Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Coping and support
By Mayo Clinic staffYou may find it difficult to cope with anorexia when you're hit with mixed messages by the media, culture, and perhaps your own family or friends. You may even have heard people joke that they wish they could have anorexia for a while so that they could lose weight.
So how do you cope with a disease that can be deadly when you may be getting messages that being thin is a sign of success?
- Remind yourself what a healthy weight is for your body, especially at times when you see images that may trigger your desire to restrict calories.
- Don't visit pro-anorexia Web sites. These sites can encourage you to maintain dangerous habits and trigger relapses. Anorexia isn't a lifestyle choice. It's a disease, and it's probably controlling your life.
- Acknowledge that you may not be the best judge of whether you're eating enough or are at a healthy weight.
- Identify situations that are likely to trigger thoughts or behavior that may contribute to your anorexia so that you can develop a plan of action to deal with them.
- Look for positive role models, even if they're not easy to find. Remind yourself that the ultrathin models or actors showcased in women's magazines or gossip magazines often don't represent healthy bodies.
- Don't call anorexia your friend. That kind of self-deception can kill you.
