Yet again I have been extremely terrible at keeping this blog up to date. Huge apologises! As I said in a previous post I had started CBT in the hope it would resolve my SED issues. Well I continued with it for a while and had limited success. I began to understand why my brain reacted the way it did to new foods and more importantly began to understand the sheer mountain I had to climb in order to beat this disorder.
I successfully managed to drink an entire small bottle of Tropicana orange juice during a session even though I found it extremely vile! But beyond that my progress was almost not existent. I found the few techniques I was given were not really suitable for food. For example one was to sit there with the food and wait until the anxiety passed and then try the food. This is based on the idea that it takes between a hour to a hour and a half for anxiety to rise and then dissipate. Now if this was sitting with a spider in a tank (which I would not do!) or something else that didn't have a time issue then it probably does work. The problem with food is if its hot it gets cold and is inedible, and it its cold it gets too warm, melts, goes off etc. So I was becoming increasingly frustrated that I wasn't making any progress and the anxiety would get so bad I would be lucky if I tried one new food a month! Added to this was the sudden announcement that I only had a set number of CBT sessions. I was over half way through my allotted sessions when I discovered this and it was acutely obvious that I was not going to make any significant progress before the sessions ran out.
Thankfully I had also joined a Facebook forum about SED and discovered a wonderful magical guy called Felix Economakis who ran a clinic in London and was a qualified hypnotherapist. He seemed to have dedicated a lot of his time studying and treating people with SED. More importantly the forum was full of people who had gone to see Felix and had been cured of their SED issues which allowed them to start the long fight to recovery. He had something like a 97% success rate and was very open about the times when it hadn't worked. He also filmed a lot of his sessions and they could be watched on You Tube. After months of reading other people's success stories and hearing the foods they were suddenly able to eat, I made the decision I had to see Felix.
I managed to get the money together for an appointment (with a little bit of help from Felix himself) and booked my appointment!! I was so excited! But I also wanted to make sure I had realistic expectations. He did not have a 100% success rate so I had to be prepared that it might not work. I also knew from the forum that some people found after a few weeks their eating issues were completely gone, while for others it took longer and required more effort. I spoke to a few of the forum members who had seen Felix recently and who had varying degrees of success, so I was as well informed as I could be. I decided to go in to the session with an open mind, and a hopeful heart.
Dad came with me to my appointment and it was his reaction to what happened which really proved to me what a dramatic change had taken place. The appointment was suppose to be 2 hours long but we had got stuck on the motorway for an hour when they closed the motorway to clear a fatal accident. So my appointment was condensed and I was concerned this would have a negative impact. I really didn't need to worry. There are three stages to the treatment which include getting you to agree to change and the final stage is the hypnosis.
I really didn't think the hypnosis had worked, but as days passed I remembered less of what had been said to me during the hypnosis and had to rely on Dad to fill in the blanks so I must have gone under! Thankfully my subconscious remembered! When I was "woken up" Felix got me to try some of the foods I had taken with me. He asks you to bring 5-6 foods to try at the end of the session that you would like to eat but couldn't. The first thing he handed me was a carton of Ribena. I took it off him - no hand shaking, no shallow breathing, feeling sick or anything - and stuck the straw in and began to drink. The shocked look on my Dad's face said it all! He had prepared himself for me to start crying and gagging etc. But nothing happened. I just drank the juice, and found it ok but a bit sweet.Then I tried a red grape, a strawberry, a piece of pineapple (which was disgusting but when Felix tried a piece he said it was vile and clearly had turned in the hot car), melon and a cherry Activia yoghurt. I was so incredibly shocked!!
After the session we went back to the car and I continued to try stuff including raw grated carrot, beetroot (yum!) and a leafy bit of lettuce that made me gag because it was so bitter. On the way home we stopped off at a Burger King to have some dinner. I still ordered my usual plain burger and fries but this time I asked for a ketchup sachet. My mind was obsessed with trying some on my fries! Now I am the girl that if there was a spot of ketchup on her burger she would be unable to eat the whole thing, and any fries with it on, would not be eaten and neither would the fries touching the fries with ketchup on! Suddenly I was putting a bit on every chip, and by the end of the meal had squirted some inside my "plain" burger! It was lovely!! My Dad just sat opposite me watching, and only commented after I had finished that he couldn't believe the difference!
It was an awesome day, but in the days that followed I was concerned it hadn't worked properly or would wear off. With a bit of encouragement from Felix and my Dad I stopped trying to test it, and just accepted it had changed and got on with it. It turns out I was not going to be one of those who completely changed in 2 -3 weeks after seeing Felix. Instead I was going to have a slower recovery, but still a recovery. As days and weeks passed I was trying at least 2 new things a day, which was a huge improvement on my CBT "one new thing a month if I was lucky"! I didn't always like what I tried, but I was trying it!
Felix had "cured" me of my anxiety and SED issues and it was now time for the hard work. The road to recovery. My taste buds were completely under developed so I needed to give them time to get use to new flavours (and still doing so). I had to get use to new textures in my mouth, smells etc. I also had to work out what I liked and didn't like! Food had suddenly become exciting!
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