How to treat eating disorders | Good advices

I struggled with ednos (eating disorder not specified), I had symptoms of anorexia and bulimia. I starved myself for extended periods of time and exercised excessively (common in anorexia) and then binged and purged (bulimia), I was also obsessed with counting calories. Thinking back to that time, I mostly wanted people to ask about my relationship to my body and how I felt about myself. I think at that time, you're very vulnerable and want to talk about your viewpoints even if you know or are told they're not true. For a person with an ED it can be invalidating to hear they look fine, because they don't think they do. In my experience that was the case. I wanted to tell people how I felt about myself, how much I'd exercised in excess and mostly I wanted someone to tell me "I see your effort. I see what you're doing, I know you're exercising instead of sleeping and you're trying so hard. But friend, you don't have to try so hard. You don't have to repeatedly punish yourself." The process of EDs can be long or short, depending on the person. It often involves learning self-compassion and staying away from pro-ED communities online (and instead looking for body positive communities if that helps) and getting rid of the scale. The latter helped me a lot. Ultimately I think rather than advice, I just wanted to be seen, heard and validated. I think that's most important. Of course, you can ask about their meals, too. But someone who's in the middle of an ED may not feel ready to recover. You have to meet them where they're at. What's also important is to understand what caused their ED, often times it's because of bullying or critical people around them but not always, it could be due to a different trauma. Either way, they may want to talk about that (how long have you had an ED? What happened around that time in your life?), understand that not everyone may be comfortable with talking about that initially. I hope this helps somewhat!

@BlueOasis420 Figure out what ppl are motivated by. My "good trigger" was my motivation to do weight lifting: Lift heavier, get in better shape and build muscle. And I couldn't do that as well, when I wasn't eating (atypical anorexia). That has helped me a lot :)