00:00:00

Intro

00:02:06

Why does delaying your eating happen with eating disorders?

00:04:55

Why it’s a problem: energy depletion

00:06:30

Why it’s a problem: unpleasant hunger symptoms

00:11:35

Why it’s a problem: talking yourself out of a change

00:14:29

This is true for all kinds of eating disorders

00:00:00

Intro

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 293 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/293.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help people to fully recover.

One thing I just want to mention before we get on with today’s show is I have recently expanded my team, and as part of that, it has created a little bit of room in my calendar, and so I now have two spots available for private coaching or one-on-one work with me with new clients. I haven’t taken on any new clients for over six months, so this is a rare opportunity for this to come up.

I truly believe that you can have a life where you get to call the shots, not the eating disorder. You can have fun and joy-filled days where thoughts about food and weight and exercise no longer dominate your mind. Full recovery is possible, and after working with clients for over 15 years, I’m very good at helping people to achieve this.

So if you are tired of living with an eating disorder and you are ready to do what it takes to reach a place of full recovery and complete freedom, I would love to help. You can just email info@seven-health.com. Just email the word ‘coaching’ and I can then send over the further details. As I said, there’s only two spots available, and this is what’s going on at the point at which I’m recording this intro, so I don’t know what will be available at the point of this podcast going out. But if you are interested in getting one-on-one coaching, getting that level of support, having someone there in your corner to help you reach that place of full recovery, then please email info@seven-health.com; email in the word ‘coaching’.

00:02:06

Why does delaying your eating happen with eating disorders?

So, on with today’s show. It is another solo episode, and one of the things I wanted to talk about, and the title and the focus of this episode, is on the problem with delaying your eating. This is a really, really common thing that happens with eating disorders.

There can be this feeling that “If I wait until later in the day, then it will feel much easier to eat a particular food.” This could be “It will feel easier because I have then earnt it by delaying it, by putting it off, by holding off, by showing willpower. That’s why it will be then easier, because I’ll have earned it.” It may feel easier because there’s then less hours in the day left, so “I’m not having this thing first thing in the morning and then having to deal with it all throughout the day. This is getting closer to the latter part of the day, so it feels safer to be able to do this.” There can be this eating disorder convincing of “Once you have everything done, once you’ve done everything else in your day, then you’ll feel so much better when you allow yourself this thing and you’re going to enjoy it so much more.”

So there can be lots of reasons why this delaying occurs – and this can be delaying when we’re thinking about what’s happening in your everyday eating, but it can also be this tendency when I’m thinking about making a change. I’m starting to make some pro recovery changes, I want to get started with my recovery, I want to really make a difference to what I’m doing, and then when I think about “Okay, let me make this change to my food”, the tendency is like “Let me do that later in the day. Let me change my dinner, or let me change my post-dinner snack, or let me just try and do this as late as possible.”

I know this from talking with clients; the earlier in the day we’re talking about making a change, the harder it often is. And this isn’t true for everyone. There’s many clients where actually, they eat better in the earlier part of the day. They feel like they have more freedom in the earlier part of the day and then it gets more challenging as the day goes on. But I would say they’re probably more in the minority, and what is much more typical is that it feels easier to delay, it feels easier to push off things, and it feels easier to eat later in the day rather than earlier in the day.

The reason why it can be such a problem to delay this eating – and again, this is true whether we’re talking about actually making a new change or just there is a tendency to delay your eating – there’s a number of reasons why I’m against doing this, or I would like to suggest that there are some better ways to be able to do it.

00:04:55

Why it’s a problem: energy depletion

The first one I want to mention is that the more that you delay, the more energy depleted you become. There’s less energy that is coming in during the day. If you’re living with an eating disorder and this has been going on for a long time, you’re probably in quite an energy-depleted state already, but as the day goes on and you’re having to do activities as part of that day, whether that be work, whether that be looking after kids, whatever it is in your day, the longer you’re then pushing off that eating or eating only a small amount earlier in the day and leaving more for later on, the more depleted you’re getting. You’re getting into a more low-energy state.

And the lower energy state that you get in, often the more unpleasant that becomes, the louder the eating disorder thoughts can get. It can become then more difficult to eat later on and more difficult to follow through on a change. So if someone says, “Hey, I’m going to make this change – I’m going to make a change, for example, to my afternoon snack”, and yet there’s all this delay that’s gone on throughout the day, when we then get to afternoon snack and we’re bringing in something new for that snack, because you’re in this more depleted state, it becomes much more difficult to follow through on that. As I said, the eating disorder thoughts are louder. There can be a lot more uncomfortableness within the body. So it becomes more challenging to follow through on this.

00:06:30

Why it’s a problem: unpleasant hunger symptoms

Another thing that the eating disorder will often say with this is that “If we leave it until later, we’re going to feel hungrier, and when we feel hungrier we’re going to be able to enjoy it more.” The problem with this is, unfortunately, many of the hunger symptoms that people actually feel, and especially as you get more and more hungry, even if you’re not necessarily noticing you’re getting more and more hungry – these symptoms are actually quite unpleasant, and they don’t actually make for a better eating experience. So there’s this imagined experience where “I’m going to hold off eating and then I’m going to have this nice feeling of hunger come up. I’m going to feel this nice experience of hunger, and then when I eat this food it’s going to be really enjoyable.”

But what really happens is that there are all these symptoms that come up and actually make you feel more unpleasant, and that’s unpleasant before the eating experience and it can be still unpleasant while having that eating experience. And as I said, a lot of these symptoms, people don’t necessarily recognise as hunger symptoms because they’re not the obvious pit in the stomach or growly stomach or things that are making them feel like “Oh, this is hunger because it’s in the stomach region.” They can be lots of other things.

I’m going to read through a list of some other symptoms – and these things are very common. I want you to imagine, if you are experiencing these symptoms, are they likely to make the eating experience more enjoyable?

Acid reflux is one of them. You have this real burning acid reflux feeling. You can get nausea or carsickness type feeling. There can be a headache, heart palpitations.

There can be a lot of thoughts about food. And this isn’t thoughts about food in a very nice, enjoyable, “Oh, I can’t wait. This is going to be really fun to get to eat this thing.” It can either feel sort of binge-like or “I’m absolutely consumed with these thoughts”, or there are these thoughts here and now I’m having all these judgments about the fact that I’m having these thoughts. It’s not just unabashed excitement about “Yay, I get to eat this food.” There’s all this stuff that is there. “Yeah, I’m having a lot of thoughts about food, but it’s not in a particularly pleasant way.”

Then there can be dizziness or light-headedness. You can have this weak or shaky feeling. Irritability. You can be very agitated. There can be a lot of indecisiveness – and this can be indecisiveness connected to lots of things from a work perspective, but it can be also very indecisive connected to making decisions around food. That then has an impact on your ability to enjoy it, because there’s all this questioning of “Did I make the right decision? Should I really be having this now? What if I added this other thing in or switched out this bar for this other bar?” There’s all of this thought that is going on.

There can be a lot of anxiety that is there. There can be nervousness. There can be really low mood. There can be anger. There can be frustration.

So if you’re experiencing some of or a lot of these symptoms, these do not make for a more pleasant eating experience. And for the regular person who doesn’t have an eating disorder, these are symptoms that they can experience too, if they go too long between meals. Like, I know for myself, if I go way too long between meals, these are the kinds of things that I experience, and I can tell you it doesn’t then make eating enjoyable when I do it. It actually makes eating a lot less enjoyable. The experience isn’t as good. I’m just very much more in my head and I’m trying to just get some energy in to get out of this place, but it’s not that I very much enjoy that experience.

This is typically what is happening when you’re continuing to push off eating. So then eating doesn’t really live up to being this amazing thing that you hoped it would be, and then you just get stuck in this loop, and then the same thing happens again and again and again.

I actually had a recent call with a client, and it was very obvious that she was in this state while we were having the call. As the call went on, I could see her state getting worse and worse connected to this. And it was true; she hadn’t eaten very much that day. By the end of the call, when we were trying to figure out what should be the goals, the capacity for her to be able to do that was just completely gone. It was so evident as an outsider how much she was being impacted upon by this. In her mind, there was much more of “I’m going to have all this more freedom by pushing this eating off and I’m going to enjoy it so much more by doing it this way.” And that just really isn’t true.

00:11:35

Why it’s a problem: talking yourself out of a change

The other reason why I think the delaying of eating can be such a problem is that the longer you think about making a change, the more likely the eating disorder will start to talk you out of this. This doesn’t mean that you have to be spontaneous with everything, because I think equally that is a disaster, if you’re like “I’ll just turn up to that snack and I will decide in the moment what I’m going to have.” That may be appropriate for someone who is much further along in their recovery and they have the capacity to be able to do that, but for someone who is earlier on in their recovery, if that is the approach that is taken, what will most likely happen is you get to that snack, you then have this almost freeze state, there’s so much indecision, and then you don’t know what to do.

There is this sweet spot in terms of being able to plan things out and to be able to say, “Okay, tomorrow this is what I’m going to be having for my breakfast” or “This is what I’m going to have for my snack” and deciding that in advance and making that a non-negotiable so that when you then turn up at that meal or that snack, you aren’t deciding “What am I going to have?” It’s “I’m turning up and I’m going to have the thing that I’ve already decided in advance.”

As I said, this is what is appropriate at one stage of recovery, and then later on we can move on to more making those snap or spontaneous decisions.

But when I say that the longer you think about making the change, the more likely you’ll talk yourself out of it, this again is very much dependent upon your level of energy depletion. What typically happens is “I’m going to have this new snack in the afternoon and that’s what I’m going to do and that’s when I’m going to challenge myself. And because I’m doing that in the afternoon, maybe I should do some compensation in the morning to make that a little better. Or maybe I push my breakfast back a little bit. Or maybe I have a little less for my breakfast.”

There are all these things that start to happen as a way of trying to compensate for the fact that I’m making this new change, and the end result is that you get into a more low-energy state. And as you’re getting into more of that low-energy state, there is more of the anxiety that’s coming up, there’s more of this anticipation anxiety, knowing that this is what I’m having to do in the afternoon, and the more you then get into that place where the eating disorder is likely to talk you out of it.

So it’s not that you can’t plan things. It’s not that you can’t actually make a change that is later in the day. But it’s more a problem if by choosing making a change later in the day, there are these other changes that take place earlier on that get you into more of that energy-depleted state.

00:14:29

This is true for all kinds of eating disorders

I also want to say with all of this, this is very true not just for someone who is suffering with anorexia. This is true for someone who suffers with bulimia. This is true for someone who suffers with binge eating disorder. The likelihood of someone having a binge or someone having a binge and a purge is much more heightened the more energy depleted they get. The more hungry someone gets, and even if they’re not recognising it as hunger, the more likely those things are going to occur.

So again, if someone is in recovery and they’re in recovery from bulimia or they’re in recovery from binge eating disorder, we’re still going to be looking at how do we make changes earlier in the day, or how do we bring in more food consistently so that you’re not getting into this low-energy state, which is then going to be making it more likely that these things occur.

So I really want to point that out because if you’re hearing this message and thinking “Well, that only applies to someone who is restricting all the time or who has anorexia”, that is not true. This is really the case for everyone where restriction and undereating is involved as part of their eating disorder – and I would typically tell you that that is true for everyone with an eating disorder.

This is quite a short episode, but it was just something that came to mind and something that’s come up a lot with clients recently, so I wanted to mention it.

That’s it for this one. As I mentioned at the top, I have two spots that have opened up in terms of private coaching. If you are interested, please send an email to info@seven-health.com with the word ‘coaching’ in the title, and then I can get that information over to you.

Have a wonderful week. Have a wonderful Easter if you celebrate Easter. If you do, I hope you eat lots of chocolate and enjoy yourself! And I will catch you next week.