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When you are acting out your eating disorder, you eat whatever will knock out feelings you don't want to have or simply cannot bear. You know what the binge foods are that do the job for you. And you know the consequences you experience later.
But what do you eat to nourish your body, keep you fit, feed your brain and equip you to function in the world in an optimum way? People in early recovery from an eating disorder ask, "What should I eat?"Â They ask this even if they have been seeing a nutritionist and studying various food plans.
If you are not in recovery you still ask yourself, "What should I eat?" Most people with an eating disorder know they are doing damage to themselves when they act out their disorder. So they try to take care of themselves as best as they possibly can to make up for or compensate for the damage they create during an eating disorder episode.
Strict dietary rules won't work. You make hard and fast rules for yourself out of your control issues. And you break those rules out of those same control issues.
This is why so many relationships with nutritionists break down. The person with the eating disorder can't maintain the structure. The nutritionist has difficulty in being creatively flexible because she/he doesn't understand the depth of the unique and unpredictable eating disorder control issues as they relate to the specific individual she is working with. (To work effectively with a nutritionist the nutritionist must be experienced and at ease in working with people in various phases of eating disorder recovery.)
But, even if you struggle with issues of control, you can follow guidelines.
The good news is that some guidelines have now come up that, in my opinion, answer very well the question, "What should I eat?"
This pyramid doesn't tell you what specific foods to eat at a meal or when or how to eat. So it avoids bumping into your eating disorder control issues. Â It does give you guidelines that make sense, that are easy to remember and that are well founded in terms of health and science.
To help yourself I suggest you print out a picture of the pyramid and place it wherever you have a tendency to ask yourself, "What should I eat?"
You can limit or stop that awful train of thinking and feeling where you feel helpless to make a good choice. You can provide yourself with the help you need now so when you have that helpless feeling, you can look to the answer you gave yourself when you were in a more sturdy emotional state.
What should you eat? Look at the pyramid and make your wise choice.
Please write in and share your experiences with using the New Updated Mediterranean Diet Pyramid
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FYI
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Breaking News on Supplements & Nutrition - North America
Med diet pyramid updated to reflect new science (this site has a lot of links on the topic)
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Help Yourself 
