http://www.katimorton.com/

Coping with the Holidays! - Eating Disorder Video #7

The holidays can be stressful for anyone, but especially someone with an eating disorder. If you think about it, everything we do around any holiday involves food, and is therefore stressful for anyone who has a difficult time with food. The purpose of this video is to offer three helpful tips to assist you in dealing with the holidays. The first tip is to journal about the stress and anxiety. This can give you a safe place to vent and express your concerns and/or frustrations with the holidays. Just make sure you keep it with you so that you can always jot down things you may want to write more on later and also so that you can journal wherever you are. The second tip is to keep your relaxing music mix with you and accessible at all times. When you start to feel the anxiety of going to dinner at a friend or families house creep up on you, turn on this mix. It will be most helpful if you take the time to place songs that you could fall asleep to/breathe deeply and relax to. The last tip to help you with the holidays is to step away. As we all know, holiday events can be unpredictable. Maybe we thought we would be eating at 5 and it is 7 and the food is still not ready and now you feel like binging etc. Sometimes it can help to just step away from everyone for a moment and take a deep breath and relax. Maybe take someone's coat into the coat room for them and stay in there for an extra minute or two. Sometimes all we need is just a moment to gather our strength. Also, so not hesitate to comment below or follow me on twitter so that we can start to create a safe place to talk and comment about our struggles and our successes so that we can help each other get closer to a healthy mind, healthy body. It is my hope that leveraging social media whether it is YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn can help me reach more people and spread the word about eating disorders and how destructive they can be to the people who suffer from them as well as those closest to them.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey! It's Kati again.

Well here we are in the midst of the holidays and it is crazy. Everybody's freaking out. People are freaking out that don't even have eating disorders to deal with, so I understand you're really stressed out.

And that's ok.

I know that a lot of times we have a lot of trouble around the holidays because everything seems to revolve around food meeting with friends to give gifts over food Thanksgiving is a meal. Christmas is a meal a lot of times followed by another meal. And then we have New Year's which can be about food and drink from midday all the way through midnight. So I know you're freaking out. It's okay I'm gonna give you three tips and coping skills to get you through it and I know this will help trust me, I have worked with hundreds of patients and these are definitely really helpful tips...

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