This physical body gets anti-stress hormones into it from doing solah, as it contains pleasurable and honourable movements.
Stress is what crippled my body. I have 3 kids that I can’t see. I don’t have any other kids, just those 3. I’m banned from Indonesia, where they live, accused of not holding a valid visa. My visa was withheld during the pandemic and I was asked for corruption money in order to get a visa that I was actually entitled to.
More stress: I live in a place without a mosque or a musollah. I have no Muslim family members like parents, uncles, aunties, brothers, or sisters. I’m the only one from my family to enter Islam.
Trigger Warning: The content in this post may be triggering for some people as it discusses eating disorders and suffering.
Dear Readers,
Please find below a guest post by Abdullah Reed. This is a true life story, Written with great care and consideration. We are publishing this is in series. It will be followed by two more posts. We thank Abullah Reed for this series in recovery from Eating Disorder.
Five Tips for Eating Disorder
Recovery
Tip 1: Engage Islam
I hope you’ll praise Allah as you read these words. Praise be to Allah for his blessings. Praise be to Allah for Islam.
Thanks be to Allah for Islam. InshaaAllah, do thank Him too.
The solution that transcends the causes of eating disorders, as well as promoting the actions required to overcome them, is our religion.
Islam has all the answers. It does not remove the need for knowledge of food or the need for various therapies. On the contrary, it enables us to embrace those two needs without getting lost in them.
The need for knowledge is paramount. Eating must be an intelligent act. Chapter 5 of the Qur’an, Al Maa’idah, teaches us this.
We need religious values. Food issues can’t be truly resolved without patience, goodness, charity, and gratitude. These values – patience, goodness, charity, and gratitude – are essential – have significant connections to our eating, immunological function, and metabolism.
Now, pay attention, InshaaAllah. The list of values given above provides direction. The next point, though, is that Islam also provides rhythm. Rhythm is different from direction.
Islamic practices support good health, and the level of support can be adjusted. For those who need strong support, Islam will come with strong support, InshaaAllah.
Support is needed because there are real pressures in this world that are tests for us and are there to make us do the wrong thing.
Well, because there really are barriers to good health, we need something that will work for us and struggle for us. What I mean by struggle is keep on working until the job is done.
I found that a big part of overcoming my problems was struggle. Struggling is very familiar to Islam, so I say Islam is suited to overcoming eating disorders.
There may be internal barriers, and there may be external barriers that are causing eating issues.
The internal barriers include diseases, trauma, injuries, infections, inflammation, allergies, psychological patterns, ideas, and habits.
External barriers include peers, lifestyles, financial barriers, availability of halal food, wrong science, abusive situations, stress, and the weather, and Islam has solutions for all those challenges.
Tip 2: Memorise verses of the Qur’an about eating
Alhamdulillah, I have memorised verses 2:168-173, 5:100, and used them in solah frequently.
Surah ar Rahman and other surahs about the foods of Paradise and Hell are also absolutely included on the list.
Their message must reach our minds and reach our hearts, and bring us to action.
In shaa Allah, these portrayals of dining, dining as it is in Paradise and in Hell, will be able to generate big shifts in our notions of what ideals to hold about eating, and drinking, and what to avoid, in shaa Allah.
Allah says in surah al Ghaashiah:
In The Name of Allah, The Most Gracious, The Most Merciful
They will enter in the hot blazing Fire,
They will be given to drink from a boiling spring,
No food will there be for them but a poisonous thorny plant,
Which will neither nourish nor avail against hunger.
Al Ghaashiah, verses 4 – 7
These verses of the Qur’an align us with the light and help us to be non-aligned with the darkness.
Surahs Quraysh, Al Ma’uun, and al Kauthar also address this area and will probably assist Muslims with eating disorders.
Memorising and reciting relevant verses from the Qur’an is probably the best thing anyone can do to improve their eating behaviour.
It is important to contemplate these verses as well, either by reading tafsirs or by other methods, so that they have a significant effect when heard.
Tip 3: Pray standing up
Do not begin doing solah kneeling unless you literally cannot stand up safely.
I did so, and I only got worse. When I was under 60kg, I was a bit wobbly standing up, but not too wobbly to pray.
I never just fell over. I was not unable to stand, even though it seemed tiring to stand when I was at my lowest point.
In retrospect, I think I should not have allowed myself to pray not standing up. I think allowing myself to pray kneeling was taken as a luxury, not a necessity.
Saving my energy for myself instead of giving it to Allah probably contributed to my blood production failure, because Allah owns me, my energy, and my blood, and I was denying Him access to them. He is my only Lord. He owns all my energy. All of it. He must have access to it. All of it. He has the right to give me energy or not. I should be grateful for every blood cell and every molecule of cellular energy, because none of it came by my own work. He has given me all my energy from the day I was born until now.
What creates the obligation to stand up? When I was an infant I did not have to do it.
As a person becomes an adult, they have to develop sound beliefs and have to develop from that belief a position of service of the Lord. We know it as tasleem, or the action of submission.
From there, we should know that we have to worship Allah.
From there, we have to think about when, where, and how to serve Allah. Devotion must carry us to a willing and trusting sevice, pleased to worship Allah. That brings us to the solah and to other obligations.
Knowing that He has commanded it is the real driver. The certainty must be there. If one is not sure, then there is more right to refrain from an act. However, if there is no doubt about the command, then refraining is denying Allah.
So, be sure that the prayer is obliged, and be sure of what is in it. I’m not a sunni Muslim or a shia, and I do not claim to know everything about solah, but I believe that it should be done standing because the word for standing is used in the Quran.
I don’t mean just “establish”, which is aqaama yaqiimu, but also qaama yaquumu, which means to stand.
We cannot deny Allah without a genuine reason.
Keeping solah is a way of worshipping Allah physically as well as mentally, sentimentally, and spiritually.
This physical body gets anti-stress hormones into it from doing solah, as it contains pleasurable and honourable movements.
Stress is what crippled my body. I have 3 kids that I can’t see. I don’t have any other kids, just those 3. I’m banned from Indonesia, where they live, accused of not holding a valid visa. My visa was withheld during the pandemic and I was asked for corruption money in order to get a visa that I was actually entitled to.
More stress: I live in a place without a mosque or a musollah. I have no muslim family members like parents, uncles, aunties, brothers, or sisters. I’m the only one from my family to enter Islam.
Permitting myself to pray with the minimum energy was wrong. I devote my energy to the prayer, now, like I devote my mind. Allah is worthy of my energy, like He is worthy of my time, worthy of my thought, and worthy of my testimony.
Stress causes a plant or an animal to reduce normal functioning. Once a fortnight my mother asks me to leave her house and move somewhere else. I am called a number of things, above all psychologically sick.
This was finally resolved for me when the psychiatrist seeing me as part of the hospital’s follow up program stopped my visits because I had no mental illness. That was after about 4 or 5 one hour regular sessions. He was focused on helping me to recover my eating and get strong enough to work. The problem was that there are a lot of people who need his services, and I was healing. He said I needed support, not constant criticism.
After she kicks me out, she then says I must not leave. It is to destabilise me, and it is very destabilising.
My mother is almost 80. She has no husband, brothers, sisters, parents or other close relatives alive. She has one other child, but
She then buys me premium dates and organic figs, using her money for what will win my support, not for the nutrition I really need.
Alhamdulillah, since my hospitalisation and in depth focus on nutrition she has changed and will buy fish, chicken, meat, or vegetables ahead of sweet favourites.
Sadly, it was not my own direct calls for these things that really reached her but my relay to my mother of the hospital dietitian’s calls. The dietitian requested that I eat animal sourced food 3 times a day. I said my body has never been great with protein, but I thought I could do once a day or more and if that did not give me diarrhoea, I might increase to twice a day, and so on.
I didn’t have to eat so much animal-derived protein. The average was 10 meals a week with animal-derived food, and always cooked with spices or herbs, rarely with salt, mostly home-cooked, not burgers or other junky foods.
I often meditated after eating meat, thanking Allah for the flavours and textures I had enjoyed. Eventually all the old cravings for sugary breakfast cereals and other childhood favourites faded into a background, simply far behind the desire for nutritious food.
They do not surface like they did before. Even if I am shouted at or whatever, I don’t go for those things.
In the interim period, if I was hungry, I would go and buy a tub of plain cream and some well made bread and consume the 300 ml of cream with the bread, sometimes whipping the cream. I did not add sugar. I would prefer digestive spices to sugar: caraway, cardamom, and licorice powder with white dairy foods.
I would also mix the cream with a little sugar-free jam or with berries, if I could get them, or with nothing at all.
Sometimes I had raw cloves with milk to heal and aid the lining of the gut.
It brings me to the next tip.
Tip 4: Appreciate your food
This is a command from Allah. This command is fundamental, not peripheral.
He says, subhaanahu wa ta’ala:
In The Name of Allah, The Most Gracious, The Most Merciful
O you who believe! Eat of the good things that We have provided you with, and be grateful to God, if it is indeed He Whom you worship.
Al Baqarah, verse 172
This verse employs the same phrase as al Fatiha. Compare:
In kuntum iyyaahu ta’buduun If it is really Him that you worship
Iyyaka na’budu It is really You that we worship
The point is so strong and so clear that I’m afraid to say it in case you are not listening or you ignore it.
Its saying that if you are not grateful for the good things you eat, you are not really worshipping Allah. It also says that if you do not take from the good things, passing them up for bad food, you are not really worshipping Allah.
Tip 5: Spice your food
Learn to use herbs and spices, and to learn to consume them according to what really works.
This is a topic that could take up a small encyclopaedia.
Every spice and every herb has a unique profile. Value them, and make a big effort to get the maximum benefits from them that you can.
Realise that Allah subhaanahu wa ta’ala has created them with purpose, and that permitting them is a blessing for us that must not be ignored.
In The Name of God, The Most Gracious, The Most Merciful
And the earth He has put for the creatures,
Therein is fruit and palms with sheathed clusters,
and grain growing tall on its stalks, and sweet-smelling plants.
Which, then, of your Sustainer’s powers can you disavow?
Ar Rahmaan, verses 10 – 13
Replace sugar and salt with spices and herbs. This is key to eating right.
Learn to grow them, learn to buy them well, and learn to uee them well.
Your story is one of the most powerful stories to date. The last submission of such strength was from India, anorexic boy of Delhi.
We never advise people, because we feel it should come from heart. Your story comes from heart and it’s perfect.
Please do edit and if you consent we can add your story in our book. Which Inshallah should be completed in 2024.
About your story.. Please, if you could speak about:
The importance of the mother and son relationship
How important is having a strong female figure in man’s life
Verses from Qur’an
Five tips to people in recovery
You just gained enough weight to be ok. But do you ever get thoughts of relapse?
Also why is it more men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders?
Male masculinity by the media. Does it impact you?
