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Intro

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Lie #1: I need to lose weight first

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Lie #2: I need my fear of weight gain to go away first

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Lie #3: I need to get my eating under control first

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Lie #4: I need to control my thoughts + feelings first

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My free course: The First 5 Steps in Recovery

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Intro

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 283 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/283.

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.

It’s been a while since I’ve put out a new episode. I was in the middle of, or recently been promoting the Fundamentals of Full Recovery programme, so I had the launch connected to that, and I had a free three-part training series, and then the programme is now being started. So yeah, there’s been a lot going on in my world and in my life, so the podcast has fallen by the wayside a little bit. I’m wanting to get back to it being more regular again, so this is me getting back on the horse.

As part of today’s episode, what I want to do – it’s another solo episode. It’s another one where I’ve jotted down a couple of notes and I wanted to just talk about a particular topic. The topic I want to cover today is four lies that the eating disorder tells you to stop you from getting started. These are really common things that I hear either clients say or I read on the internet or I just hear because of the circles I’m in in terms of eating disorder work.

I’m going to go through each of them and why they come up, how they come up, when they’re more common.

00:01:45

Lie #1: I need to lose weight first

The first lie that the eating disorder tells you is “I need to lose weight first so I can have a buffer and then I can get started with recovery.” This is a really common one, the idea behind it being “If I was at a lower weight, then it would be easier to get started with my recovery.”

It sounds like that would make sense on paper, but the reality is it isn’t any easier when you’re at a lower weight. And if anything, when you’re at that lower weight, there is more fear that is generated around making changes. There can be the fear of “I’m now at this lower place, I now don’t want to lose that”, or it never really feels like you have a buffer. No matter where your weight gets to, you still feel just as scared about changing it and just as scared with getting recovery started.

If anything, the more weight you lose, the more you get into energy debt, the more the eating disorder has an impact, and the more the thoughts are intense. There’s this real misunderstanding that “If I was at a lower BMI or a lower weight, then I would be so much more inclined to want to recover”, and that is just not the case. I think this is a really common lie that the eating disorder tells you to stop things getting started, because there is some logic to it. It feels like it would make some sense. But the reality is, it just doesn’t translate to being the case.

Actually, the reverse is true: as people start to eat more, as people are starting to have weight occur and weight go on, as they’re making changes that are pro-recovery, then they become more inclined and wanting to recover. Restricting more, upping exercise more, losing more weight – none of those things promote the feeling of “Now I want to start recovering.”

So if there is this thought that is arising in your mind, my first suggestion is do not give in to it, because it is not going to make it any easier for you. And the second is to recognise that this is an eating disorder thought. This is a thought that is unhelpful for you and your recovery and improving the quality of your life and is just going to produce more of the same.

00:04:20

Lie #2: I need my fear of weight gain to go away first

The second one that I want to talk about is “I can’t change until my body image or my fear of weight gain goes away first.” So, “I have all of these thoughts that are coming up in my mind, I have all of these uncomfortable feelings that come up, and I need those to go away first before I can start to make any changes.”

The reason why this is a fallacy and a problem is those thoughts and those fears are a product of the eating disorder. It’s not to say that someone can’t have body insecurities before having an eating disorder, or feel that they would like this part of their body to be changed, or had times in their life where people had made fun of them or unfortunate experiences had occurred. All of that can be true, and being in a depleted state or suffering with an eating disorder really highlights these kinds of fears and insecurities and turns them up to 11. It really magnifies them and makes them much more intense.

This means that those fears aren’t going to go away until you start to recover. What unfortunately happens is there’s this “I can’t make any changes because the fears are just too intense, the thoughts are too intense, and I need them to go away first.” What someone will typically do is then do things that the eating disorder is suggesting. So “I’m going to up my exercise a little bit” or “I’m going to cut this snack a little bit” or “I’m going to eat my meals a little later.” All the things that are trying to rid someone of that anxiety or reduce that anxiety in the hope that “If I do all these things, then my body image will get better or then those fears will go away.” And it just doesn’t translate. It doesn’t happen.

So my suggestion with this one is knowing that these fears are in big part connected to the eating disorder, and the only way that they’re going to change is by going through recovery. So rather than putting recovery on hold or having these fears be the reason that recovery can’t start, more see them as these are the reasons why you need to recover, because if you don’t recover, these fears are going to stay around. It’s by going through recovery that these fears go away; it’s not something that you try and do in advance.

00:07:06

Lie #3: I need to get my eating under control first

The next lie that the eating disorder tells you is “Let me get my eating under control and then I can start to recover.” Or it could be “Let me get my cravings under control and then I can start to recover.”

This one is a really common one with people who suffer with binge eating or suffer with bulimia, so binging and purging. Or it’s also very common with people who save up a lot of their eating till the end of the day. They’re eating a lot of food in the evening time, and there’s this feeling of “I can start to make or I will start to make or I want to start to make changes, but until I’m able to get that evening meal under control, I’m not able to.” And “I want to start to eat some of my food earlier in the day, but I’ll only want to do that if I know that then I’m going to start eating less at nighttime. Then when I know I’ll start eating less at nighttime, then I will start to make changes.”

The other thing that happens alongside this is this feeling of “I really enjoy that nighttime. I really enjoy that point of the day where I get to eat all these foods, and I don’t want anyone to take that away from me.” So you then get into this bind where “I don’t want that to be taken away, and there’s no way I’m going to change my eating earlier in the day until I know that that part in the evening is going to change.” So you’re now in a situation where both of those things cannot be true at the same time, and the eating disorder then uses both of those things to prevent you from recovering.

It’s the same in terms of the binges or the binging and purging. There is this focus on “I have to have the binging stopping before I can make any further changes.” But what’s actually driving the binging is the fact that there is restriction going on, and that the restriction is what is causing the binges. If that is not dealt with, this pattern is going to continue on. So someone stays in this binge-restrict cycle and says, “I’m not going to change until the binges stop first.”

With this particular one, what I would say is that nothing is going to change in that order, or the order the eating disorder is telling you, or the order that in a lot of ways you would like to have happen. What is going to change is by ending the restriction or by eating earlier in the day, with time, those binges will start to stop. Or with time, you’ll start to eat less in the evening time.

But there’s going to be a lag time for that to happen, and there’s a reason why there’s a lag time for that to happen: because your body needs more energy coming in. Your body needs to feel that it is no longer restricted – that it’s no longer restricted physically in terms of physical restriction and getting out of the energy debt that it’s in, but it also needs to not feel that there is impending physical restriction coming on, where you’re telling yourself “I shouldn’t eat in this way. Tomorrow’s going to be different. Tomorrow I’m not having X, Y and Z food.”

Or the body needs to know that there isn’t mental restriction that isn’t happening, where you’re eating certain foods but you’re telling yourself you’re not allowed to eat them in that moment, or your mind is thinking, “Hey, I’d really like to eat this thing” and you’re telling yourself, “No, we’re not allowed to eat that thing.” So there is this restriction that is going on.

Really, restriction is at the heart of all eating disorders. I think there can be this misconception that it’s only something that happens with anorexia, or maybe it’s anorexia and orthorexia where restriction is there, but with binge eating disorder or with bulimia, it’s not about the restriction – when really, it is about restriction with all of the eating disorders.

With this lie, the solution is that more food needs to be coming in, either more food earlier in the day or we need to be changing the restriction that’s going on. There needs to be different foods that are coming in, and giving yourself the permission to have those different foods.

And when I say ‘giving yourself permission’, I think of permission as being a verb. Permission is doing the thing. By eating this food, you’ve given yourself permission to do it. I think there can be this misunderstanding of “I need to give myself permission, so in theory I’ve made it okay for myself and I feel completely comfortable in that decision, and then I take action”, and that just doesn’t happen. That’s not what permission looks like. Permission in the beginning is you doing the uncomfortable thing even though you may not necessarily feel ready to do it.

00:12:18

Lie #4: I need to control my thoughts + feelings first

The final one that I want to talk about, the final lie, is “I need to figure out how to control my thoughts and feelings, and then I can get started.” This is a really big one, especially as the eating disorder has gone on for a really long time, so someone’s been living with this for years and years or decades and decades.

There are lots of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that naturally arise, and what has happened because of the way the eating disorder is, is when those do arise, there is some kind of eating disorder behaviour that is used to take care of that. Eating disorders are about avoidance, so there is this uncomfortable thought or feeling, so “I’m going to do something to have that go away” or “I’m not going to change something for fear that these uncomfortable thoughts and feelings will arise.”

So when someone thinks, “I do want to recover”, often the thought can be, “Well, to actually be able to do that, I need to be able to control my thoughts and feelings.” And control really means “I need to be able to remove them, to take them away, either so they don’t appear in the first place, or when they show up, I need to be able to, in a sense, have an eraser so they just disappear.” The reality is, that is just not going to happen. That’s not how the brain works, that’s not how our nervous system works, that’s not how emotions work.

The solution for this one is changing the frame from “I need to be able to control my thoughts and feelings” to “I need to be able to learn to cope with my thoughts and feelings, and I need to learn different techniques or different ways of being able to cope with thoughts and feelings.”

If I think about them separately, if I’m thinking about how to be able to deal with thoughts, it’s very much, how do I recognise thoughts are just thoughts? Just because I had a thought, does not mean that it is true. It doesn’t mean that it’s a value of mine. It doesn’t mean that it’s something I necessarily have to pay attention to. It’s not a demand. I don’t have to follow the thought just because the thought has come into my mind.

So the way to be coping with these thoughts is being able to create distance between yourself and your thoughts, so that that thought can be there and it’s then not having an impact on you. It’s not hooking you. You’re not then becoming fused with that thought so that you start to believe that it’s true or it’s your thought or you have to do something. It’s recognising, “I just had this thought. I recognise that my mind has generated this thought. And even though this thought is here, I can still take the action that I want to take as part of my recovery.”

In terms of feelings, the way that I think about this is more about, how do I create room for my feelings? How do I create space for them so that I’m not trying to pretend that they’re not there? Because that is not helpful, to be like “I’m definitely not feeling this feeling” when I really am feeling this feeling. So being able to say, “I really am feeling anxiety right now” or “I’m really feeling sadness right now” or “I’m feeling loneliness” or “I’m feeling disappointment” or “I’m feeling anger or rage” or whatever the emotion is – being able to accurately label an emotion is a really powerful thing.

But even if you can’t accurately label that emotion, being able to just recognise, “Okay, there is this uncomfortable emotion that is here, and I’m not going to pretend that this emotion isn’t here.”

But the other side of that is recognising that emotion is there and then not becoming swept up in that emotion where it then has a huge impact on your choices and the kinds of thoughts that are happening and where those thoughts take you. It’s then recognising, there is this emotion that is here, and I can create room for this emotion. I don’t have to have resistance to it. I don’t have to try and push it away. I don’t have to get into why this emotion is occurring, why I’m feeling this, how am I going to cope if this is still here in two hours or tomorrow, but rather creating room for that emotion so that it can follow the normal pattern where it rises up and then decreases of its own accord.

And sometimes that will be quicker and sometimes that will be slower, but the half-life of emotions is pretty small. What tends to perpetuate them is all of the thoughts and the suffering and the stuff we put on top of those emotions.

So learning how to cope with thoughts and feelings is really the way out of this, but what the eating disorder tries to convince you is that “If I need to recover or if I’m even thinking about recovery, I need to figure out a way to control these things.” That is definitely not a thing that you can do and is definitely not the way out an eating disorder.

So those are four lies that the eating disorder tells you to stop you getting started. These are four that are very common. There are undoubtedly others that I could’ve included or that I’ve missed, but I wanted to just share those four today.

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My free course: The First 5 Steps in Recovery

The final thing I just want to mention is that I have a free course that you can take. It’s called The First 5 Steps in Recovery, and it looks at a number of different aspects connected to recovery and how you can get started with it. I’ve had lots of lovely feedback about the course; I’ve had people emailing saying “I would’ve happily paid for this.” It’s not something I’m charging you for; you can get free access to it. If you go to www.seven-health.com/283, you’ll have a link there so that you can sign up for the course.

That is it for this week’s episode. I will catch you again soon.