Through addressing concerns related to body image and self-love, the content on this site has skirted discussions of disordered eating, often tied to my own personal struggle with compulsive and emotional eating during my adolescence. However, in striving to build a community around healing and the positive impact of surrounding yourself with people concerned with forward motion and recovery, Bulimia is not a topic that I have discussed openly, as it has not been a part of my personal experience in learning to love my body.

However, when asked if I would be interested in participating in an online blog effort to shed light on and provide awareness around Bulimia, I felt compelled to participate, as I know that this is a topic that extends to a great many people who read this site, as well as many that I’ve worked with individually over the last couple of years.

It is my clinical belief that while those who are working their way through the recovery process benefit greatly from professional treatment, I have always been drawn to supplemental, creative outlets for coming to terms with your body – as it is, today, right this second. In my own journey to learn how to stop feeding myself with copious amounts of food instead of cultivating a live rich in the stability and love that I was truly seeking, there was absolutely no tool that provided me greater clarity and relief than writing.

I wrote down each and every feeling that I had – the feelings that I wanted to feed.

I wrote down the experiences that were tying me securely to my painstaking quest for the thin ideal: the diets, the plans, the times I slipped up and fell off the wagon, the times when I had fallen so deeply into the hurt of the life I felt I didn’t deserve.

And with every word that I wrote, and every word that I shared – I took a step closer to the life I had been denying myself.

This was a life that I saw the people around me having. Their lives were seemingly filled with happiness, with sitting out in the sunshine, and consuming food when they were hungry. And stopping when they were full. They were finding people to love them, and, perhaps more astonishingly to me at the time, they believed that they were lovable.

It took me a very long time to realize: we are all lovable.

We all deserve a life where our relationships with our bodies can be filled up to the brim with compassion, tenderness, and the sincerity of knowing that we are worth friendship and kindness from others.

And yet, for many -the knowledge and sheer certainty of our own worth seems like a movie that we watched that one time and barely remember. As if we can make out a couple of the key scenes or the face of an actor, but it is hardly applicable to our current situation.

We are not giving ourselves enough credit.

Now, not everyone will be at a stage in their recovery where they feel like sharing their innermost feelings in a public forum – if ever – but writing can be an extremely useful tool in the recovery process regardless. It can be instrumental in discerning who you are and what you deserve.

It can shed light on an anchor that appeals to you on a deep, heartfelt level, tethering you to the whisper of a promise of more.

In honor of Bulimia awareness day, I want to share three of my absolute favorite writing prompts for reconnecting with my body, prompts that I have used again and again in my life to bring me back to myself, and bolstering my belief in a life outside of my disordered thinking. Additionally, I would love to open the comments up to those for whom this day and topic might be particularly salient, because this is a community built up around love and support for one another.

• My body was built for…
• My body needs…
• I am ready for…