For the third week, the Oprah Winfrey Net has hosted a live chat after Addicted to Food with Tennie McCarty.  The chat offers a great place for questions and comments for the shows topics and keeps with it the message that you are not alone.  In case you missed the chat, here are some of the highlights. 

Tennie on Food

• “Go to a good dietician who is trained in eating disorder. Those who aren’t trained want to turn everyone into a normal eater but addicts need to go through a different process with different food portions.”
• “Hunger is real. It’s about the food until it’s not about the food. It’s about feeding yourself 3 balanced meals a day and if you feed yourself properly then the hunger pains will go away.” 
• “If you mean recovering from binge eating…eating recovery is about moderation. Feeding yourself 3 balanced meals every 4 hours… like ​medication​. It’s when you skip meals we feel that we “deserve” food and then we end up binging… it’s a bad cycle. It’s about guilt-free eating.” 
• “There are no good or bad foods, It’s what you do with them.” 
• “One way to tell if you need to get off of something is to stop eating it and see how your body reacts.  The cravings will stop if you stay off of it long enough.”

Tennie on Eating Disorders

• “We have got to tell the truth and keep telling the truth about what you are doing with food.  We are sneeeaky with our food so you have to be honest about it!”
• “Have someone you are honest with (to talk to)…we give so much power to the eating disorder but once you can get honest about it the disease loses its power.”
• “You are a normal eater if you have gone on a diet and can lose those few pounds and keep it off. Emotional eaters are those that obsess about certain food, but each person has to make that decision ​themselves… Read ​literature​, call a specialist and get honest with yourself. If you even think you have a problem, you probably do. The quicker you can catch an eating disorder the easier it will be to treat.”
• “We’ll find anything to take our focus off of what’s the real issue is. Any excuse will do.  We get obsessed with anything that will take us out of our process a lot of that side obsession is called ​co-depend​ency. That is often what is under the eating disorder.”
• “Food affects the same part of the brain as any other addiction.  We have been treating it like that for 24 years and now, the researchers are validating that.  It’s the same.”
• “Eating and the weight are but a symptom of the disease… the eating disorder taken to the extreme can kill you though, so you must get to that core pain …
  since one without the other just doesn’t really work.  Some folks think if you just treat the ​mental/em​otional side the eating will take care of itself but I don’t think that is true because you have to deal with both. The food masks the feelings”
• In response to the question – do you think people have a better understanding of eating disorders? “It’s also why I wanted to do this show. To educate people about the disease and to let people know there is hope! You can recover from this. You absolutely can.”

Tennie on Treatment

• “Absolutely not…we do not send someone home for purging or relapsing in ​treatment​… that is the most natural thing for a bulimic to do is to purge. But we work through it with them…. that’s the whole point of treatment and relapse is nothing to be ashamed of.”
• “Everyone absolutely can recover! i don’t care how far down you’ve got, there is hope for change as long as you breathe.”
• “People come in all the time and go through the program at their own pace. They don’t always come in together like the eight featured on the show.”
• “We can just keep making excuses. It’s just a turning point you have to get to. You chose whether to go down the road of recovery or not. You just need to get on the track and make those consistent changes a bit at a time.  Everything in your life has to change for recovery, but it’s a change for the better.”
• “Exercise is a part of our program though. Weight resistant work, yoga, cardio – 1 hour every morning.  It becomes an addiction when they can’t stop it and they have to exercise several hours a day every day … and it becomes harmful to their health.”
• “I am not any different from any other food addict I continue to practice my recovery and treat my disease the same as anyone else would with any other type of disease once or twice a year I go to a 5 or 6 day intensive just for myself. I go and do my own work about once or twice a year and have for the last 25 years. And I’ll continue to do it.  You can’t give away something you don’t have. I couldn’t teach others how to recover if I’m not recovering myself.”
• “BSOLUTEL​Y. I was practicing bulimic for 14 years every day. I have not had 1 bulimic episode since sep 19 ’85.  If I can stop then anyone can.”

Tennie on Healing

• “Well a lot of what we dealt with on the show tonight was co-depend​ency that is easily set up in childhood​… talk therapy doesn’t get much good except to get the story straight. It makes you aware of the deeper issue… to get the pain and the anger and the reasons you are eating. It’s a bad cycle. It’s about guilt-free eating.”
• “There are 2 sides of an eating disorder; mental or emotional and physical. There are good programs that just address weight issues but that is just a small part of it.”
• “It’s important to look at the past to get the history straight, but the healing comes from the inside out.”
• “As hard as it is, we must embrace ourselves the way we are and say it out loud to ourselves whether we believe it or not we must start treating ourselves right and knowing we do have worth and value.”
• “Eating disorder people, we are our worst enemies.”
• “We can just keep making excuses. It’s just a turning point you get to. You chose whether to continue …You just need to get on the track and make those consistent changes a bit at a time.”
• “Cleansing – it’s a letting go of all the stuff you have held onto for all those years. it loses its power over us (once you let it go…)”
• “The burning of excuses is something we do here about once a month clients love to do that because it’s such a symbol.”

 Tennie on References or Books

•  “Dr. Hollis “Fat is a Family Affair” is a great book.”
• “Another great book I highly recommend is “Living with the Enemy: ​Exploration​on of Addiction and Recovery” by Mordstrand.”
• “Phillip Werdell also has an excellent book about food addiction and weight – based surgeries and one for men, there aren’t many, is Michael Preger.”
• Here are some other resources for eating disorders: ​http://bi​t.ly/EDre​sources

And a Couple of entries that I thought were worth sharing…

•  Robby LeBlanc who was on the program shared this: “Bottom line…my expedience at Shades saved my life.”
• Another person in chat wrote this:  “I think this network might be saving my life right now.”