00:00:00

Intro

00:02:20

What is the ‘healthiest’ way to recover?

00:05:49

What does it really mean to be healthy?

00:09:53

Health is not just physical

00:12:20

Seeking the ‘healthiest’ recovery is an eating disorder thought

00:16:53

What to focus on instead

00:23:10

So what is truly the healthiest way to recover?

00:00:00

Intro

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 279 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/279.

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 clients to fully recover.

Before we get started with today’s episode, I just want to mention a couple of things. One is this is another episode where I’m just doing it off the cuff. I’ve put down some notes and I’ve turned on the microphone, and I’m just going to record and see what comes out. I did this last time and I asked for feedback from people and how they felt about the episode, and I got lots of really lovely, kind comments and lots of people saying that they would like to hear more of these kinds of episodes. So yeah, I’m really glad that that’s how it came across. When I listened to it again, I was also pleasantly surprised and pleased with how it sounded. So yeah, I’m going to be doing more of these.

The second thing I want to mention is that I’m currently taking on clients. At the point of recording this, I have just two spots left. The last day I’m going to be accepting applications for new clients is the 10th of August, so it’ll be about a week from when this comes out. I want to focus on serving clients that I take on, and I also just opened up my practice for new clients at very limited times throughout the year. This will be most likely the last time I take on clients this year, so if this is something that you want help with, then you can go to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can find details about how I work with clients and apply for a free recovery strategy call so we can figure out where you want to get to in recovery, if we’re a good fit, and then we can go from there.

00:02:20

What is the ‘healthiest’ way to recover?

Today on the podcast, what I’m wanting to cover is one of the things that comes up a lot with clients and I believe is also something that gets in the way for many people in terms of either just starting recovery or starting recovery and then becoming stuck or paralysed about what to do. This is the idea of “What is the ‘healthiest’ way to recover?” or trying to do recovery in the ‘healthiest’ possible way.

What this typically looks like is people taking their ideas of what they believe to be ‘healthy’ and then trying to do recovery in that way. So “I want to do recovery, but I want to eat ‘healthy’ food”, whatever healthy food means to that individual. Or “I want to do recovery but I want to avoid unhealthy food; I want to avoid sugar or carbohydrates or bread” or whatever may be someone’s definition of what an ‘unhealthy food’ is.

Or connected to this, there’s a lot around health and weight. So “I want to recover in the healthiest possible way” can also mean “I want to recover while eating the least amount of calories to help me to recover. I don’t want to go over some amount,” so there’s this idea that there’s this perfect amount of food to help me recover, and I don’t want to have one calorie more than that. I’m aiming for this ‘Goldilocks’ amount of energy to help me to recover. There can be this real idea of “I’m trying to recover” but focusing on doing that while not gaining weight or not gaining ‘too much’ weight.

It can mean “I’m wanting to recover in the healthiest possible way, so I’m going to be exercising while I’m recovering, and I’m going to be exercising and building muscle, and that means the gains that I make aren’t going to be about fat; they’re going to be about muscle because I believe that building muscle is the healthy way to recover.”

There can be many different variations of this, and maybe for you, you sit down and reflect, “What do I think of as being ‘healthy’, and what are some of the ideas I believe need to be there for me to do recovery in the healthiest possible way?”

What I would say is that the majority of these are going to be connected to the idea of restriction, and really all the ones that I’ve gone through already are connected to restriction in some way. It’s trying to recover, but doing so in eating disorder approved ways. It’s trying to recover, but “I still want to keep a lot of the same rules and ideas that are already here because it feels uncomfortable to try and change them”.

What happens when someone tries to recover in this way is typically, they don’t get very far.

00:05:49

What does it really mean to be healthy?

One of the things I think can be useful to reflect on is, what does health really mean? What does it really mean to be healthy? I’m going to give some of my ideas connected to this, because I think it can be important, and I think that sometimes there can be skewed ideas about what it means to be healthy, and a lot of that is because of the eating disorder.

When I think about the idea of health, the first thing that comes to mind is that it needs to be context-specific. When we’re saying, “I want to do something in more of a healthy way,” we have to look at, what is the context of those steps that over time morph into an eating disorder? What are they trying to resolve as part of this? If I’m thinking about someone from an eating disorder perspective, what they’re trying to resolve is not having an eating disorder – trying to nutritionally rehabilitate.

And in that context, we can think about healthy food very differently, because healthy food is the food that is going to help you to get in the energy that your body needs to nutritionally rehabilitate. It is the food that you need to eat so that you’re able to get over the eating disorder, so that you are no longer afraid of certain foods.

That means that healthy food in this context can mean ‘processed’ food. It can mean ‘junk’ food. It can mean ‘sugar’. All of these things that we tend to, or society tends to, think of as unhealthy, in the context of eating disorder recovery, are some of the healthiest foods that someone can eat. I’m not saying that then when you’re no longer in an eating disorder, that you’re not allowed to eat any of these foods, that these foods then become unhealthy. That’s definitely not what I’m saying. But in the context of an eating disorder, these foods that we tend to demonise become the healthiest foods that someone could be eating.

Again, if we’re thinking about what health means, it means helping to alleviate symptoms that are already there. If there are symptoms in an eating disorder, as I’ve talked about many times, so much of that is driven by nutritional deficiencies, by being in a malnourished state. So foods that help to bring in energy and help the body to repair are then going to be healthy foods.

If you, for example, eat a pizza and it then helps you to have the best night’s sleep that you’ve had in a long time because your body has got in really good amounts of energy that it needs, that pizza is a very healthy food and is very useful in helping to alleviate those symptoms.

There is not going to always be this very obvious, black-and-white thing with this. For example, there could be food that is eaten that increases some digestive issues because there’s more food coming in than has come in for a long time. So digestive issues increase in the short term, but by doing this, there is more energy that comes in that allows other symptoms to start to improve. So across the long haul, this starts to really make a difference. These types of foods can be then thought of as being incredibly healthy in this context of health being about alleviating symptoms.

00:09:53

Health is not just physical

We can think about health more broadly than just the physical body, but also the mental and emotional body. Health is about having real psychological flexibility, so eating foods that mean that with time you have more psychological flexibility is increasing health. Again, eating ‘processed’ food or ‘junk’ food that then means that over time you’re no longer fearful of this food is increasing your psychological flexibility and is therefore increasing your health.

Health is about other things outside of food as well. Health is about social connection. It’s about experiencing joy. It’s not just about the foods that we have coming into our body. For so many of the clients I work with, the eating disorder is incredibly isolating. It means that they aren’t seeing friends or family in the way that they used to, or even if they’re still seeing them on a regular basis, their ability to really be present in those moments and be able to get the most out of that time and that enjoyment with those other people is diminished. Doing things that allow that to change is then really helpful in terms of increasing someone’s health.

Meaningful work is healthy and has an impact on someone’s overall health. Again, if you’re in an energy-depleted state, if you’re stuck in an eating disorder, it can have an impact on your ability to enjoy work, to find meaningful work, to be able to be present and have the energy and the focus and the concentration to do this kind of work. So again, doing things that then allow you to increase your ability to do this kind of meaningful work increases health.

What I find happens all too often when we think about this idea of health is this very narrow idea of what health or healthy means, as opposed to having a much broader, bigger picture view of what it means.

00:12:20

Seeking the ‘healthiest’ recovery is an eating disorder thought

I would say that the idea of trying to recover in the healthiest possible way is really an eating disorder thought. There is this feeling that has arisen, there is this uncomfortableness that has arisen, and I’m now trying to come up with an explanation for why this is.” For some people, their logical answer is “It’s about weight and I fear that I’m going to put on too much weight”, so that then becomes the reason. And there could be a lot of overlap with these; it can be multiple things at once. It can be about the healthfulness, so that then becomes the explanation. But your mind is coming up with a reason for avoidance and a reason for not doing the thing that would help you to recover.

And there’s good reasons for why there is this avoidance that comes up. There’s obviously the fear of the unknown, the fear of “I don’t know how this is going to pan out, I don’t know where things are going to end up. I know I do have to do these things that are uncomfortable as part of getting to a better place, and that feels very uncomfortable”, and it makes sense why someone would want to avoid that. As I said, there are lots of uncomfortable feelings and sensations and thoughts that arise, and a lot of the uncomfortableness with this is then the belief that gets tacked onto this, which is “I cannot tolerate this. I’m unable to experience these feelings without doing something that minimises them, or without doing something that tries to take them away”. So it becomes this vicious cycle of “these things arise and then I have to do something to try and alleviate it”, which is some form of avoidance.

Really, with this, the mind always tries – it doesn’t just try, but does use logic. There are certain thoughts that then come up that you can get hooked by that help to make this idea of doing things in the healthiest possible way and wanting to figure that piece out seem like “this is the right thing to do, this makes so much sense”. Some of the thoughts that come up can be “Everybody diets and restricts, so I’m just like everybody else. I’m not doing anything different to anybody else. To be healthy, we have to diet and we have to exercise, and I’m just doing more of that. Weight gain is unhealthy. Everyone knows that weight gain is unhealthy, and this is why I want to do this in the healthiest possible way, to try and minimise the weight gain that I put on.”

There can be the thought of “But what happens if I take action, what happens if I gain the weight and still nothing changes? I don’t know that something better is on the other side. I don’t know that 100% with certainty, so I feel unsure and I want to try and figure out the best way of doing this in the healthiest possible way.”

There can be the thought of “No-one ever really recovers. Anyone who says that they’ve really recovered, I don’t really believe that that’s true. And if no-one ever really recovers, why should I put myself through this torture and this heartache? Why should I be living at a higher weight when I’m still going to have these same thoughts and feelings and insecurities and worries? Let me just do this at a lower weight, or let me try and figure out the healthiest way of trying to do this to minimise that.”

There can be thoughts around “My parents or my partner or my friends are still into dieting, so it’s going to be too difficult for me to go against the grain. What are people going to think when I start to do this?”

So there’s lots of different thoughts that come up, and you get hooked by these thoughts and then you take certain action that is then in alignment with these kind of thoughts. I would think of these types of thoughts as being unhelpful thoughts that pull you away from taking the kind of action that you need to in recovery.

00:16:53

What to focus on instead

What I would say is more helpful to focus on than these kinds of thoughts is, what do you truly want in recovery? When I ask this and I talk about this with clients, there’s lots of things that they can come up with.

One of them is to be symptom-free or to have certain symptoms or issues be reversed. For example, it could be “I want to get my period back.” I’ve had many clients where that is one of those goals, and we’ve been able to achieve that. I think most recently about a client who has had her period return, and she’s just had her second period. This is the first time this has happened in over 20 years, and she honestly didn’t believe that that would ever happen. And it’s happened by her eating more food and not focusing on doing this in the ‘healthiest’ possible way in the narrow definition of health, but doing it in the healthiest possible way in the true definition of health, which is giving her body what it needs to repair.

I’ve had clients have changes in their bone health. We started and they had osteopenia or osteoporosis, and through doing the work and changing the way that they are behaving and things that they’re doing each day, they’ve had their bones re-heal. So they are now no longer osteopenic or osteoporosis. Often, this is doing things that go against what their brain was telling them was the ‘healthy’ way of doing it. For example, there is the idea that “I need to be doing weight-bearing exercise to help my bone health”. This can be a common one. Even though someone’s very depleted, they’re still thinking “I need to be doing weight-bearing exercise to help my bone health”.

For the client that I’m thinking about when I’m talking here, they had their bone health repair by taking time off exercise, by not exercising, by not doing loadbearing exercise. Because that wasn’t the thing that was getting in the way of their bones repairing. The thing that was getting in the way of their bones repairing was the fact that there wasn’t enough energy coming in, so the body was not prioritising bone health and rebuilding that bone because it had lots of other things that were a priority. So doing something like taking time off exercise was the healthiest thing for this person, and it’s shown that this was the healthiest thing for this person because their bones repaired.

The same can be for memory and concentration. Clients talk about – and again, I’m thinking of a particular client here – by doing things that have helped to rebuild her body and bring in more energy, they are now able to be more present at work. They’re able to be better in work meetings. They’re able to handle the workload that they have and are able to be more productive at work, and truly more productive at work. They’ve been able to do this, again, by bringing in foods that previously they would’ve thought of as unhealthy, or bringing in an amount of food that previously they would’ve thought about as unhealthy. And when I say they would’ve thought about, I mean that their mind was generating was unhealthy, that the eating disorder was telling them was unhealthy. But they did something different and they saw these changes in their health.

When I think about what people truly want in recover, one of the big things is to no longer be afraid or governed by fear in terms of their choices – to be able to eat out at a restaurant with family and friends, and for that to be a pleasant experience. For them to be able to do that without the need to check the menu in advance, without the need to compensate and not have lunch or to do more exercise. To be able to have that experience and truly enjoy that experience. Again, this comes by eating more food on a regular basis. It comes by challenging these fears and these beliefs about what is healthy and unhealthy.

Another area in terms of what people truly want in recovery is the ability to really speak up and to set boundaries and to be their authentic selves and to be accepted, both by themselves and by others, for who they are. That doesn’t come about by trying to do recovery in the ‘healthiest’ possible way and by eating the ‘healthiest’ possible foods in the way that most people are defining that, or the eating disorder is defining that.

Another thing that people truly want in recovery is to be able to cope with difficult thoughts and feelings that arise, and to be able to cope with this without using the eating disorder – to have ways of being more resilient, to have ways of knowing that “I know this feels challenging, and I know I can make it out the other side” or “I know I can tolerate this”.

These are the things that people truly want in recovery, so when we can focus on these, we can really start to look at the fact that this idea of trying to recover in the healthiest possible way isn’t really in alignment with what someone truly wants. The ‘healthiest possible way’ idea is about safety and trying to feel safe in the moment as opposed to is it the path that truly leads to what people want in recovery?

00:23:10

So what is truly the healthiest way to recover?

If I’m then thinking about what is the healthiest way to recover – and I know I’ve touched on some of this already – it is really, truly understanding that the eating disorder is the most unhealthy thing that you have in your life, and really, doing whatever it takes to fully recover is the healthiest thing that you can do. Because the eating disorder is impacting on the quality of your life; it’s also impacting on your health at all levels, whether we’re talking about physical health, mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, etc. So the healthiest thing is, how do I not have an eating disorder?

Another thing I would say is using symptoms as your guide. If you’re eating in a ‘healthy’ way, your symptoms will still be there. You’re not making progress in terms of recovery. This should be your guide: Are you noticing that your energy is getting better? Are you noticing that you’re able to sleep more? Are you noticing that you’re less cold than you were before? Are you noticing that you have more psychological flexibility with going out and being with friends, etc.? This should be your guide as to are the things you’re doing truly healthy and leading to more health.

With this, I would say it’s forgetting what you think you know about what is healthy – forgetting all of the prior beliefs that you have and really basing it on, what are the outcomes that I am noticing connected to this? As I said, recovery is not linear; there are things that will get more difficult in the beginning before they get better. But if you’re truly doing things that are increasing your health, you should be trending in a direction where things are improving with time, even if there are just glimmers to start with. And for a lot of people, this is not what is happening. They’re just stuck in the same place.

One of the big things with this is action creates clarity. Move out of the realm of theory and what you think you know and move into the world of lived experience and actual practice. So often, “I want to do this in the healthiest possible way” turns into this ongoing project of gathering more information or trying to figure out everything in advance of “how do I do this in the right way” and in a lot of ways turns into this impossible riddle that someone is unable to solve in advance, so they just stay there. It doesn’t lead to any action.

So again, if the idea of trying to figure out the healthiest possible way is leading to lots of inaction, this is not the healthiest way of doing recovery. So often, this leads to someone doing something for a day or two and then reverting back to what they were doing prior and not really learning anything from that situation. All it’s doing is just creating more avoidance, creating more of a feeling of “I can’t do this”.

One of the things I was thinking with this as well is if you are sick, and let’s say you are sick with a cold, you need to rest and to sleep. There shouldn’t be a limit put on this. If you went to a doctor because you’d been ill, and as part of being ill, you said, “I’ve been sleeping 18 hours a day”, I would hope the doctor didn’t say to you, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You should not be sleeping 18 hours a day. You need to be setting an alarm. You need to make sure you’re only sleeping a maximum of 9 hours a day. 18 hours a day is way too much to be sleeping.” They would understand the context of the fact that you’ll ill right now, and what you need is more sleep than the average person, and that sleep is part of what is going to help you to recover. In this context, you sleeping more is a very helpful thing to be doing.

This is the same with recovery. The things that you need to do with recovery are context-specific to recovery, understanding, what do I need in this situation? And again, it’s not that you get out of recovery and then have to go back to restriction, or you get out of recovery and then put all these foods that you were previously allowed to eat back on the banned food list, but understanding “What is the context of what is going on and what is important for me in this moment?”

I hope that helps in terms of understanding the question of what is the healthiest way to recover. As I said, I truly believe that it’s an eating disorder thought, and the way that people get stuck and trapped and hooked by this thought really just leads to a lot of inaction and a lot of overthinking as opposed to actually moving towards true recovery.

That is it for this week. As I mentioned at the top, I’m taking on clients at the moment. I only have two spots left at the time of recording this. I’m also not taking on any further applications after the 10th of August; I believe I’ll have filled those spots before then. But that will then be it in terms of me taking on clients for the year. I don’t want to have my doors open all the time; I limit the number of clients I work with so I can give them attention that I know is needed in recovery.

So if recovery is something that you want to do and you want help with, then time is of the essence, and now is the time to reach out. You can do that by going to www.seven-health.com/help.

So that is it for this week. I will be back with another episode next week. I will catch you then.