; we criticize, hate, and pick out every little part that isn’t good enough in our eyes. The constant disapproval of my body eventually turned into me not even being able to see what I actually looked like because my perception of myself was so twisted. When I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t tell what was big or what was small. What the scale and measuring tape said, completely contradicted what my eyes were telling me. Over the past several months, I’ve finally gotten to the point in my recovery where I am beginning to accept and love my body for what it is.

I saw a Dove commercial recently that really made me think. Women were asked to describe their features behind a curtain while an artist blindly sketched them only from hearing the descriptions they gave him of themselves. Then others were asked to describe the same women while the artist sketched another version based on their description of the way they perceived those women. Then, the two drawings of each woman were compared to one another. The drawings were both drastically different. The sketch based on the women’s description of themselves were mainly only focused on what they saw as negative features, while the other sketch based on the description from others showed the women’s true beauty. After the women saw their drawings, the artist asked, ‘Do you think you are more beautiful than you see?” This really put things into perspective for how we view ourselves and how it impacts everything around us.

Dove Real Beauty Sketches

But why are we so critical of our appearance? Why is it so hard to love ourselves and our bodies? We all strive to reach some form of, what we think of, perfection and acceptance; but as cheesy and cliché as this might sound, we need to realize that our bodies are perfect the way they are. Our physical appearance should not be what solely defines us. Start making small efforts to accept yourself completely; begin complimenting yourself, even if you don’t believe it at first. As you learn to love yourself and your body, your reflection in the mirror will begin to show the real, beautiful you.

Blog, Health & Recovery

Stress: What Are You Going To Do With It?

March 12, 2014

Who isn’t under stress today? Whether it is school, work, family, friendships, or just life stresses, everyone has stress at some point. It’s not IF we are going to have to handle stress but it should be HOW are we going to handle stress when it happens.

Lately, I’ve been very stressed out with college. I went to an online high school in Pennsylvania 10th grade through 12th so I could travel with my modeling. In 9th grade, I went to a liberal arts magnet school in Georgia and before that I was home-schooled through middle school. I haven’t had a lot of years in a class room. It was very difficult trying to keep up with all of my school work while I was modeling and sometimes working 12 to 13 hour days shooting and going to castings. I graduated in May from my online school and started college this semester after returning home from modeling. I have always put a lot of pressure on myself to be “perfect” in everything I do and school is no different. College is new to me and with it brings a lot of new stress that I’m learning to deal with like everyone has to when they first start school.

Lately I have been reading about the effects of stress on the physical body and it’s crazy what it can do to us. Stress suppresses our immune system, can cause problems with breathing, heart rate, and can mess up our sleep. Everyone handles stress differently: some people eat a lot when they are under stress, some handle it better alone and don’t want to be around other people, some might get irritable, and some might not even respond to stress. We all react to it in different ways.

With my eating disorder (ED), the first thing that ED wants me to think is that ED is back in control. I questioned it a few times when those same self-defeating thoughts came back along with the stress. I was starting to think that I couldn’t handle school without ED and giving into that way of thinking, but I started to realize that I was giving ED way too much credit.

I’ve come a long way with my eating disorder and I know that I am stronger than ED. Recovery is not easy; I’m going to slip every now and then and give in to those ED thoughts. There will be times where I feel out of control and I’m going to give in to ED’s lies. But that’s the thing… they are LIES.

For me, giving in to ED and going backwards after all of the hard work I’ve put into my recovery is not going to happen. I’m not going to let stress allow ED to control my mind. ED feeds off of stress and loves to make me feel like I need ED’s “help” to deal with it all. That’s not true.

Handling stress all starts with our thoughts. In therapy, we talked about how eating disorders relate back to how we think. Everyone has conversations with themselves in their head every day. These conversations are either positive or negative. These past few weeks, ED was starting to feed me negative lies and for a while I was almost beginning to believe them again; but I’m not going to continue to give ED that much credit. I started taking every thought captive and replacing each of ED’s lies with the truth about me. It’s up to us to know how to respond to the negative thoughts ED feeds us; we can react and believe them or we can see them for what they are – LIES – and try to replace them with positive thoughts and truths.

This is much easier said than done and it takes a while to get to this point in recovery. I know this sounds cheesy, but start by saying something positive to yourself in the mirror in the morning. When I first started my recovery, I had a saying on my bathroom mirror that I would repeat over and over in my head: “I accept myself unconditionally right now.” Try repeating this to yourself; write it down and put it in your car or on your mirror…wherever you need to. Everyone deals with stress and handles it differently. When you feel stressed, weak and out of control, think about the lies ED is telling you and combat that with what you know is the truth. You are strong and you don’t need to listen to ED’s lies.

Stress is going to happen….What are you going to do with it?

Blog, Health & Recovery

Dear Me…A letter to my fifteen-year-old self

February 7, 2014

It’s the year 2010, and your life is about to change. You’ve been back and forth to New York for your modeling and you are now settling in to the city for your first extended stay as a model with one of the top agencies in the world. I know how excited and nervous you are right now for all that is ahead of you. Your modeling career is off to an unbelievable start meeting with famous designers and international magazines. It’s just the beginning, and it feels like you have the world at your fingertips.

New York 2010

The last few months leading up to this trip, you’ve been skipping meals and over- exercising, but please listen to me when I say that you are putting too much pressure on yourself to lose weight. You’re taking it to the extreme and setting yourself up to be miserable. Soon you’ll start to feel trapped in a destructive cycle of shame, fear and self-hatred. What might feel good right now will regrettably leave you feeling hopeless and alone.

Today, I want to warn you especially – you will have an important decision to make very soon, one that can change your life drastically. It won’t really seem like a big deal at the time but will mark the start of your eating disorder that will consume your life for the next few years. For the first time, you will start to hear your eating disorder (ED) whispering in your ear. Don’t listen.

I wish you could know now what’s taken years to learn the hard way. Love yourself as I do now.

From,

“Future You”

Blog, Health & Recovery

The Yellow Brick Road to Recovery

October 16, 2013

When I was recently modeling in LA, I met the most encouraging and amazing person. Her name is Jodi and we met through a mutual friend. I had an instant connection with her, not just because she was from the South and living in LA , but I could tell she was the type of person that I could talk to about anything. When I met her, ED was slowly sneaking back into my life as I was getting back into the swing of modeling again. It was so good to have someone there that I could share these storms of emotions with.

Just a few short weeks before getting to LA, it seemed I had everything under control with my eating disorder. But the perfect storm hit as soon as I got there and I was letting ED take over again. I had been struggling with the decision of whether to come home or stick it out through my storm and hope that ED would eventually leave me alone. Every day, it was harder to ignore the anxiety and stress building as I tried to model and pretend that ED wasn’t with me again. I was having severe panic attacks and my skin was literally crawling as I fought not to slip back into my old habits.

*Thank you Jodi for being such a great friend to me! – Urth Caffe

The night that I decided to put myself first instead of ED and come home to continue my recovery, Jodi and I had met for dinner at our favorite restaurant. Jodi was very supportive of my decision to come home and wanted us to see the Wizard of Oz at the IMAX Theater in Beverly Hills that night. I’ve seen Wizard of Oz who knows how many times, but this time the movie had a whole new meaning to me. I never saw how much it related to my eating disorder until I saw it this time.

I was definitely not in Kansas anymore. I left behind my comfortable life of therapy, recovery, the support of my family, and normal eating habits to landing in my own Technicolor Land of Oz full of measurements, diets, and the constant struggle to be perfect. I was always responsible for most of the pressure I felt throughout my modeling career. This trip was no different, except this time I was in my own OZ searching for a way to model without relying on ED to achieve perfection.

With an eating disorder, you’re always looking for the road that leads to a full recovery. Just like Dorothy, the Lion, Scarecrow, and the Tin-Man, you’re searching for…

COURAGE:

To be able to eat a meal without feeling guilty or obsessing over calories.
To be okay with exercising a normal amount each day.
To not be constantly trying to reach for perfection.
To not let your eating disorder take over your existence.

KNOWLEDGE:

To recognize when ED is lying to you.
To realize that the road to recovery is worth it.
To know when you are reaching your limit and need help.
To put your health first before anything.

HEART:

To see that you don’t have to be fully recovered to make a difference and help someone else.
To be happy with yourself regardless of your size.
To see how special and unique you are outside of your eating disorder.
To put yourself first before ED.

Honestly, at first I had no idea why Jodi wanted to take me to see the Wizard of Oz, but towards the end of the movie, it became very clear to me. Dorothy, the Lion, Scarecrow, and the Tin-Man all went on a journey to search for different things, but they found out they held the power to everything they were looking for all along. It took them traveling across Oz and defeating a wicked witch to figure that out. The same goes with defeating an eating disorder. It may seem like the yellow brick road is never-ending and you will never be fully recovered, but you have the power inside yourself to get rid of ED for good.

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