Hello and welcome to a DeZero Mind Mental Head. That is what this channel is called, my name is Charlotte, if you didn't already know that. This week I'm making a video because it is eating disorders when is week and I thought I would make a video in honor of it. Is that the right saying? I wanted to talk about the misconceptions surrounding eating disorders. Obviously you might disagree with some of the things I'm saying but I think they're kind of pretty much standard. If you do disagree with anything that I have to say or you have anything to add then let me know down below and we can discuss it or whatever. That's what I'm going to be talking about this week so I will not ramble on too much. I'll just get on with it. You don't have to be thin to have an eating disorder. Shocking right? Eating disorders aren't mental illnesses. The size and shape of a person bears no resemblance to the severity of their illness. Now I've talked a bit about this before on my channel and this comes up especially in terms of when you're trying to get help from services because there is a cutoff point with the VMI threshold especially when you're trying to access in patient treatment. More so as an adult because when you're an adolescent they'll pretty much take you into hospital at any BMI but with being an adult you have to be under a certain BMI to be accepted for inpatient treatment. And there seems to be this belief that you have to be a certain BMI to have a problem. Well they don't seem to realise if you've had an eating disorder from a young age obviously going through to being an adult there is more damage done to your body and your metabolism. Your weight will fluctuate, your gain weight, your lose weight and obviously your BMI will go up and down. The mental illness is still there but the longer it goes on the more ingrained it is in you and the harder it is to treat. It doesn't seem to accept that it doesn't matter what your BMI is. The eating disorder is as prevalent as it was if your BMI is 11, if it is 18, if it is 20, if it is 22. The eating disorder is there. Some people's natural BMI is higher so they can be just as sick as someone reaching a lot lower BMI to them getting to a BMI of 15, 16 is just as sick as someone else reaching a BMI of 11. It doesn't matter. BMI and weight should not be taken into account when treating an eating disorder. The next misconception is that anorexics don't eat. I've been very open about the fact that I go for long periods of time without eating at all. But the majority of people with eating disorders will maintain a restrictive diet meaning yes they do eat but it's very few calories and they may have compensatory factors. Laxatives, exercise or purging. I faced comments when eating things like a salad or a plate of vegetables such as Oh well done that's great or what a big pile of food that looks a big meal. Which is ridiculously unhelpful. Whilst I know rationally that's not enough to eat comments like that feel the eating disorder making me feel like it's not okay to eat more. Someone with anorexics usually restricts their diet and might go for a few days with little to no food but more often than not they do eat. The next misconception is that only young girls have eating disorders. Whilst eating disorders are more common in younger people, younger people don't recover grow up to be suffering from chronic eating disorders. Therefore eating disorders outside of young teenage girls do exist. Hello both. Shut up. Both younger and older. My first inpatient admission I remember a younger being sent across from the children's hospital for a few days before she started getting to distress the environment as there were some really unwell patients. She must have only been about six or seven. It was just heartbreaking seeing like this tiny little child just she was a baby just a baby. She should have been at home playing with Barbies. And then at the other end of the spectrum. During my next admission there was a lady who must have been in her 60s and she was probably the most unwell lady I have ever seen and met. You know she was very very frail and whilst I was there she suffered from a heart attack. She never came back from hospital. You don't have to be a young teenage girl to suffer from an eating disorder. Many years ago I did some volunteer work for people with learning disabilities. There was a guy who had Down syndrome because my mum worked there as well. I knew his situation because she told me about it and he used to sit and touch his body talking to himself and just muttered himself about feeling fat. He looked very malnourished and he looked mentally anguished. After eating he used to disappear into the toilet and come out covered in sick. I knew from my experience even if mum hadn't told me what was going on. Me and mum both tried speaking to the staff and speaking to his key workers to try and speak about getting him some help. Because obviously people with Down syndrome can suffer heart problems and with the electrolyte issues with bulimia I was worried. So his staff took him to the doctors and they refused to point blank to accept that somebody with Down syndrome could have an eating disorder. Hmm. Yeah. It's a bit fucked up. What can you do? Only few miles have eating disorders. Strangely mental illness doesn't discriminate against gender. 1.6 million people in the UK have eating disorders. I was shocked when I saw that figure. 1.6 million people and that's only people that are seeking treatment and seeking help. And of that 1.6 million people 11% are men. And again that's only the men that have sought help and sought treatment. I have no doubt that that figure is far higher. Obviously being a female I don't really feel able to say very much else. I don't really know what I can say. There is a website that offers support for memory eating disorders that I will link down below. Big Macs cure everything. Pizza Hut, Cures Anorexia, Happy Meals, Cure Depression and Subway Cures OCD. Well wouldn't that be fantastic? Except its Borgia. The years my dad said he'd give me 50 quid to eat Big Mac. Despite knowing that I was a vegetarian because he believed that that was the cure or something. To be honest if I thought that he would have paid I probably would have done it. But he never pays his bets. So for people who have not been through a eating disorder it's hard to understand that eating itself doesn't fix you. It actually causes you more distress. But it's the consistent eating and the maintaining a healthy weight that helps the brain heal. For the brain to start healing your weight and intake need to stay consistent for at least a year. I have talked about this in a previous video but in case you've missed it I'll talk about it briefly here. Your brain is the last thing to be healed. As it needs to be able to trust your body to be providing it with adequate nutrition and not to return it to a malnourished underweight state. Eating disorders are superficial. This is probably one of the biggest misconceptions because an eating disorder is about changing your weight, changing your body. People think that it is a diet and about looks but often it can start off that way. It is often about deeper issues and about self-esteem, possibly trauma or a way of dealing with other things going on. Like for me it's about punishment. So if I feel fat or ugly then my way of dealing with it is my eating disorder. If someone upsets me I use my eating disorder. So it's not just about the superficial things, it's about everything. Just as self-harm I use as a way of punishing myself for if I feel fat or ugly or if someone upsets me it's the same with my eating. It's not just about the way I look, it's about everything. And I think that is one of the hardest things to understand for people because they do see it just as brain, superficial, diet, food, looks thing. The last thing is probably the joint biggest misconception. Is that eating disorders are a choice? No. There is no element of choice. I can understand how this is hard for people to understand. As surely the person's suffering is the one making an active choice to either restrict or purge or take laxatives. But it isn't as simple as that. The physical act of what they're doing comes from the brain and in the brain is the mental illness. It is a mental illness just as somebody with depression. Crying for example isn't a choice. They can't choose to be happy. Which, by the way, is one of my least favourite sayings. Choose happiness. You can't choose happiness. Happiness isn't a choice. Mmm. Mmm. Sometimes not always, as I've just said, there's a trauma that triggered off the eating disorder or at least contributed to it. Would you then say that it's a choice? Would you then say that it's the eating disorder suffer as fault? No. So, that is the end of this video. I hope that you found it helpful. Please like this video. Subscribe if you haven't already subscribed. Check out my blog. I am currently vlogging this week and next week. So, there'll be a video shortly, hopefully. Share this video around as well if you want. Thank you very much for watching and I will see you soon. Bye. See you next week. The next week. MMMMMM. MMMMMMMM.