Laxative abuse

Potentially triggering for eating disorders.

When most people think of eating disorders, they think about someone starving themselves, making themselves sick and being really thin. However, eating disorders are a lot more complex than this. A further issue that is becoming more common in eating disorders is the use of laxatives.

Many of you might think that using laxatives seems a bit strange so why do people with eating disorders do this? Some people think that it will help them lose weight. For me, I enjoyed the empty feeling that taking laxatives gave me. I personally could never make myself vomit. But, laxatives were easy to get and although I knew that they did not stop me from absorbing calories, that feeling of emptiness was good for me. Laxatives help get rid of any retained water and that lowers the number on the scale. For someone suffering with an eating disorder, that is perceived as a great thing.

My laxative abuse started off by taking the recommended dose whenever I felt bloated. However, it soon got out of control. My body got used to the laxatives so I started taking more and more often. It was one of the hardest parts of my recovery. My body was used to being aided like this. It did not help that I was then diagnosed with IBS. When my IBS causes horrible constipation, I cannot take laxatives to help it. When you stop taking laxatives, you tend to get bloated and the eating disorder voices in your head convince you that this translates as getting fat/putting on weight. It takes a lot of strength to stop abusing laxatives, to recognise that this bloating is temporary and that your body can live without them.

So this all sounds really difficult and horrible, right? Yes but I am one of many examples that it is possible to stop abusing laxatives. Here's some advice:

• Remember that laxatives do not make you lose actual weight. They simply dehydrate your body which sometimes resembles losing weight.
• Laxatives can cause dehydration, bloating, electrolyte imbalances and a variety of health problems. Remember that recovery is about taking care of your health.
• Get rid of any laxatives you have in the house.
• Talk to your doctor or a friend, get some support.
• Take each day as it comes and be proud of your progress, do not beat yourself up if you slip up at all.
• Depending on how long you have been abusing them, you may have to reduce them gradually. Assess the best way for you to stop this, everyone is different.
• Drink lots of water and eat lots of fibre, it will eventually stop the bloating and stop your body's reliance on laxatives.

Beat, the UK's leading eating disorder charity, is currently seeking to address the problem of laxative abuse. They are calling for the sale of laxatives to be better regulated. This is so important. If laxatives are more difficult to access then less people will have the chance to take them. Take a look at what Beat is aiming for.

Currently MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) claim that they recognise the problem but do not believe that sales restrictions would be appropriate. I disagree. If laxatives were not so easily obtainable, if I could not buy lots of them at the age of 14 wherever I wanted, if I had to ask for them from behind the counter, if they were clearly not a weight loss aid... well, I really think that I might not have abused laxatives so readily and I think that's the case for many eating disorder sufferers. Something needs to be done because this growing trend is scary and dangerous.

Diets are dangerous...

Diets. We probably all know someone that's been on one. Most of us have been on one ourselves. It's usually just an attempt to lose a few pounds. Diets seem healthy, harmless and sometimes like the best thing for someone to do. But they can be dangerous and they can lead to eating disorders. I understand that this is not always the case. I understand that some people need to go on diets for health reasons but a hell of a lot of people who put themselves on diets do not need to lose weight.

A lot of people who develop eating disorders say that it began when they tried to eat a bit more healthy. Perhaps they started eating more fruit and vegetables. But then it can spiral out of control. It's easy to enjoy the weight loss. It's easy to start eating less and enjoying losing more weight. It's nice to see the numbers on the scale drop. People start telling you how good you look. You tell them about this great diet you're on.

Well, this can get serious really quickly. You eat a bit less and you lose more weight and soon it is not enough so you start exercising too or skipping meals altogether. It starts pretty innocently but it becomes more sinister. You get thinner. You get sick. Soon, you are in the grips of an eating disorder and really mentally unwell.

It's the new year in a couple of months. That means people will be going crazy talking about their desperate need to lose a few pounds, there will be diets advertised everywhere and celebrity fitness DVD's. People will buy into it but I am urging you not to. I want to remind you that this diet culture we are in is dangerous for everyone. As someone in recovery from an eating disorder, I can say that hearing friends talk about diets and calories makes me feel like I should be. It damages my recovery and diets put them at risk of potentially developing eating disorders. Eating disorders kill people.

It makes me angry. Seeing constant adverts for new diet pills and diet companies. STOP IT. Stop making people think that they need to lose weight in order to be happy. Stop showing unhappy fat people and happy thin people, the world does not work like that. People are not that simple. Weight loss is not equal to happiness. Eating Special K every day will not make your life better, following weight watchers will not make you a good person. Diets sometimes help you lose weight but unless your doctor advises you to do so, you probably do not need to. These companies are making money off of your misery, low self esteem and desperation.

Most importantly, the diet industry wants you to feel bad about yourselves. It wants you to hate your body so you buy their products over and over again in a desperate attempt to fix things. However, this doesn't work. So you try more diets and low fat foods and gym classes. Losing weight is not how you learn to love yourself. It is not how you become happy. Looking after yourself, being kind to yourself is how you learn to love yourself. And you should love every part of you because if we all show ourselves a little bit of love, these awful diet companies will go out of business. Eating disorders may decrease in frequency.

Ignore the diet talk. Do not buy into this culture. You are more than your weight and you deserve to love yourself for who you are not because you lose weight on a diet.

Fitspo: is it really healthy?

Fitspo is a term used to describe fitness inspiration, throughout the internet it has gradually replaced thinspo. Thinspo or thinspiration is essentially using pictures of very skinny, sometimes emaciated people (usually women) in order to motivate others to get thin. Its links are with the dark world of pro anorexia websites. When people became aware of it, many of them were rightly disgusted and found it very disturbing. Then along came fitspo, an attempt to use quotes and images to inspire people to eat healthily and work out.

Widely found on websites such as tumblr, pinterest and instagram, the people who follow this see it as a healthy alternative to thinspo. But, I am not sure it's as healthy as all these people seem to think. One quick tumblr search and it shows a bunch of pictures of women deemed 'healthy' yet I notice that they're all relatively skinny and like with thinspo, a lot seem photoshopped! Many of these women seem obsessed with their 'healthy' diets and workout regimes. Surely this obsession is not healthy...

As I go through pages dedicated to fitspo, I notice that many insist that it's okay to eat some cake or a piece of chocolate occasionally. This leads me to think that they really are trying to do this the healthy way. But the fact that they are encouraging people to eat what they deem healthy 90% of the time and workout almost every day does not sit right with me.

What makes me more uncomfortable is that a lot of these pages are run by people who claim that fitspo helped them recover from their eating disorder. Well, I would argue that exercising so much and eating so healthily is actually putting them in danger of perhaps just developing a different type of eating disorder - orthorexia. This is an extreme fixation with avoiding foods deemed unhealthy by the person. This whole concept of fitspo just seems very dangerous to me.

Looking at some of the food diaries that people post, along with their exercise routines, quickly highlights that these people are not consuming enough energy compared with what they are exerting. This is probably why many of the pictures are not just women with lots of muscles but actually very small women. I know that you cannot tell if someone is healthy by looking at a photo but it all seems dangerously similar to thinspo.

Basically, I want this all to stop. I want people to stop telling others what they should be eating, how often they should be working out. I want all this 'motivating people to do this and that' to stop. This obsession with bodies, whether it is getting thin or getting fit, has to stop. The key similarity with thinspo and fitspo is that clearly these people are striving to make themselves look good. It is not healthy to be so fixated on what you look like, everyone needs to remember that they are more than a body, so much more. Rather than using sites like tumblr to motivate others to change their bodies, we should be using them to promote self care and body love!