Participants: Don Mckintosh (Host), Jennifer Jill Schwirzer
Series Code: HFAL
Program Code: HFAL000188
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00:01 The following program presents principles
00:03 designed to promote good health and is not 00:06 intended to take the place of 00:07 personalized professional care. 00:09 The opinions and ideas expressed are those 00:12 of the speaker. Viewers are encouraged to 00:14 draw their own conclusions 00:15 about the information presented. 00:50 Hello and welcome to Health For A 00:51 Lifetime. I'm your host Don Mackintosh and 00:53 today we are gonna be talking about an 00:56 important and troubling subject eating disorders 00:59 and joining us in the studio today to talk 01:01 about this is Jennifer Schwirzer. She has a 01:04 webpage, jenniferjill.org, and she has done a 01:09 very important book "Dying to Be Beautiful" 01:13 and I highly recommend the book and 01:15 we are glad that you are with us today. 01:16 It's good to be here. The reason I liked the 01:18 book is the research, the team you pull 01:21 together and then the fact that you are writing 01:24 it from, you know, perspective of a survivor. 01:27 Some of who has been through it. 01:28 Survivor. Many times you've got 01:31 people that right books about this never had the 01:33 problem and they just don't have that you know 01:36 the warmth that comes from the different 01:38 stories. You said there is about 10 different 01:40 testimonies in the book and then the information. 01:43 I'm talking about eating disorders. We were 01:46 talking about anorexia and bulimia, bulimia. 01:50 And just a quick definition of what those 01:52 are. Okay, anorexia is characterized by 01:56 obsession with thinness and anorexics limit the 02:01 amount of foods so there, it's basically 02:03 self-starvation. Bulimia in contrast is a binging 02:07 and purging disease consuming large 02:09 quantities of foods typically high calorie 02:11 foods and then finding some way of eliminating 02:14 them through vomiting or laxatives or exercise. 02:17 You know, in your book you talk about how 02:19 we got here as a culture. Yeah. We talked 02:21 about the social factors, the biological factors, 02:25 the physiological factor, all these different 02:27 things. We talked about how the culture is 02:29 changed from being fat is in or fats, where it's 02:32 at, thin is in, and how models get thinner, 02:37 but people are in reality getting fatter and that 02:39 disparity. We talked about all different 02:41 things and by the way you know, I'm glad 02:43 you have the webpage and you have a lot of 02:44 this information for people who want to 02:46 review that, but in this program you really 02:49 wanna talk about how to help someone that 02:53 has an eating disorder. Yeah, I'm assuming 02:55 that some of the people listening have a loved 02:57 one or friend that they suspect might have 03:00 either anorexia or bulimia and they wanna 03:03 help that individual, so I wanna go over some 03:05 techniques and something óóóóó. 03:06 So what are some of those techniques? 03:08 Well, I want to start out by saying that helping. 03:11 Well, let's just sort of given overview here with 03:14 this next graphic. We wanna, we wanna 03:17 encompass three steps in our helping attempts. 03:19 One is disclosure, then decision, and then 03:22 connection. What I mean by disclosure is you 03:24 want to get the person to admit that they are 03:26 having this problem or that they are 03:27 struggling with this problem. 03:29 Sometimes as real hard. That's very difficult and 03:31 in a couple of minute I'm gonna talk about 03:33 how to, how to make that approach and then, 03:34 okay, so you want them to disclose. You want to 03:37 say, yes, you're right. You know, your suspicions 03:39 are confirmed. I am struggling and that's the 03:42 entering point and then you wanna bring them to 03:44 decision to do something about it because just 03:46 disclosing isn't enough. You want them to come 03:48 to the place, where they are like okay, 03:49 you're right, I need to get help because this 03:51 is a dangerous situation and then finally you 03:54 want to connect them with the people that are 03:56 gonna be able to help them and that involves 03:58 you doing some legwork. You doing some 04:00 reading up on these disorders, a good place 04:02 to start is the book, but there is very, very 04:05 many resources out there. There is couple of 04:07 websites that you can look at. There is one 04:10 called somethingfishy.org, oh, I don't why it's 04:12 called that, but it has a lot of about eating 04:13 disorders or you can just do a Google search 04:16 and you need to start reading up and start 04:18 understanding some of these things and then 04:19 look into your local area and try to find resource 04:21 that you can connect that person to, so that you 04:24 have those options right there. You want them 04:26 to engage their own will in seeking help because 04:30 they are not really gonna be helped unless they 04:32 are involved in the process, however, 04:34 you want to make it easy for them as possible. 04:37 So disclosure. Disclosure, decision, 04:39 connection. Decision, connects like that. 04:41 Okay, so the first part is often the hardest. 04:44 That's the disclosure getting them to admit 04:46 that they really do have a problem, so I wanna 04:48 talk about that for a moment here. Let's look 04:50 at the next graphic. Your initial approach is 04:53 gonna weigh heavily in terms of your success or 04:56 failure at this. You've got to be very careful 04:58 with what you say to a person with an eating 05:01 disorder because remember they are obsessed 05:04 with the way that they look. They are obsessed 05:06 with food. This is on their mind constantly. 05:08 This is kind of their world. 05:10 So, if you say "You look so thin!" that's bad 05:12 because they think they are failure. 05:13 That's right. They are translating that "You're 05:15 a failure!" If you say, "It looks as though 05:16 you're gaining weight!" they translate it "You're 05:19 fat!" If you say, "Boy, you sure ate a lot" 05:22 they translate it "Time to purge pig!" You know, 05:24 so there you have a cognitive distortion 05:26 going on and they are gonna read into what you 05:29 are saying. You are gonna try to encourage them, 05:31 they are gonna read it wrong, so you have to be 05:32 very careful how you approach them. 05:34 Oh! Well, that's interesting. So they 05:36 really have some distortions and you could 05:38 just feed into it. You have to have a 05:39 lot of tact and you have to, you have to pray, 05:43 I think it's time for prayer when you're facing 05:46 life or death issue like that. 05:48 Okay, so what's the next step? 05:49 Okay, so then you wanna connect them with some 05:51 helping resources in their community or whoever. 05:55 There are some online resources, but I always 05:57 think it's better to first try to find someone, 05:59 right, that they can help, get help from face to 06:01 face. Umm! Umm! So I wanna look at 06:03 some of the options for therapy. 06:04 Let's look at that behavioral therapy you 06:06 are gonna talk about. Okay, let's look at this 06:08 graphic. Behavioral therapy is one of the 06:10 therapy sits out there for treating eating 06:13 disorders not involves a technique called 06:15 desensitization. I wanna develop this for a 06:17 moment here. Desensitization is simply 06:20 pairing deep relaxation with imagining or 06:25 envisioning whatever is you afraid of and so 06:27 often with for instance anorexia there is a food 06:29 phobia, you are afraid of food, you are afraid 06:30 to eat. So, pairing deep relaxation with visioning 06:35 food can often take the edge off of that fear 06:38 and some people might have an issue with that 06:39 they might think it's too new age. I believe that 06:42 prayer accomplishes the same thing. When you 06:45 have a stressful situation and you pray 06:47 about it, what you doing is you are affectively 06:49 bringing that situation, bring yourself face to 06:52 face with that situation in the presence of God, 06:55 and you. Hence confection of the Holy 06:56 Spirit what's right, what's wrong, and the 06:58 fact that it matters, right. That's right, 06:59 but you are also, you are also taking a place 07:02 for your safe, which is in God's presence, umm! 07:03 umm! and you are bringing that issue into God's 07:06 presence and so it takes the sting out of it, 07:08 so then you are prepared. Have you ever had that 07:10 experience, where you afraid of something, 07:12 you are anxious, you are concerned, you pray 07:14 about it, and you are able to face it with 07:16 curse, so I think the same thing is accomplished 07:19 with prayer as this is accomplished with 07:21 desensitization. Let's go back to that graphic. 07:23 Another. Behavioral Modification. 07:25 Another proponent of behavioral therapy is 07:27 behavioral wise just rewarding good behavior, 07:29 punishing bad behavior. The point of behavioral 07:32 therapy is arresting behavior, which is 07:34 important particularly in the case of anorexia, 07:37 where there is malnutrition because 07:38 the brain is physical organ. It's not properly 07:41 nourished and you are not gonna be able to 07:42 change the thought patterns. 07:43 All we need to stop it. So you need to arrest 07:44 the behavior. The problem with behavioral 07:46 therapy is that there is a high relapse rate 07:48 because you don't deal with the root problem. 07:50 So usually behavioral therapy needs to be 07:52 combined with something else and that 07:54 cognitive therapy, so then we have cognitive 07:57 behavioral therapy, which is real big right 07:59 now, coming from Aaron Beck and Albert Delvis 08:02 studies, different kinds of cognitive therapy 08:04 they deal with both behaviors and underlying 08:07 thinking, so you are arresting the behavior, 08:09 but you are also dealing with the root cause of 08:10 the behavior. One of the ways of doing this is 08:14 something I called "Bibliotherapy" just start 08:16 reading about it. There are many self-help books 08:18 out there on eating disorders not all of them 08:21 are valuable as others, but if you can just start 08:24 cracking the box, so to speaking getting out 08:26 there and informing yourself it can take the 08:28 mistake out of something there is lots of online 08:30 resources. Now you are saying the people that 08:31 need to read this is not the people so much 08:33 suffering as those who are trying to have. 08:35 Both. Both, okay. Yeah, Bibliotherapy is a type 08:37 of cognitive therapy. Okay. So, there is lots 08:39 online information and then there is also talk 08:41 therapy and sometimes in a counseling situation. 08:44 A counselor can identify, where that 08:46 persons thoughts become distorted, become 08:49 catastrophes, become negative, where they 08:51 don't need to be and they can help that person 08:53 bring those thoughts back in line with reality, 08:55 so that's cognitive behavioral therapy. 08:57 Is that very affective? And it's, it's quite 08:59 affective, but I'm gonna get to 09:00 effectiveness a little bit later down the line. 09:03 Okay. It overall it is a fact of especially with 09:05 depression and anxiety related disorder. 09:07 Psychodynamic. Psychodynamic therapy 09:10 is basically Freudian. It stems from Freudian 09:14 psychoanalysis dwelling heavily upon the past 09:17 or this is where you find clients recovering 09:20 memories. The problem with psychodynamic, 09:23 the psychodynamic approach is that overall 09:25 it is never really been proven effective. 09:27 Freudians theories were never really tested. 09:30 He lived at a time, where they didn't have much 09:32 empirical testing and there wasn't as much peer 09:35 pressure within the psychological community, 09:38 so his theories were never proven and this has 09:40 not been proven effective. And then 09:43 you know one thing you said before is that 09:45 many times people, who are anorexics also have 09:48 in the past many times cases of insets, yeah, 09:53 so wouldn't you wanna go back and discover 09:56 that? Yes, I think that there is a place for 09:59 understanding the person. When you have a 10:01 person sitting before you, you have a history 10:03 sitting before you and you as a therapist need 10:05 to know something about that history, so that 10:08 you can help them connect the dots between what 10:10 happened and who they are now and also so you 10:12 can build trust with them. But dwelling 10:15 heavily, there is a difference between 10:16 understanding the past and it's impact on the 10:18 present and dwelling heavily and ruminating 10:21 on the past it reaches a point with the heavily 10:23 dwelling on the past, where it becomes 10:25 I think self-destructive. So, we've talked about 10:27 behavioral cognitive psychoanalysis or 10:31 psychoanalytical dynamic in family. 10:33 Family therapy. Okay, we will look at the next 10:35 graphic here. It used to be that they would 10:37 do what's called a parentectomy for someone 10:39 with an eating disorder. They felt they needed to 10:41 be taken out of their family system because 10:42 often it was dynamics within the family system 10:44 that was predisposing a person to the eating 10:47 disorder and in fact feeling that eating 10:49 disorder they take him out and they move the 10:51 parents out of the picture, but they don't 10:53 do it anymore. They recognize that because 10:55 the person when go back into the family system 10:57 and they relapse, so now they deal with the entire 11:00 family system. And sometime a family 11:02 system can support a disorder, but it can work 11:06 in the positive as well. The family system 11:08 can be taught to support recovery from the 11:10 disorder. Good, yeah family system therapy. 11:13 So you work with the family. Often you know 11:14 when you are doing individual counseling 11:15 then you will eventually bring the family in. 11:17 Support groups. Okay, support groups 11:19 are valuable for bringing people out of isolation 11:22 one of the great, the motivators in any given 11:26 addiction can be the sense of isolation you 11:29 like you are the only person with this problem 11:30 and sometimes coming out of isolation can be a 11:33 positive move. Those include reading groups, 11:36 talking or rap groups, not as in rap music, 11:38 but talking, on online chat. The caution with 11:42 support groups is sometimes people relive 11:45 their falls, so to speak of their temptations. 11:49 This is true of alcoholic synonyms, they will not 11:51 allow a person in a group, but good group 11:54 will not allow them to recount in detail they 11:57 are drunken binges. They can say I messed up, 11:59 but they can't go into detail because the 12:01 experience once called the dry drunk. 12:03 The experience again is the second time. 12:05 So the same thing can happen with any 12:06 addiction, so you need to be cautious that it 12:08 doesn't become just a way of ruminating in 12:11 your problem that you are actually 12:12 working towards solving it. 12:13 Is there medication? And medications have 12:16 proven, have been helpful I should say 12:19 especially in bulimia because of it's genetic 12:22 connection to major affective disorder, 12:25 so that which works on depression can also 12:29 work sometimes on bulimia less often on 12:31 anorexia, so that has been helpful. 12:34 Some of those serotonin reuptake inhibitors 12:36 and all those different Paxil and all those 12:38 different kind of things, sometimes in the 12:40 short-term or whatever that doctor says can 12:42 be addressing the underlying issue. 12:44 You know, I wanna say something at this 12:46 point and that is I struggled with depression 12:48 and I have found it taking a while, I did 12:50 some reading, óóóó and some other 12:52 things and I read about sunlight and I decided 12:57 to start walking in the morning and it's made 12:58 a big difference because I think it 13:01 increases serotonin in the system. 13:03 So these clinical treatments that you've 13:05 mentioned, I mean if we click through a lot 13:06 of them have they, no one of them may be as 13:12 that helpful, but are they helpful taken 13:14 altogether? You know, not really. Let's look at 13:18 the next graphic here. The clinical treatments 13:21 do not have a high success rate 13:23 unfortunately. And that's been documented 13:26 by scientific literature. According to the reading 13:28 I've done in the scientific literature 13:30 there has, there is not the magic bullet hasn't 13:32 been discovered yet. Now you are a survivor. 13:35 You got through it, hopefully when we 13:36 comeback we will learn more about what is 13:39 effective That's right. And we will look at 13:40 that. We have been talking with Jennifer 13:43 Schwirzer. She has written a book : 13:44 "Dying to Be Beautiful", excellent book you 13:46 can find more information about it on her 13:48 website at jenniferjill.org and when 13:53 we come back we will look at how she got 13:55 through it? Maybe you will find things I know 13:57 you will find things that can help you join 13:59 us when we come back. 14:02 Have you found yourself wishing that you could 14:03 shed a few pounds, have you been on a diet for 14:06 most of your life, but not found anything 14:08 that will really keep the weight off, if you 14:11 have answered yes to any of these questions 14:13 then we have a solution for you that works. 14:16 Dr. Hans Diehl and Dr. Aileen Ludington have 14:19 written a marvelous booklet called Reversing 14:22 Obesity Naturally and we would like to send 14:24 it to you free of charge. Here's a medically 14:26 sound approach, successfully used by 14:29 thousands, who were able to eat more and lose 14:31 weight permanently without feeling guilty or 14:34 hungry through lifestyle medicine. Dr. Diehl and 14:37 Dr. Ludington have been featured on 3ABN 14:40 and in this booklet they present a sensible 14:42 approach to eating nutrition and lifestyle 14:45 changes that can help you prevent heart 14:46 disease, diabetes and even cancer. 14:49 Call or write today for your free copy of 14:51 Reversing Obesity Natural and you could be 14:54 on your way to a healthier, happier you, 14:56 it's absolutely free of charge, 14:58 so call or write today. 15:02 Welcome back, we've been talking with 15:04 Jennifer Schwirzer. She has written a book 15:05 "Dying to Be Beautiful" and it deals with 15:08 anorexia and bulimia, very important and 15:12 troubling subject for that percentage of 15:14 people that really get caught within its grip. 15:18 In this section, when we were talking with 15:19 you about what happened to you? How you kind 15:21 a overcame this? And you know, there is hope, 15:26 there is hope, there is happiness at the 15:28 end of the tunnel, right. That's right. I was 15:29 saying before that the clinical treatments don't 15:32 have a high success rate, but I wanna clarify 15:34 that you should try everything available, 15:37 you should, you should bring everything to the 15:38 table because this is a life or death issue for 15:40 some people. And so I'm not saying that it 15:43 never helps because often you know the thing 15:45 that, that has a high success rate is the 15:47 grace of God. Every person that I talk to, 15:50 interviewed from my book was in some 15:53 way shaper form health by the grace of God 15:55 through their problem, umm! and had some 15:58 kind of spiritual testimony to give. 16:00 So sometimes God uses, however, various 16:04 channels and sometimes he uses therapist or 16:07 he might use a doctor or he might use a 16:09 support group, so we need to leave those 16:11 channels open because his grace can move 16:13 through them as well. Right and grace, 16:15 of course, you know the grace of God teaches 16:18 us that denying this or doing this or doing that. 16:21 Right. Grace has many different things. 16:23 That's right. The grace of God can change 16:25 distorted ideas it's cognitively behavioral, 16:29 your thinking can change as a result of grace. 16:33 So, lot of these things can have elements of 16:35 grace in them, but tell us about your story 16:37 what happened? Yeah. How do the grace of 16:39 God take you from being you know what 16:42 you were to what you are? Pretty sick to being well, 16:46 it was actually the love of an individual and 16:49 God's love working through that individual. 16:51 I mentioned before that my husband had dealt 16:54 with the certain type of anorexia himself. 16:56 It was what you would call spiritual anorexia, 16:58 as I mentioned before there are two types one 17:01 is diet and fashion related. The other 17:03 is related to religious exercises. A person 17:06 trying to become more holy versus becoming 17:08 more fashionable, and he was involved in 17:11 some alternate religion and he ended up 17:15 starving himself down to a very low weight, 17:16 but survive the experience. 17:18 Was this, was this a tenant of the religion to 17:19 to starve yourself down? What it was, was 17:21 macrobiotic diet and, okay, they had very 17:24 strict ideas of what kinds of things you 17:26 couldn't, couldn't eat and portion control, 17:28 but everybody else was binging and he wasn't 17:30 because he was very consciousness, 17:32 so he ended up following the diet and almost 17:35 dying from it. So because he had recovered, 17:38 he was living in a community and he saw 17:41 the leader of the community levitate off 17:43 the ground. He said, I'm getting out of here. 17:45 So that was it for him and he ended up renting 17:47 an apartment, óóó on the floor, girl that 17:49 he met him came and she nourished him with 17:51 the chicken broth. He came back to health and 17:54 to life anyway and he was able to start eating 17:55 was able to start eating again. So he had 17:57 survived that experience and then he met me 17:59 and he could see me struggling with some of 18:00 the same things and it was through his love for 18:03 me. His really is unconditional love for me 18:06 then I was able to see Gods unconditional love 18:08 and feel secure enough to overcome this 18:10 problem. The way it all penned out was he and 18:14 I were actually in a relationship, umm! umm! 18:17 And he would warn me that I was heading 18:19 down a very unhealthy path. He would say I 18:22 have been through that and you need to eat 18:24 more and I would brush it off, you know, 18:26 and as I did with just about everyone. 18:28 And I was hovering around 95 pounds all 18:31 the time and that isn't like a severe anorexic. 18:35 A really severe anorexics will continue 18:36 to lose weight and finally die starvation, 18:38 but I was, I wanted to stay. 18:39 And you were how tall? 5 feet 6 inches. 18:41 5 feet 6 inches. I mean, it's okay to be 18:43 95 pounds, but if you are 5 feet 6 inches 18:44 that's kind of thin. That's too thin, 18:46 it's like 20 pounds off me now, so I was too 18:48 thin, but I didn't think I needed any body fat 18:51 or anything and I felt like I could be that way 18:53 and I actually liked it and that's the real 18:55 thing about anorexia it's called an 18:57 ego-syntonic disease, meaning it can sink 18:59 with your ego. You like it. 19:01 Yeah, you feel better even though no one 19:02 is fighting your game, you're kind of 19:05 You like it, you feel self-satisfied. 19:06 Bulimia is the opposite it's ego-dystonic, 19:09 but I was quite contempt being 95 pounds. 19:11 I wanted to stay there, but I got a flu and the 19:15 flu lasted for a solid week I couldn't eat 19:17 anything, umm! And so, I went down to 85 19:19 pounds, wow! And I remembered being 85 19:22 pounds and getting in the bathtub. And I just 19:24 the bones like straight against the porcelain 19:26 of the bathtub and it, that moment I had 19:29 epiphany that I was sick and then I needed 19:33 to, to gain weight. And so, began to climb 19:36 back up to a normal weight, which was 19:38 actually very difficult and it's hard to conceive 19:41 of that for people. So, that was where 19:42 disclosure came and you say may be I am, 19:44 that's right, and then you made a decision. 19:47 I made a decision, I was getting married. 19:50 Well, I regain the weight to my normal 95 19:53 pounds, but then once I got married I realized 19:55 that I needed to gain back to a normal 19:57 weight and so because I was in 20:00 the secure relationship this person who is gonna stick 20:02 with me through thick or thin, I was able to overcome 20:05 lot of thought patterns that have been 20:07 sort of an addiction for a woman. 20:09 Now, were you a Christian when you married your 20:11 husband Michael, yes I was, and he was now coming into 20:14 Christianity or he was? He was already a Christian too. 20:16 But he had been into some kind of Eastern religion 20:19 stuff, right, and so, you had, you came together. 20:22 Yeah. Amazingly the minute you become a Christian all 20:24 your problems starts to instantly go away, have you 20:27 notice that? Right. That is amazing. Yes, it is 20:29 amazing. So, I still has some issues I had to deal with, 20:32 but in the context to my relationship with him I was 20:35 able to, to deal with some of the underlying thinking 20:38 and it was difficult for me to eat a normal amount of 20:40 food when you shrunk your stomach down and you have 20:43 got into this mindset, but by the grace of God I was 20:46 back up to whopping 120 you know 20:49 within a few months of getting married. 20:50 Wow! So, since that time have you ever had like a 20:54 relapse mentally, cdid you ever say, 20:57 I'm going back to no food. 20:58 Not at all. I'm the type of person that if I get really 21:01 depressed about something, I will like have to remind 21:04 myself to eat. Some people medicate with food on the 21:07 opposite, I'll just like flake out and I'll stop 21:09 eating in sleeping. But I don't want to be skinny, 21:13 I wish I could gain weight in fact if you know of any 21:16 way that I can I would be glad to try it because I am 21:19 one of those people, who is chronically more active 21:22 then the number of calories I take in, but in mentally 21:26 I'm on a totally different page. Umm! Umm! I do not 21:30 want to be thin, I do not want to get any thinner. 21:32 I don't obsess about food. You are able to eat even 21:35 sometimes laugh about what happened even though it's 21:37 not really laughable in some ways. 21:40 I have to laugh about it. Yeah. 21:42 I mean, I used to make all kinds of foods that 21:44 typically anorexics will make food for other people 21:46 they won't eat it. Some of them will wash there hands 21:48 repeatedly, so they don't absorb calories through 21:50 their skin. I wasn't that bad. But I make all kinds of 21:53 food for him and he would eat it, but now I make food 21:56 for me like. I've been making fudge, trying to 21:57 perfect this, this fudge recipe, you know, and I, 22:00 I eat it. You have, you actually these is kind 22:03 a ironic, but you move from, from I guess what you just 22:07 said might make this little different, but you move 22:09 from like not eating food, and now you are having a 22:11 restaurant, yeah, eating food yourself and serving it 22:15 to other people, serving it to other people. 22:16 But like I said anorexic will, anorexics will often 22:20 really cook a lot of food for other people, but they 22:22 won't eat it themselves, but yeah I had this restaurant 22:25 for three years and developed the menu and 22:27 prioritized that the food had to taste good, yeah, 22:31 you know. So, but I wanna, I wanna just highlight one 22:34 individual that I interviewed in the process 22:36 of doing research for the book, her name was Lacey 22:39 and she went down to, she went to down to 57 pounds. 22:44 57, how tall was she? She is 5.4 so, she was little 22:46 short. She had moved away from her home of origin to a 22:52 place, where she was not able to connect socially 22:54 when she was an adolescent. Umm! Umm! And because 22:56 she had a difficult time connecting she was very 22:58 lonely, finally she got in with the group of girls, 23:00 who were pathological dieters and she said Ah! 23:03 This is the key to acceptance is being thin. 23:07 She looked at them they were thin, she started to 23:09 become thin and to make a long story short she went 23:12 down over a several months to extremely dangerous way 23:16 and finally one week nothing seem to be helping she went 23:20 in for her weekly way and it was found that she weighed 23:23 57 pounds. You know, just that the family was 23:26 traumatized, the mother and daughter were just crying 23:29 in each other arms, they wanted to sent her to 23:33 another facility, where she could live in, but the 23:37 mother didn't feel the girl would survive the trip the 23:39 plane flight. So, they made this disparate decision 23:42 and this is so interesting to me they decided that they 23:45 would go back to where she was healthy, so they went 23:47 back to her home town that she had moved from when all 23:50 this began. And in route to the town, a medical miracle 23:55 took place and they pulled over to the side of the road 23:58 and she ordered a sandwich and 24:00 ate a full meal for the first time in years. 24:02 Wow! Was that dangerous to eat a 24:04 big meal once in a while, well, yeah. 24:06 I mean you can, you can overeat 24:07 you know and you've got to gradually. 24:09 But the change in the mind just because of the location 24:12 of going back to a place, where she was healthy 24:15 and then once she got there she met her family and her 24:18 friends at a restaurant ate again. And that began her 24:20 road to recovery and to me the thing that is, that is 24:23 made obvious in that story is the fact that love heals 24:26 people. Is what happened to me, you know, somebody 24:28 loved me and in the context of that security I was able 24:32 to overcome, I was able value myself enough to feed 24:35 myself basically and the same thing was true of her 24:38 she, she was suddenly had a reason to live. Well, this 24:42 book again weaves all the stories together Dying to be 24:46 Beautiful, that's right, and now you are living 24:48 because you are beautiful. Well, I <24:51>. 24:51 And because you are. What would that I mean. 24:52 What I mean is that you see yourself as beautiful in 24:55 God's eye because you see yourself as he sees you 24:58 and that is a personal value. That's right. 25:02 It's not based so much on anything in me done as it's 25:05 based on the value that he placed on me and I think 25:08 that's a crucial point because as soon as people 25:10 turn to themselves to say I'm good, I'm beautiful, 25:13 high self-esteem because I have all these qualities. 25:16 You know those things are very fragile and often 25:19 they are based on being better then someone else and 25:21 so it's very fragile situation, but if you base 25:23 yourself-forth on, on the price that Jesus paid for 25:26 you on the cross and also on the difference that you 25:28 can make in the world serving others and 25:31 blessing others that is a solid foundation. 25:34 What would you say to the person watching right now, 25:36 maybe a family member or actually someone struggling 25:38 with anorexia or bulimia? What would you say, 25:41 what are the steps you would take right now 25:44 as you are watching this program you know within 25:46 the spiritual context as well? Well, I would first of 25:49 all get on your knees and pray. This person has a 25:53 disorder or possibly has a disorder that could, 25:56 could lead to you know permanent problems are 25:59 ultimately death, serious situation. Not only that, 26:03 but they are totally engrossed in something 26:05 that's taking their eyes off what's really important 26:07 that is their soul salvation and their mission in life 26:10 and so they are consumed with something that's taking 26:12 him off the path. So, get on your knees and pray that 26:15 this person becomes all that they can be in Christ and 26:19 then approach that person once you've prayed and try 26:22 to get them to be honest with you about their problem 26:24 if they have it. To disclose it. Disclose, that's right. 26:27 And, but before you do any of that actually let's back 26:29 up a minute, just do some research, do some reading. 26:32 Go to your website jenniferjill.org, get your 26:35 book Dying to be Beautiful is a good start, 26:37 but there is many other resources. Many other 26:38 resources, which I list in the book as well. 26:40 So become informed and then once you go to the person 26:44 if you can get them to the place, where they are 26:46 willing to admit their struggling then you can 26:48 connect them. Then you can lead them to a decision to 26:51 do something and you can give them some options, 26:53 as to how they can do something and that's just 26:55 beginning. It maybe the one facility doesn't help, 26:58 one counselor doesn't help, but they can keep trying 27:00 give him a sense that there is hope and that they can 27:03 change because it's, it's true that they can. 27:06 Thank you so much for spending the time Jennifer 27:09 with us and for writing the book, I mean look, it takes 27:12 a lot of energy to write a book. I just recently 27:14 worked on one of those projects. I mean that's, 27:17 that's, that's a big project. Thank you for the 27:19 research, thank you also for pulling that team together 27:23 in the book and also thank you for just being 27:26 completely honest about your situation 27:28 that's really helpful. And thank you for watching us 27:31 here today on Health for a Lifetime. 27:32 You've heard some excellent information. 27:35 You can again get more information about this book 27:37 by going to Jennifer's website. Jenniferjill.org 27:42 and the title of the book is Dying to be Beautiful, 27:45 as all kinds of resources on the website and in the book 27:49 and we hope that you will find things there that would 27:51 just increase the effectiveness of this program 27:54 information that you have watched today. |
Revised 2014-12-17