 Hi, welcome back. I'm Pookie and today I'm going to be sharing with you eight ideas for successful meal times when you are in recovery from an eating disorder. I hope this is going to be helpful to you if you are yourself in recovery or if you're supporting someone who is. So number one is plan. Plan ahead. Think about what you're going to eat, where you're going to eat it, who you're going to eat it with and when you're going to eat it. Think about all these questions ahead of time. You want to take all the decision-making out of the actual meal. Now you might have a whole team of people that you're working with on this depending on where you are in your recovery and what support you have. So you might have a dietician involved, you might have a therapist involved. All sorts of different people might be involved, but plan, plan, plan, plan, makes it so much easier when it comes to the meal. Next one is routine. That kind of goes with the planning, but think really carefully about trying to build your meals and your snacks into your daily routine. Now in the early days of recovery, the most important thing that you can do is to be on top of your meals. And so when you're planning your diary, the meals and the snacks go in there first. They're the big things and everything else slots around them. That can feel pretty tough when you've got lots of other competing demands on your time. But this is the most important thing and it's also the thing that we often let slip the most easily as well because let's be honest, we don't always want to keep on top of it, but we have to. We must put the meals first, so routine really helps with that. Give yourself a time slot within which you're going to eat your meal or your snack and know that if you haven't managed to do it in that time that you need to bring in the reinforcements and think about what that might be. Number three is to allow adequate time. So like I say, you're going to put your meals and your snacks in your diary first before anything else and you want to be realistic about how long it might take you to eat each of those things and how long it might take you to prepare for that and how long it might take you to de-escalate afterwards. It can take longer than you think. Sometimes you're eating, you know, one being at a time or whatever. And that's OK if that's where you're at, but you must allow yourself adequate time so you're not getting stressed about the other places you need to be, the people you need to see, things you need to do, etc. Give yourself adequate time. The next is to try and get yourself in the right frame of mind before meal time. So when we're planning, we want to think about that time just before meals and think about what can I do in that time to ensure that my head is in the best possible space when I enter into the meal. We want to be as calm as possible and feeling as positive as possible because heaven knows, meal times can be very, very hard. The next one, number five is you're going to have to be pretty hard on yourself. Yeah, sorry about that. There's no two ways about it. When we're in recovery from an eating disorder, we will be thinking really carefully about how much and how often we need to eat. And we've got to try really hard to stick with that because you give yourself an inch, then you'll take a mile. And, you know, one moment you're skipping a few mouthfuls of a meal. The next minute it's been a week and you haven't eaten according to your plan. And that's just not OK. So you've got to be really hard on yourself. You're going to plan ahead, what you're going to do, and then you've got to trust in the process, trust in yourself, your former self who made this plan and try really, really hard to stick with it. Put in place whatever you need to, whoever you need to, in order to try and help you stick with that plan, but try so hard to stick with it. It's really easy for things to kind of fall out of control if we don't stick with the plan and do the things that we've agreed that we're going to do. Number six kind of goes with number five. And that is that we need to have strategies for calming ourselves during the meal time. So because we're going to be pushing ourselves and trying really hard to do what we've set out to do, that might mean that we get angry or sad or anxious. There's loads of big feelings that we might have now. Think ahead about what strategies might help you to calm during a meal time. Also think about if there's anyone who can eat with you who might be supportive and talk with them ahead of time about what they can do that's supportive if you were to become very sad or angry or anxious. There's again, loads of different things that might work for you, but it might be that you have calming music to hand or putty to play with or colouring or whatever it might be, whatever works for you. But plan ahead, think about it at a time of calm so that during the meal, if your mood escalates, then you can put those strategies into place. It's all about preparing ahead. Number seven is to think about the time after the meal. This is a time when we are at risk of either purging or harming ourselves because we either feel guilty and want to get rid of the calories or we feel very anxious and our mood's gone out of control and so we might end up self harming. It's a really difficult time. So it's great if we can be accompanied during that time and also good if we can think about specific activities that will allow us to get our headspace back into a good place, to allow our mood to level again and get us ready to continue with the rest of our day. So think carefully about what's the best thing for you to do after your meal. Think really carefully about that kind of 30 minutes or so afterwards about what helps you just to get back on an even keel ready to face your day again. OK, and finally, number eight is that we should be regularly reviewing and replanning what we're doing, but don't do that directly after the meal. Let some time pass and then look back at the meal and think, what went well? What went less well? What can I learn from that? What do I need to change and adapt as a result of that meal? We want to be constantly learning, but we need to wait until our head is calm and we're no longer in that state of directly after a meal before we try and get our learning from it because you're in no place to learn during a meal or directly after it because there's just so many competing emotions going on. Just talking about it's making me slightly stressed. So good luck and we're kind of all on this journey together. I am eight, nine months now, a healthy weight in my recovery journey from anorexia again and mealtimes are sometimes easy, sometimes hard. But all of these ideas really, really help. So both professionally and personally, you're in my thoughts. Keep fighting and take each meal one at a time. Learn what you can from it and try really, really hard to stick with the goals and the aims that you've set yourself. And if you're someone who is supporting someone who's recovering from an eating disorder, thank you, people like you make life so, so much better and easier for people like me and the many other people who are watching this. Good luck with the journey. Keep fighting and let me know what you thought of the video. Take a moment to like, comment, share, subscribe and I'll see you next time. Bye.